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This may finally be the year professional digital photography "takes off." For fashion/celebrity photographer and digital pioneer Kevin Foley, this day’s been coming for almost a decade. One of the very first professionals to "go digital," Foley had an early advantage. He was computer-savvy and already successful enough as a photographer to be able to make the $30,000 investment for camera and accessories. Foley’s clientele includes celebrities, television networks, film studios and fashion designers.
Over the years, he has seen his clients gradually adopt digital especially during the past four years. The biggest obstacle he observes was lack of computer literacy in art departments. All that’s changed now, he says, especially within the past 12 months. The challenge may now be shifting to the issue of digital media management.
"iView MediaPro gives me the best and most comprehensive cataloging ability of any application out there."
 From the start, Foley saved all his data on available storage media progressing over the years from Zip Drives to CDs to DVDs. Despite the advantages of digital technology, it originally took many steps to deliver images to clients. He relied on a popular photo image editing application to manually format each individual image and save them in sizes ranging from thumbnails to full sizes. It was a tedious, time-consuming process.
Then, about two years ago, he heard about iView MediaPro the media management software. He was intrigued because it was one of the few digital asset management applications that could handle raw Kodak images. He adopted the application, and as usual for Foley, his timing couldn’t have been better. Today a shoot lasting several days can generate as much as 20 GB of data on 6 to 8 DVDs totalling 20-30 GB of data. Now Foley can import his raw Kodak files directly into iView MediaPro which automatically generates various sizes and is highly user-customizeble JPEGs all in one step. He estimates this automated process has cut his time in half.
"You can’t underestimate how easy it is to learn." said Kevin Foley. "Unlike other applications where the "how to use" section starts several chapters into the manual, iView is intuitive, quick and easy. And its cost is so reasonable you can justify it in less than one day."
What makes all the difference Foley says is iView MediaPro’s ‘down-to-earth’ qualities. He finds it very flexible and very user-friendly. He likes the fact that iView MediaPro allows you to set up a system for saving and renaming images and repurposing files, then automates the process. Batch renaming function lets him note a subject’s name, date, and other information in a format that fits with his clients’ corporate databases.
For a typical one-day fashion shoot Foley works with a Kodak 14n camera and two to four memory cards (4GB ea). While he is busy capturing the right angle, the perfect lighting and the magic of the fashion model, the other card is being copied to the laptop. He may stop now and then to assess a shot, particularly if there are questions about the lighting. But for the most part it’s a fast-paced, non-stop day of creating compelling shots. When he’s gone all out on a one-day shoot, he’s typically averaged about 100 images per individual shot, and a day’s work will generate approximately 5,000 images.
Foley usually has about three days to complete this kind of assignment. One day to shoot, one day in the studio and delivery to the client on the third day. Once in the studio, laptop is downloaded to the network, which takes about twenty minutes. Then the raw Kodak files are imported directly into iView MediaPro. Once the images have been imported, they are annotated and archived in catalogs. Foley keeps a catalog for each client for each year. Thus images over the years can be instantly accessed and removable media instantly identified. For final delivery, Foley burns two copies of the images on DVDs.
"We can also run a batch process overnight sending files from the network directly into MediaPro. It’s a great way to streamline and automate the process, and it’s highly reliable. We estimate that it cuts our man-hours in half for any given job."
Foley reports that the following MediaPro features are especially useful in his workflow:
- It’s an easy-to-use visual database (in some ways comparable to the old Zip drive "find it" application)
- Once the program is set up, it’s fully automated making it more cost-effective in terms of ‘man’ hours
- It is able to save and convert a wide variety of file types
- It allows you to upload images to Web sites where they can be presented/viewed
As you would expect from a digital pioneer, Foley has his share of entertaining anecdotes. For example, once on a shoot at an exotic island location, Foley’s assistant innocently left his laptop resting on the sand a spot that turned out to be a tide pool. Three-quarters of the computer lay submerged for almost an hour with two and a half days of shooting on it. Foley knew enough about computers to recognize that the hard drive had not been under water. He was able to literally tear the machine apart, reinstall the hard drive in a new laptop and finish the job successfully. Such are the challenges of pioneers.
Not all examples of his computer proficiency are this dramatic. But clearly his choice of iView MediaPro is a good example of his ability to play smart, save precious time and keep him at the forefront of the digital game. |
