Many photographers have a lot of film images that they wish to digitize, but conventional scanning techniques may be too expensive.  You can use your digital camera to make “camera scans” that are amazingly good, and very quick to produce.

A basic camera scanning setup includes the camera, a close-up lens, a film holder and a light source. You can rephotograph your film in large quantities, and then adjust it with your software of choice.  For slides and B&W negatives, Lightroom can work really well. Color negatives take a bit more work, and may look best if you “process” them in dedicated scanning software such as VueScan or Silverfast.

If you want to learn more about the hardware, software, workflow or quality, take a look at dpBestflow.org.  There is a page that describes the process, as well as one that steps through an entire workflow.

Process here:
http://www.dpbestflow.org/camera/camera-scanning

Workflow here:
http://www.dpbestflow.org/camera-scan-workflow

Peter Krogh is a commercial photographer and the author of The DAM Book, Digital Asset Management for Photographers (O’Reilly 2009).  He helps photographers, companies and institutions worldwide understand the digital ecosystem . www.theDAMboook.com

If you need to get the maximum run time out of a battery charge on your Mac laptop, you’l want to be aware what is running in the background. If I have a long airplane flight, for instance, it can be annoying to run out of battery while I’m still in the air. You can open the Activity Monitor and check what’s running.  One of the surprising culprits – the Finder.  If you have your view options set to “Calculate all sizes”, anytime a finder window is open the computer is constantly recalculating the size of all files.

You can either close all finder windows, or uncheck “calculate all sizes” and get up to 30% more run time from the laptop.

Peter Krogh, author, The DAM Book, Digital Asset Management for Photographers
Second Edition May, 2009. www.theDAMbook.com

Whenever you move the primary copy of your images from one drive to another, you should perform a validated transfer. This makes sure that all files are transferred, and that every bit in the original is also in the copy. Read about the process and watch a movie of it in action at dpBestflow.org.

One of the most powerful tools that we have for making the most of our photographs is an image catalog. Catalogs allow you to organize vast numbers of images into groupings that make sense to you. dpBestflow recommends that all photographers make use of catalog software as a critical component of file management and workflow design. Read about it here at dpBestflow.org.

Consider Blu-ray disks as an way to backup your files. The dpBestflow project recommends that write-once media, such as CD, DVD or Blu-ray disk can provide needed protection for your valuable images. Many people feel that DVD is just too small, at 4 GB, to be worth the hassle. Blu-ray can hold 23 GB. Burners cost less than $200, and discs can be found for as little as $3 each. Read more here.

We’ve packed quite a bit of information in the website, so we thought we’d make a movie to show you how to navigate. We suggest you spend a few minutes looking over the video before you dive in.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

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As Richard points out in yesterday’s blog, the dpBestflow project is a muti-dimensional, multi-media effort.  We know you are visual people, and for some subjects, a movie makes the point better than text. You’ll find quite a bit of content on the site that walks you through some workflow by actually showing it in action.

This six minute video outlines the creation of metadata templates in Photoshop CS4.

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When I’m looking for one of my images, one of the most valuable tools I can use is the location list in Lightroom or Expression Media.  My awareness of where a picture was taken is deeply tied to my memory of that image. By using Country. State, City and Location tags, I can organize my images in a really useful way. (Add date information to this, and it’s even better.)

But adding that information can take some time. Furthermore, some locations are impossible to pin down with any specificity.  “Okavango Delta” is a pretty generalized location.  So how do you pinpoint images more accurately.  And even more important, how do you add the location names without endless retyping.

Enter GPS – Global Positioning Satellite. It’s possible to add GPS tags to your images, and it’s even possible to use those tags to fill out the IPTC location fields, so that the Country, State, City and Location tags show up in the program of your choice. Take a look at this movie to see a bit more about how this is done.

On Mac 10.5 and above, you can get a right-click by double-tapping your trackpad with two fingers.  Go ahead and try. (If you’re not already using a multi-button mouse, you literally don’t know what you’re missing.) There is all kind of functionality hidden in these “contextual menus”.  Clicking nearly any onscreen item pulls up a new menu. Make sure that you have “Tap Trackpad using two fingers…” checked in the Trackpad section of System Preferences.