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The Tipping Point

By Dave Harp

My name is Dave and I’ve been digital for twelve months. With the exception of one magazine art director who insisted on film, I’ve been lab free for a year. No E-6 processing, no C-41 contact sheets or prints. I’m digital and plan to stay that way.

Digital is no panacea. It won’t solve the nagging problems facing our profession but it is an important new tool that can help give us a lot more options, it can keep our clients happy and can even increase our sagging profit margins. On the flip side, it is also an enormous amount of work and it’s quite expensive to get a professional quality digital operation up and running. It can also add liabilities that didn’t exist in the film-based world: We photographers could be blamed for a bad printing job because we’re now virtual pre-press operators, too.

In his national bestseller, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell uses an amalgam of scientific and cultural analysis to discuss the nature of change and his premise makes a great read. He likens cultural changes to an influenza epidemic. He writes, “…three characteristics—one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment—are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the three, the third trait—the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment—is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does.” Of course, he calls that dramatic moment The Tipping Point and in my experience we’ve crossed that threshold with digital photography. Digital photography for publication photographers is here to stay and will be a greater force every day; every month, every year until we encounter the next tipping point, whatever and whenever that may be.

A phrase that gets a lot of exposure these days is “digital workflow.” You become very conscious of the changes in your workflow the moment you capture your first digital image and begin to learn a new way to make pictures and serve clients needs. “The ability to do something creates the need to do it,” my friend and former national board member Tom Guidera used to tell me. The ability to deliver finished photos on a Friday from a Thursday shoot is possible these days because we can do it with digital capture. More and more, clients “need” this schedule of turn around.

Whether you have those time pressures or not, the digital workflow will require some often steep software learning curves: in my case Photo Mechanic Lite to download files from my Nikon D1X camera, Mac Bibble to prepare NEF files, iView Media Pro to edit and catalog the photos, a deeper understanding of Adobe Photoshop and plug ins like iCorrect to prepare files for print or Web use. My corporate and editorial clients are slowly getting used to my e-mails that lead them to a private segment of one of my Web sites, where they can review the entire shoot in HTML (thanks to iView) and select the photo(s) they want from the assignment in a quick and efficient manner.

The digital realm also effects my stock work. In the past, I would send original transparencies or repro dupes from my voluminous Chesapeake Bay archive via Fedex to corporate, editorial and advertising clients, but now they’re digitized on my Nikon 4000 scanner and e-mailed for consideration . Once they’ve made a selection, I can prepare and upload specific files (vial e-mail or ftp) to meet their needs or burn them to a CD and send them overnight. The beauty of this work flow is that the originals stay with me and the scans are immediately ready to fulfill the next client’s needs. One of the losers in the digital revolution is the overnight courier—I miss chatting with my Fedex driver.

Former APA president and Photoshop guru Jeff Schewe, who has been studying digital asset management longer than most, is leading the development of Digital Image Photographic Standards (DIPS) and has solicited the help of the alphabet soup of photographer-advocacy groups (ASMP, EP, PPA,NPPA). Although it’s a work in progress, DIPS is currently at the stage of establishing the ground rules for digital capture, archiving and delivery to clients). If there is to be any order in the digital photography realm—and I certainly hope there will be—standardizing file naming conventions, digital file formats and creator information, color space prerequisites and copyright ownership issues naming conventions, digital file creator information, file formats, color space prerequisites and the all-important copyright ownership issues is absolutely necessary.

We’ll attempt to answer other questions in the coming years through programs in chapters, at the redesigned ASMP.org and in the grand tradition of ASMP, by e-mails and phone calls between members. The faster publications photographers embrace digital photography and turn it into a force for the benefit of all, the better off we’ll all be.

Dave Harp, immediate past president of ASMP and a current director, is a Baltimore, Maryland, editorial and corporate photographer.

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