Visiting Jonathan Ross of Andersen/Ross is to visit the state of the art in royalty-free stock production and digital management. He sits at a desk surrounded by four separate screens, in a darkened room, while two employees are busy at workstations in another. He shoots stock in high volume, producing scenarios with multitudes of models from a self-assigned shoot list running multiple pages.
Jonathan has a different take on exposure with digital than I’ve heard before. "I shoot with an exposure compensation about 2/3 of a stop over." What about blinking highlights on the LCD? "So long as it’s not in the skin tones, you’re fine. But you have to capture the shadows."
He talked about his first digital shoot—a set up of a wedding, the couple in the back of a Bentley, with that luscious wrap-around light from the windows to cast a glow on the couple. On film—no problem. It would have felt warm and fuzzy with all that overexposure. On digital, he saw huge sectors of the image blinking at him, and he kept compensating the exposure downward to rein it in. Which made the interior so black he ended up having to pump additional light into the car. "I wanted to throw that camera into the water at the end of that shoot."
So now he overexposes. Like negative film. Digital capture, in this way of thinking, works like this: the lighter the image, the more data there is. You can bring the tonality back down in processing, but you have to ensure there is a super-abundance of data, since you’re throwing out gobs of it in correction.
But what about those highlights in the sky that get clipped? He showed me a cool Photoshop trick. Set the brush mode to Multiply, pick a nearby color, and broadly paint in the highlight. It’s not going to fix large swathes of blown-away areas, but it can corral the details that are getting clipped and bring an errant histogram back into line. The same trick can work for shadows, using Screen mode. It’s not precise, and it doesn’t have to be. But it’s fast.
He has some workflow quirks that I will avoid, but make sense for his operation. He shoots both RAW and jpg simultaneously, so that he has a pack of images he can upload for his agencies to review right away. He keeps the file numbers that the camera assigns, so no batch renaming (this way he doesn’t need to rename two files of the same image, which is what he has in this mode). But (and this makes me nervous), he resets the file sequence counter in the camera after each shoot. It means his staff has to be assiduous about renaming his previous files at some point in the process, or he’s going to get overwriting of data.
Backups are made in triplicate on external hard drives, as well as on DVD’s. He is making a transition to digital wallets ("You can’t take a laptop to the beach"), and he’s found a brand out there with a fast hard drive and long battery life (I have a Nixvue, which has neither).
Like other digital shooters I talk to, the RAW files are a source to be mined for images that suggest further work. No one converts the complete set of images that emerge from the camera. Most images remain unworked and untended, and stored archivally as they came out of the camera. The analogy to negatives, most of which remain ignored, is obvious.
Jonathan is a profoundly generous shooter and technician, and I have great admiration for the operation he has built.
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