In the Winter issue of Currents, you got my take on what kind of equipment and technology you need to start your photography business. Now I’d like to talk about preparing images for sale and distribution. Many of you have libraries of analog images from years past that are still saleable. Few editors take slides anymore, so if you don’t yet own a scanner, consider buying one. You don’t have to spend $10,000 for an Imacon. A Nikon 5000 works well at a fraction of the price. When looking for a scanner, be sure to get a model with “Digital Ice” as that helps alleviate any of the dust spots from old slides. Before scanning, use canned air on both sides of each slide to remove any surface dust/dirt adhering to the transparency. Like I said before, take the time to do it right the first time and you can keep moving forward. Scan the high-res image from the beginning and do a batch action in Photoshop to resize and save to jpeg after the initial hi-res Tiff is scanned. Save the Tiff files separately, as you would the Raw files in digital capture, so you can always return to the “original” to make future changes, if necessary. Scan each photo at 16 bit, 4000 dpi, and then save the jpeg to 8 bit for website delivery. You’ll usually get a 50-60 MB file from a 35mm slide. There is nothing more maddening for photo editors than returning to a photo they saved to a working folder only to realize that they don’t know whose it is or where it came from because the information has not been embedded. At my agency, we not only back up daily on a Raid Array within the office, but we also store external hard drives of our entire photo library (which we rotate out every week) offsite at the bank. Then there’s our website server in Connecticut, which has all the files as well. My husband, Dave, used to manage a digital storage facility and we’re lucky to have his expertise for our agency.
Few photo buyers have more than a couple days to find their shots. The quicker you can deliver digital files, complete with metadata, the better your chances of making the sale. I’ve found that even when there’s considerable lead time before a due date (say a week), the early bird often gets the worm. But you have to have the right stuff. When hundreds of images are making their way to a photo editor’s desk, the quicker her eyes land on “the shot,” the sooner she can stop looking.
Bottom line: make photo requests your top priority!
You can’t fill a photo request unless you can find the right shot or the right version of the shot in your files. You need an organized file naming scheme and a method for keywording and tracking your files. The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers by Peter Krogh is a good resource for figuring out what to do after you take the picture through final output and permanent storage.
Your file and folder names need to be short and meaningful, possibly including ISO (International Organization for Standardization) country codes or shoot numbers for your reference. Programs like Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge can help you keyword files quickly. Other programs, like Portfolio and Expression Media, add cataloging features. Still others, Lightroom and Aperture to name two, handle much of the workflow. Try out a couple programs to see what will work best for you.
Present accurate caption information with the image as well as embedded in the file using File Info in the Photoshop drop-down menu. File Info is also where you put your copyright info, credit line and keywords. As painful as it is, enter the keywords at the same time so you don’t have to revisit the IPTC File Info scenario again. Do it once and do it right the first time.
A few tips on composing captions and keywords:
Find a stack loader too. Make the feed adjustments necessary and start scanning 50 at a time. We use our son’s old baby monitor—it’s 18 years old now—and set it up next to the scanner while walking around the office carrying the monitor with us. When we scanned thousands of images before the launch of our website in 2003, the scanner was running day and night. We could hear if it had stopped or had a problem because of the monitor.
After you’ve scanned the images, you can work on them in Photoshop—spot cleaning, color correcting and so on. I have one contributor to my site who learned Photoshop early on, and it’s paying off for him. He told me he spends about 15 minutes on each slide, color correcting and making the colors and light pop. His images are downloaded more than any of my other 250 photographers.
With digital capture, many photographers make lo-res jpegs for agency submission review and then convert the Raw files after images have been selected. That way, they can take the time to caption, keyword and color correct in Photoshop in order to deliver the high-res digital files. Others do everything all at once. Even if you’re submitting and selling images on your own without the help of an agency or portal, you still need lo-res files with caption and credit info embedded.
Offer photo buyers lo-res files that are big enough to enable them to see the content but small enough to load quickly. 500-1000 pixels wide and medium Jpeg quality will usually do the trick.
Once you have your images prepared, be sure to back them up somewhere, including offsite in case something happens to your home. A photographer recently told me how his entire house burned to the ground during the California fires. He was out of the country at the time, and there was nothing he could do.
Now that you have your images prepared, you can get the lo-res files on your own website and/or start submitting to agency and portal sites.
Take these steps and keep the work flow going and before too long you’ll have a collection of images that not only solve picture researchers’ problems, but that can be found from anywhere in the world based on keyword searches. It’s pretty amazing!
That’s it for this round. Next time I’ll talk about finding clients appropriate to your coverage and, more importantly, how to get them to come to you for images. Happy shooting!
The Office: Preparing the Images (Part 2)
Running a Professional Photography Office (Part 1)
Many of you who will read this column are already tried and true professionals making a living at selling your images. Still, I’ve found that no matter how much we think we know, we can always learn something new from everyone. This column is intended to be for those serious amateurs that are just getting started and want to move their photography passion into some kind of entity that is actually making some money to at least support their hobby
What you'll need to get started:
Computer with lots of hard drive space
Back-Up Raid Array or External Hard Drives
PhotoShop, Lightroom, Microsoft Office or equivalent
Fast connection
FTP site or free web based file system
Archival storage system (DVDs, hard drives, online storage)
Website
Fax machine
Printer
Letterhead & Business Cards
Quiet space to work uninterrupted
Telephone with answering machine or voicemail
Getting Help
First of all you need to find a quiet space where you can work. Most people have some kind of home office scenario, an extra bedroom, the den, or maybe in the garage.
Seriously though, you need some space where you can work on your images and business processes without a lot of interruption. Processing images takes quiet time to make sure you take care of all the steps with the IPTC File info, metadata captioning and keywords which are so crucial to selling your images.
Get started with a good computer with a lot of capacity for storage of images.
Talk to experts about the right configuration of main memory, processor speed and hard drives to suit your needs. You should start with at least 600 gigabytes of storage and select a tower that has a few extra slots for additional drives as you need to add them. Just know that the more images you shoot and the fewer you delete, the more space you’ll end up needing in the end! Next come up with systems for backing up and archiving your images and your business data.
Pay for a fast DSL connection from the beginning because when you find you’re trying to send images to clients, you want them to transfer quickly. The dial-up connections often have problems and can’t send large files. We limit anything we send in an email attachment to 5 megabytes, as we’ve found most offices and even home offices of freelance designers and editors can take a 5 megabyte file.
Get yourself set up with an ftp site that you can post images to for clients to pick up. This is especially important if you’re sending more than a few images at a time. Many photographers have found the portal sites of Agpix.com and
DigitalRailroad.net very beneficial for this reason. They have viewing platforms where images can be posted for clients to review and their pricing is quite reasonable.
Of course you need a printer and a fax. With the fax you should add a separate telephone line that is dedicated to the fax only. (The old-fashioned fax/phone combos are a pain for everyone). With a Dedicated Fax Line you can still be on the telephone and a fax will come in automatically.
You’d be surprised how much a fax is still used, especially when signatures are required and you don’t have an electronic signature set up on your computer (which you should have anyway). Some clients will take an electronic signature via email, but the fax or regular mail is still the most often requested.
My recommendation would be to have your own telephone line for your business. Make sure your telephone has voicemail attached to it. Clients don’t really think your kids’ cute little messages with Mommy in the background are very professional. Those kinds of messages also give a clue to the level of “professional” they’re working with too.
The more you come across as an organized professional, complete with letterhead and business cards, your own logo, etc., the more serious people will take you.
This brings me to Letterhead and Business Cards. They don’t have to be real fancy—just come up with something simple that is representative of you. Some people like to use a favorite image they took—ask a few friends their opinion of several shots before you commit to one. Photographers are often drawn to a very personal nature photo that speaks to their style as well, or maybe just use an element of it in their logo or on the card.
You can often find freelance designers just starting out that will work out the logo and design for a reasonable price. You can also go to Office Depot on-line and put together your own cards and letterhead from templates they have. My son did a simple business card recently (he’s 18) and came up with a handsome two colored card—he got 500 cards for $35.00. Not bad. It looked professional too. He’s still trying to figure out what his business is...but that’s another story.
I think that this might be a good time to talk about getting help. Many of us are not as computer literate as we’d like to be. I know I’m still not, although I’ve learned a lot from my younger staff over the years! This brings me to the value of high school and college students. They are computer savvy, can set up all kinds of computer scenarios, can do research on the internet for you, and can even help you by typing in the IPTC caption and keyword info (with you sitting by their side while working together on images).
They’re much faster than some of us 40+, and really don’t cost that much. You could probably pay them $8-10 bucks an hour and really get your money’s worth—especially if you’re not a great typist. Look for kids at local high schools (contact the main office) involved with photography or graphic arts programs. All the schools have technology centers these days and you might even contact someone in the media department for recommendations for kids looking for part time after school work.
Later on, when you’re at the point that you can use some serious help with Photoshop and processing your raw images, look to the local colleges and graduates from photo oriented programs around the country. They are right on top of the cutting edge of digital imaging and have quite a bit of experience with Photoshop. Not only can you hire them to help you process your images, but they can teach you some of the tricks they know in Photoshop that will benefit you in the long run.
I’ve recently hired graduates from Brooks Institute and Seattle Central Community College’s Commercial Photography program and they are outstanding! I’m sure RIT in NY has talented graduates looking for work as well. Don’t discount location too—often one can figure out how to work with people remotely. There are many options these days with the on-going advances in technology! I had one gal doing keywording for me in NYC and later in France while she was going to school at the International Center of Photography in NYC.
That’s it for this column. In the next few issues I’ll address the actual business of preparing images and finding clients, among other things. Until then, Happy Shooting!
This article first appeared in the Fall 2007 Issue of NANPA's Currents magazine.
