Photoshelter Vignettes
I’m a photographer who does editorial and advertising work, as well as personal portraiture. I’m also a 3D or CG (Computer Generated) artist and Instructor. I was among the first to lead the charge from shooting film (using a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II) to digital (using a Kodak DCS-760) in editorial and advertising shoots as early as 2001, and remember (sometimes not so fondly) the challenge of managing 36mb 16-bit Tiff files when 256mb Compact Flash Cards were considered a reasonable size, when my single-core (multi-core was but a twinkle in many a geek’s eyes at the time) on-location Apple iBook had a total of 10gb Hard Drive space with 768mb of RAM, RAW work flow and Digital Asset Management were considered arcane arts, and having to tediously burn, back-up, and hand deliver sets of CDs to my clients after a shoot. Using Photoshelter’s Archive storage management and gallery/image delivery systems changes all that – not only making it easier to manage and secure thousands of image files online, but also providing a means to present and deliver work to clients professionally and conveniently.
This is a series of vignettes on how I use my Photoshelter Personal Archive today.
A Tale of Two Cities
Whenever I upload photos from a shoot with Canadian Immigrant magazine, the decisions on which images to use are made by editorial teams based both in Vancouver and Toronto. Using Photoshelter’s invite-only gallery feature, I can give private access to the images from the shoot, which not only facilitates the final shot selection by Editors across two cities, but also gives them instant access to the full resolution images that can be downloaded directly into lay-out.
Canadian Immigrant – Images by Tommy Zablan
Family Ties
Momoko’s sister and grandmother visited from Japan. On the last day of their visit, her sister surprised with a very special Kimono, for the purpose of shooting her Seijin-shiki (成人式) ceremony photos. They booked us for a shoot on a morning ferry from Victoria to Vancouver and we did the shoot on that very same afternoon. Since her sister and grandmother were to go home to Japan on the very next day, they were worried that they would not be able to see all the images from our photo session. We promised that we would show them all the images through an on-line gallery. We uploading the images and sent invites for the gallery shortly after, and the decisions on which prints to order where made both by family members in Japan and Vancouver.
Seijin-Shiki – Images by Tommy Zablan
Virtual Visualization
I’m also a 3D Artist and Instructor, specializing in texturing, lighting, and rendering. At times, I get asked to make a presentation on various aspects of 3D production, and the classes that I teach. Sometimes, the presentations can be impromptu and the workstation that happens to be hooked up to the projector may not have the right software installed, or I may not have my flash drive with presentation data on hand. By keeping many of my rendered images in my Photoshelter Archive, I can quickly pull the images into a Gallery, and using the built-in gallery tools to sequence the slides, turn it into a professional presentation – with just about any workstation that has an internet connection and a Flash enabled browser.
CG Work – Models And Textures – Images by Tommy Zablan
Vancouver’s Got Talent…
…a mix of local and international talent that gives this city it’s unique flavor, and I want to play a part in promoting it. Because of the way Photoshelter’s core Archive to Gallery system is built, I can easily create mini-portfolios like the one I created for Make-up Artist Ayumi Komiyama, without having to create folders with duplicated data (which would be the case when creating web galleries from a program like Lightroom or Photoshop). Because the galleries can be e-mailed and embedded into blogs and web sites (by clicking on the e-mail or embed code links on the bottom of the navigation bar) – they can be like mini, self-contained portfolios that can be sent to whoever wants to see them. The Photoshelter – Graph Paper Press integration makes it efficient for me to publish artist profiles and interviews such as this one.
Ayumi Komiyama, Make-up & Hair Artist – Images by Tommy Zablan
Gallery In A Flash
On one of the rare occasions that I could actually follow the updates on my Twitter stream in real-time, I read that one of the people I’m following, an Editor in a major Canadian Fashion magazine, wanted to have some sushi in Vancouver. The time it took me to pull some recent shots of Sushi (from one of my favorite Vancouver Restaurants) from my archive, organize them into a gallery, post it on my Photoshelter – Wordpress integrated blog, and send her the link on Twitter? Around 3 minutes (and a lot of that was due to my Internet connection bandwidth more than anything else). She said the food shots made her drool. I’d say that’s a good thing.
Sushi – Images by Tommy Zablan
A Site For The Future
This is an excerpt from my Digital Workflow course material;
The goal of an effective digital photography workflow is to be able to organize, secure, display, and deliver work to a client (or prospective clients). Ideally, it should be an extension of your mind and the way you work – facilitating a smooth and efficient flow of ideas from capture to output. Particularly in this multiple publishing platform, multimedia digital age, an essential component of managing image libraries today is associating them with the right keywords and captions so that they can be found both on- and off-line.
The beauty of doing this with a program such as Adobe Lightroom 2 is that an entire batch of images can be associated with keywords and other appropriate information while the images are being imported from the memory card into a hard drive in one step. I also set it up so that the images, along with all the keywords and other metadata, is imported into one external drive, and backed up into a separate second external drive at the same time, while Lightroom simultaneously builds up a database containing the keywords associated with each image as well as the location where each image is stored. This insures, that even after several busy months of shooting, I can easily find images that were done several months (or even years) before by doing a keyword search.
Once all the images have been associated with the right keywords, titles, and captions off-line, these images (and all associated metadata) can be uploaded to my Photoshelter Archive, which can read and retain all the data associated with the images. Among other things. Photoshelter’s service also includes many features that would appeal to professionals, such as built-in e-commerce tools, rights-managed licensing models based on fotoquote (a standardized software for calculating usage rates in North America), the ability to store and deliver high-resolution output files (as well as RAW files), automatically putting a watermark on displayed images (while being able to deliver un-watermarked high-resolution originals to clients), and being able to embed images and flash galleries into a blog or web page link point directly to the originals. This makes for very efficient digital asset management since all the keywords and captions only have to be done once and the images that are displayed on-line flow from one source.
Think of an Archive like a reservoir, which you can stream out into various media. Once in my Archive, if I wanted an image on my blog, such as the illustration you see above, I don’t have to create or upload a duplicate copy of it, since what you see is an embedded image that references directly to the original in my archive. As an exercise, try;
- Clicking on the illustration above, in which case it will take you to the original image in my Archive.
- Go to the Search Images box at the bottom of this page and type ‘Workflow’, which is on of the keywords I associated with the above illustration.
- Click on the white triangle at the bottom right of the above illustration, copy the embed code, and embed the same illustration into your blog. This is exactly the same way the image was embedded into this post (or the same method used in embedding Youtube videos into blogs and webpages).
Images can be presented or delivered to the clients in the same way, or ’streamed out’ into my Blog/Website, Facebook account, or any of the other on-line publishing and networking tool.