|
Jaap Buitendijk lives what many photographers would consider a charmed life. As unit and/or special photographer for major motion pictures, such as "Girl With a Pearl Earring," "Gladiator," and "Harry Potter," Buitendijk has created memorable images of a world very different from daily life. His most recent assignment was on the film "Alexander," directed by Oliver Stone, which is due to be released in the autumn. For a stunning gallery of his many images, please see: http://www.jaapphoto.com.
Jaap Buitendijk grew up in Holland. While traveling the world in his early twenties, he reports that the "photography bug" bit him. He got serious and enrolled in a course in documentary photography, eventually specializing in film production. He threw himself into his work, and his career took off. He has won the Fuji Professional Award for film stills and to date has worked on over 17 films. He is constantly in demand, and his resume speaks volumes about the variety of images he's produced over the years. His photographs have appeared in publications such as Vogue, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Film, and The New York Times.
"MediaPro encourages a very clean way of working. Other photo management programs create their own hierarchy of images. MediaPro lets me keep images wherever I need them."
Recently, Jaap took time to speak with us about how he works and how iView MediaPro fits into his workflow. We began by asking him to clarify the difference between unit and special photography.
Like many people, Jaap first learned about iView MediaPro from a colleague. He said he'd heard of it before, but didn't appreciate the difference it would make to his work until he started using it. Before using iView MediaPro, he hadn't been shooting much digitally.
"Now that he has 'gone almost fully digital,' he says he depends on Media Pro."
Editing images daily keeps Jaap on a grueling schedule.
"This is the most crucial role that iView MediaPro plays for me," he says. "MediaPro encourages a very clean way of working. Other photo management programs create their own hierarchy of images. MediaPro lets me keep images wherever I need them."
"On the last picture, if I hadn't had MediaPro, life would have been harder. I had got away with using other applications to manage photos before MediaPro. But if you're working with thousands of images every week you want a program that's efficient with hard drive space and doesn't automatically create extra copies of all those images."
"When you're on a film crew, you work six days a week, often more than 12 hours a day. Sometimes after a long day of shooting the last thing you want to do is go back to the hotel and look at more images," Jaap told us. But it's that kind of discipline that helps him manage a potential tsunami of digital data. MediaPro allows him to quickly kill the images he doesn't want and save the ones he wants.
At the end of a day of digital shooting, he's typically got five or six one-GB memory cards. He loads data from those cards into an external hard drive for a first safety back up. He'll do that in the car on the way back "home" for the night.
Then, when he arrives at his hotel room, he dumps data from the hard drive onto the computer. Now he effectively has three copies. The computer images then are imported directly into MediaPro. He takes a break from it for a while, during which time MediaPro is generating 640 x 640 thumbnails. This takes about 10 minutes; we're hoping he's also taking time off for a good dinner. The editing process lasts about an hour. A quick delete on the keyboard lets him pare down the images from 500 to 300 or 400 images. He then copies his old catalog and makes a new catalog. He uses the renaming function to create a seamless sequential order from old to new images. The new catalog is labeled with that day's date.
Jaap routinely uses some of MediaPro's basic image editor features: for example, the image enhancement function to improve tone and contrast, or the crop tool to crop an image slightly. He'll send the client both the enhanced image and the RAW file.
He also goes between MediaPro and Photoshop. For example, while working on his portfolio, he chooses the Open With Photoshop option in MediaPro to prepare an image for printing. Thus, when the image is saved in Photoshop, MediaPro automatically adjusts the thumbnail to the last saved version.
Jaap finds the file conversion features of MediaPro very useful. For example, if he wants to select one or two images to email a client, he'll convert them to JPEGs for easy distribution. Where the client might like to have smaller copies of each image, he'll create small JPEGs as well as the RAW files.
Delivering his work to his client means simply copying images into a folder and burning them to a DVD-both the RAW and the manipulated files. His client receives such a DVD every two days.
As this case study goes live, Jaap is currently in Kenya on assignment for another film. You have no doubt seen images that Jaap has produced already, and as you read this, just imagine that he is now selecting that scene out of the many movie images that you will remember in the future. |
