Re-inventing Ourselves

I've spoken to about five different friends in related businesses over the past few months who all had essentially the same thing to say, they all said they were looking to "re-invent" themselves in an attempt to make their businesses more lucrative and to just get more business in general.

I've spent a lot of time contemplating that buzzword, re-invent. Inferred by that word is a recognition that what it is that you are doing or have been doing, is no longer working for you. It isn't providing you with the income and or satisfaction that you desire from it. After you realize what you have been doing isn't working, where do you start to make changes and how do you know in what direction you might go? Most of all, what do you keep and what do you "throw out"?

First, I think we have to define the problem we all seem to be having.

A lot of us are mid to late career professionals who have slowly found our skills becoming obsolete, as technology marches on, replacing hard won skills with computer hardware and software that can do what we spent years learning how to do. These computers can do it cheaper and faster and yes, better than we ever could. Some of us adjusted to this technological onslaught by simply adopting the new computer based tools just as fast as we could, attempting to stay ahead of the pack, adding value where a human was still necessary. In my field humans are always necessary because it is about visual communication and creativity, so far no one has developed a computer that can originate human creativity.

Then came the cheaper humans. All while computers got faster, cheaper and more powerful the Internet also made the world a whole lot smaller so it became almost as easy to hire a human operator half a globe away as one next door. In countries like India, whole businesses cropped up that did a good job of bridging the cultural divide that made Americans more attractive creative workers. We all know the rest of this story, we're expensive people to hire in comparison to other people around the globe. So what do we do, how do we re-invent against this kind of two pronged attack on our ability to make a living? Historically, Americans have dealt with cheap labor and technological obsolesce by marching up the value chain. By abandoning those jobs that have effectively become commodities and branching out into fields that require more; more risk, more education, more capital.

Unfortunately most of us chose the "more risk" route to making more money. It clearly worked out for some, but backfired for the country as a whole. The "more capital" route has also been pretty heavily exploited by the larger companies. So that leaves the "more education" route. I don't necessarily think quanity is as important as more specialized education. We need skills for the current and future workforce. The education we got 30 years ago isn't going to cut it. I know, I don't like the idea of going back to school either but what choice do we have? I can't see myself working in some dead-end retail job like the scores of the middle aged people, desperate for any kind of work who have been slowly replacing younger entry level workers in the past decade. I want to at least use some of the skills I acquired over 35 years of running my own business.

So back to school I'll go.

Sometimes Technology Works!

I went to visit my sister in PA a week or so ago, went to show her my new site on her snazzy new computer and was extremely dismayed to discover that my site, which looks terrific in IE 6 and IE 7 broke in IE 8. None of the SimpleViewer Galleries appeared the way they should and several articles had text and pictures appearing in odd places. I knew the issue wasn't with the SimpleViewer Galleries because when they weren't displayed within a "wrapper" they looked fine in IE 8. I suspected it was the "liquid" template I had chosen in Joomla.

I did a search when I got home to see if anyone else was having trouble with my JA Joomla template in IE 8 and found a bunch of posts on the subject. The good news is that they’d already put out an update that fixed it. It still requires the user to click on compatibility mode in IE8 but that’s OK. This cheered me up enormously since I’m quite fond of my very simple interface. The problem wasn’t with SimpleViewer which handles itself very well in IE 8, it was in the html that the template uses to display articles. It’s all in the “liquid” sizing. I really want to use “liquid” sizing because it makes the site so much more inviting. The only thing I might do is start using a sized template for articles that have a lot of text to keep the lines of text from getting too wide because that makes them hard to read on very large screens. Of course, people on large screens can always size their browser down and have the text narrower. I do this all the time with forums on my 22 inch screen. If for some reason I close the favorites navigation and maximize the browser window, the posts get really wide, too wide to comfortably read.

The other good news, I can put under the heading of :

"Sometimes Technology Makes
Our Lives Easier Instead of More Complicated"

I bought a new film scanner the other day. I was prepared to be disappointed. I have an older 35mm scanner that I’ve nursed along and it has been quite a chore because it is an old SCSI peripheral and every time my hardware or my OS software gets updated I have to search around for an ASPI driver that will work. The company that made the scanner was Polaroid, so you can imagine they aren’t any help since they went into BK years ago. I have kept up with the chore simply because every single time I’ve tried to replace the scanner the replacement has never worked as well for color negative film, which was all I shot for many years.

The problem always with color neg film is that orange mask, which shows up not at all on color photographic paper (color paper has an offsetting cyan mask) but presents enormous problems for the CCD cells and CMOS chips in scanners. Most scanners are created for reading the high dynamic range in slides, not the low contrast of a color negative. The orange mask is never evenly distributed over the frame and trying to extract it from the other colors frequently ends up either killing the other colors (they become murky looking) or you get terrible streaks in smooth texture free areas like clear blue skies. At any rate, I’ve tried film scanners that range from a few hundred dollars to the $25,000 high end pre-press scanners and none delivered as good a quality as that stupid little Polaroid scanner I paid $800 for 15 years ago! I still have it set up on an old XP workstation at the studio but I really didn’t want to face trying to get it to work on the 64 bit Vista workstation.

At any rate, I bought yet another new film scanner that showed up yesterday and my first tests were awful (very large chunky grain) until I tried a particular tool included in the software (Silverfast) designed to minimize grain that creates four scan passes and then merges them all together. It takes longer to scan each image that way, but the results are finally better than my little Polaroid scanner. The previews are better, more accurate, than any other scanning software I’ve ever used and it works on current software and hardware. Finally, I can retire the old Polaroid!

Old Dog

This old dog was laying on the sidewalk in Basseterre, St. Kitt's, in one of the worst parts of town. He was so obviously beat up but so completely unconcerned with me or anyone else for that matter.

I used this picture for a CD cover mockup for a friend who is putting out a new CD later in the year.

What I do

One of the primary digital services I offer is RAW file conversion to RGB or CMYK. I'd like to explain a little of what this involves so clients will have a better understanding of what they are paying for when they order a conversion.

First off, a little background:

When photographers switched from film to digital cameras the hope was that an image created in digital form would eliminate entirely the need for a trained professional, someone who does what I do. What designers and photographers wished for was a way to capture images in the camera that needed no post production before they could use those images in their documents. These hopes and wishes were quickly dashed.

Photographers and designers learned early on that the high quality jpegs (usually referred to as "fine" jpegs) straight from the camera, created using the internal camera controls, were not high enough quality for most professional uses. Although, these fine jpegs are certainly good enough for most amateur uses. More importantly, shooting in fine jpeg mode locked in decisions that were made "on location", where viewing conditions were less than ideal to make such decisions and the internal camera controls were, at best, blunt instruments in comparison to the software tools available on the computer back at the studio.

Consequently, most professionals switched to shooting in RAW format even though shooting in RAW format adds a layer of complexity and requires a great deal more post production work. The final results were so far superior that this decision was almost unanimous across the professional photography universe. RAW is the original information captured by the camera, before all the decisions about color balance, sharpening and gamma are applied. I like to think of the RAW file as a "digital negative". All the choices that the photographer makes on location are contained within the file but those choices haven't yet been applied to the file so they can be fine tuned, after the fact, at the studio, using a calibrated, color controlled monitor. No original information captured at the scene has been thrown out, as it would be in a camera produced fine jpeg. RAW images, because they contain proprietary information and because they are in a RGB color space, cannot be used in offset reproduction; the RAW file image must be converted to an industry standard file format like jpeg or tiff and converted to CMYK before it can be placed in a document destined for an offset press.

Aside from converting the image from RAW to TIFF, from RGB to CMYK, most images require additional optimization. There are always some images that require very little adjustment and can be used very close to how they open up within the RAW processor using the default settings, they simply need to be sized and sharpened for the size they will be used, but this is the exception not the rule. Most images require subtle or even gross changes in the white balance, gamma, black level, highlight level as well as tone. The "auto" settings within imaging software programs are significantly better than they were just five years ago, but like most automatic controls they only work well on images that fall within a statistical norm. If an esthetic decision was made by the photographer to create an image outside the realm of "normal" the auto settings will not provide the most accurate rendition, for this you need an actual person, someone who is familiar with the vision of that particular photographer.

Any image interpolation, the sizing of the image up or down, is also applied within the RAW processor because the image will retain the highest quality by being sized there. Many clients think they have the best solution by ordering the image in the largest possible size, but this is not the case even when the image will be used in many different sizes in the future. They sacrifice quality for a small gain in convenience. The highest quality is obtained by sizing the image within 20% of its final use every time it will be used. This is best done from within the RAW processor.

Once the corrections are made within the RAW processor, the image is saved as a tiff. The tiff is then opened within Photoshop. In Photoshop additional changes are made which are image specific. Frequently there are areas of the image which are outside the acceptable range in contrast or exposure, windows for example, or colors falling outside of the CMYK gamut, these can be adjusted to a color that can approximate the RGB color within the CMYK color space. Image sensors sometimes get dust on them during lens changes and these darker areas need to be cleaned up. I also adjust areas that require more contrast or spot sharpening, for instance in a group photo, frequently the light levels are not equal over all the individuals, making some individuals darker, flatter and less visible. I adjust the tone on their faces to account for hue differences in the way individual skin tones reproduce in a photo. I also clean up areas of their faces that are distracting to the picture like blemishes, discolored teeth. I clean up the whites of the eyes in most portraits. In an exterior, I adjust uneven tone in skies and fill in areas on the lawn, remove trash and other small distractions that detract from the image. All of this is included in the price the client pays for the original conversion.

Sometimes the client requires additional retouching outside of the scope of the changes I routinely make as described above. This might involve removing an individual from one picture and placing them in another or changing a cloudless sky to include clouds or change the color of a shirt, change background colors, etc. This work I bill by the hour and will be happy to estimate this additional cost up front. My charges are well at the low end of industry standards for retouching and I work fast.

When I'm finished the image should be ready to be placed in the document and require no further adjustment by the pre-press department at the offset house. Adjustments, if made, will be minor. This will save the client money and, most importantly, time at the offset printer. Recently I asked a printing rep that I work with frequently just how much pre-press time I saved them and he estimated that the cost to the client was cut in excess of 70%. In most cases, zero adjustments needed to be made to the images after the proofs were made. I use an industry standard CMYK profile but I'm happy to use any custom CMYK profile provided by the offset printer if requested. I also, convert to black and white, providing either duotones or quad-tones. This is best done within the RAW processor because a well balanced color image doesn't necessarily translate immediately into black and white without adjustments in gamma and exposure.

Images used for the web are processed a little differently in that they will remain in the same color space that they were captured in, RGB, and will be used at much lower resolutions. It is important to order separate web versions created that use a sRGB color profile rather than taking the CMYK file and converting it back to RGB. The original Adobe 1998 RGB file tiff can be used to create the web version (once converted to sRGB) so clients should request delivery of the final RGB files if they intend to use the images on their website. All images are saved in RGB format before the final conversion to CMYK so there is no additional charge to get the RGB files sent along with the order.

One of the more exciting things we've been doing lately has been creating panoramas, this is where numerous images are stitched together to create one long continuous image. This can be done in horizontal format or vertical or a combination of both. Some very interesting artistic results can be obtained from using this tool.

About me:

I received a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art, MICA, in Photography in 1978. After graduating I worked as a location assistant, commercial photographer and finally as photographic printer and digital image processor. I continue to shoot my own fine art photography, which has been shown in museums and galleries. My personal work is in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum. I opened my own photographic business in 1979. My business was mostly all photographic until around 1997 when digital images and high end digital printers first started to make serious inroads into the photographic arena. My lab was one of the first photographic labs in the area to jump head first into the digital world (I have the scars to prove it). Now I work almost exclusively on digital images. I still do some work in the darkroom, with film, but less and less every single year.

My current and past client list has included most of the well known (as well as lesser known) commercial photographers in the Baltimore/ Washington area as well as photographers from around the country. I've worked on a number of book projects. I've also worked on publications and pieces for a large portion of the Fortune 500 as well as colleges and non-profit institutions from around the country. I have almost 35 years of experience in making images look great for my clients who are composed of photographers, designers, ad agencies and corporate clients. Even though I now work in front of a computer using a software program, instead of inside a darkroom on an enlarger, the task of getting the best possible image is still fundamentally the same. The tools have changed but the task is still the same, make that image look as good as it possibly can. When you pay for a conversion you are paying for my many years of experience with a few million plus images and counting.

BTW this is the site

This is the site I was referring to, for those of you who got here via BlogSpot:

http://www.gracezaccardidigital.com/

Setting up the new site for GZD

Finally, after many years of helping everyone else and their brother set up sites and publish their pictures, I'm FINALLY setting up a site for myself. It has been a bit daunting in that a lot of things have changed since I played with those very first WYSIWYG HTML editors. After a lot of research, I chose to use a CMS for my site, I chose Joomla because it had the largest following (read that as lots of help and plenty of extensions). I love the clean interface and the ease with which I can edit content. The hardest thing was choosing a way to display groups of photographs. In this respect I chose to go simple and less flashy than all that was available.