The Office: Preparing the Images (Part 2)

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.

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:

• Include country/state, subject and anything pertinent that describes the photo in your caption information.
• Include the Latin names for flora and fauna. You’d be surprised how many researchers actually search on them.
• If the photo is in a national or state park, reserve, zoo, etc., name it.
• If the image is seasonally specific, label it as such.
• Use many of the same words from the caption in your individual keywords. When you put any of your digital files on any website, either your own, a photo agency or portal, the captions and keywords are vital to their being found in searches. Some websites search on captions, others search on keywords.
• There are no set rules for keywording, but you don’t need every keyword on the subject (“keyword spam,” as it’s known).
• Consider 15-25 keywords appropriate. When they apply, use conceptual words—such as peace, happiness, fear, danger, adventure, remote, alone, solitude, security, challenge and so on.
• There’s nothing worse than coming across a file of images that have keywords generated by an inappropriate software program. Do the keywording yourself, individually, for each image.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

This article first appeared in the Winter 2007 Issue of NANPA's Currents magazine.