Winter 2005 - University Photographers' Association of America

BITS & CHIPS
A UPAA Technical Column
by Dean Carothers of Tennessee Technological University
Piecing Together Digital Workflow
Digital workflow is one of the
favorite terms for consultants and
$1,500-a-day seminar promoters.
There are lots of software packages
that purport to improve our digital
workflow, automate it or make it all
easy and fast -- for a fee.
For those of us that remember
the days of labeling slide mounts
and filing negatives and contact
sheets digital workflow may sound
more like hype and hucksterism
than something that we need. While
most of us can do without the fifty
thousand dollar solutions there are
some real issues and the way we
choose to handle these issues now
will have a major effect on how
valuable our images will be in the
future.
I spoke with Dr. Patrick Reagan
on my campus at Tennessee Tech
about what historians think of
digital photography. I will skip his
more succinct reply and tell you that
he, and other historians worldwide,
are shall we say, highly concerned.
One aspect that I had not considered
was that when we saved our
negatives or slides we generally
kept all, or at least most, of the
images we made. Researchers often
find that they can glean a lot of
information from the outtakes and
duplicates. Think of Joseph Stalin's
fondness for having anyone that he
was on the outs with retouched out
of official photos. The historians are
very concerned that only the final
"corrected" images will be saved.
While it sounds like all of us are
taking the need to archive our
images pretty seriously (that was a
good session at the Symposium)
there is still the issue of obsolescent
storage systems. That is the official
way of saying "where do think you
will have to go in twenty years to
find a working CD drive?" If you
are not worried about 20 years think
about 100 years. That probably
won't be our problem but it may be
a big one for someone.
All the variations of chemical
based photography are still
viewable with nothing more than a
light source and our eyes. You don't
see lantern slide projectors around
much anymore but the images are
still easily viewed. That means that
it is very likely that the negatives
from Aunt Sue's point and shoot
may be more accessible in the future
than the finely crafted photographs
that we make with our Nikon D7x
35MP pro cameras. Based on the
discussion at the Symposium here
are some things that I think we can
all work on to make our work more
accessible and useful.
Metadata
This is all the stuff that our
digital cameras save with each
photo in case we need to know that
a photo was made a 1/160th of a
second at f8.7 using a 24-85mm lens
at 31.2mm focal length. That stuff
really can be useful, but what we
are really interested in is the IPTC
data that we add to each image.
IPTC data is a format proposed by
the International Press
Telecommunications Council to
allow newspapers, magazines and
wire services to send and receive
data along with images that are
transmitted electronically
(www.iptc.org).
Embedding the Who, What,
Where, When data into each data
file that we archive goes a long way
toward making our photos more
useful in the future. For some of us
that future is not that far away
either. Software like Canto Cumulus
can index and allow searches on
metadata. The last time I checked
Cumulus only indexed some fields
of the IPTC data and that feature
was not on by default but it is there
if you want it.
Apple says that the next version
of OS X will include metadata
search as part of the operating
system. If this proves to be
implemented in a way that is useful
to photographers it might be
enough reason to keep paying the
price for Apple computers all on it's
own (www.apple.com/macosx/
tiger/).
Many software packages let you
edit and embed the metadata
including Photoshop. Common
packages like ACDSee:
(www.acdsystems.com/English/
Products/ACDSee/index.htm).
F o t o s t a t i o n :
(www.acdsystems.com/English/
Products/ACDSee/index.htm and
iView Mediapro). Www.iviewmultimedia.com
make the job of
editing your shoot and embedding
data easier. We really don't have
much excuse for not captioning our
photos with the best information
that we have.
Using standard descriptors
wherever you can is another good
idea. If I tag a photo as being made
of the ‘admin bldg’ and you spell
out the correct name,
‘administration building,’ you
won't ever find my photos using a
search tool. Most schools have
naming conventions for places and
buildings. Likewise, tagging a
photo as 'Dr Harrison' may be
following protocol but a tag of
'Susan Harrison' or 'George
Harrison' will avoid all sorts of
confusion later.
What do we archive?
'Best practices' say that our
archive system should keep the
original camera files as the main
archival source. Do we delete the
duds and the technical flaws? Like
many of us, I do delete the truly
awful shots but if we want to be a
true archivist we should keep the
whole shoot, duds and all. That
doesn't mean that we have to show
UPAA Contact Sheet 21