I am beginning my tour of colleague’s studios to get a sense of how other photographers are managing the digital workflow. I spent a couple of hours with Mel Curtis yesterday, who is in the middle of a big stock shoot for Getty, all on his new Canon Mark II. Looking at the RAW screen shots from that camera, he said, "It’s better than 100 speed film from a Hasselblad." It’s too sharp, in fact. There is no grain to soften the texture of the skin—every pore and hair is visible.
Mel claims he’s only a step or two ahead of me in the digital conversion. "Metadata? We haven’t gotten there yet." He’s also shooting under controlled studio light much of the time, so there is no exposure variation. I’m challenging the medium more aggressively in my location and travel work. And, I am using a much less sophisticated camera.
Mel has what I think of as a nearly essential ingredient in shifting to digital—a full time digital workstation employee. His assistant described the workflow thusly—a card goes from the camera directly to the computer, and is batch renamed right away. Right now he’s using the name of the model, his initials, and a date as the file name. The RAW files are immediately backed up on a CD or a DVD. A spiffy element is that he prints the file info, and a photo of the model, directly onto the CD with a cheap Epson R200 printer. It’s so slick looking. I want to do it too. So as soon as I got home I ordered a printer ($85) and a stack of printable DVD’s and CD’s.
Then he batch converts the bundle to jpgs and, if he’s on location or with an art director, that’s what they usually walk away from the job with. Here, now, is the paradigm shift I was seeking: don’t aim for perfection. "The jpg’s are like a contact sheet. The exposures are never all perfect on a contact sheet, and art directors understand that." The RAW file is the equivalent of a negative, to which you only need to invest the effort to make perfect when the occasion demands. Otherwise, it’s always in storage and available.
We talked about the computer storage issue. A single capture on the MarkII makes a 50mb tif file. He already has binders and binders filled with disks. There are two terabyte external hard drives on order.
Here’s another personal quirk: 512mb cards. This on a camera that makes 16mb RAW files. He says it’s like a roll of film, and he likes that break in the action in a rhythm that is familiar to him. If he’s out and about, and runs out of cards, then that means he’s done.
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