Extending Battery Life of Mac Laptop

[by Peter Krogh]

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

Become a Flash (video) Master

[by Jay Kinghorn]

Despite the recent dustup between Flash Video and HTML 5, the majority of online video today is delivered in the Flash Video (FLV) format.

To get the best video quality at the smallest file size, be sure to check out Robert Reinhardt’s Flash Video Bitrate Calculator. Not only does it help you determine which sizes and settings are optimal for use in your video compression software, but it also allows you to download your settings for use in Sorenson Squeeze and On2Flix software.

Stars and Bars

[by Judy Herrmann]

Ratings and rankings – the star and colored label system supported by many image browser and catalog applications – give photographers a powerful way to organize images without a lot of effort.

Most of us already apply stars and/or labels as we’re culling through our captures to segregate the selects from the rejects.  You can make this process even more valuable by deciding on a meaning for each rating and label and applying it consistently.

For example, our studio uses 3 stars to indicate images selected by a client.  As a result, we can find all of the images that a client has ever picked by simply searching our catalog for 3 star images.  Since we don’t deliver Raw or PSD files, limiting the search to 3 star plus TIF or JPG gets us everything we’ve ever delivered.  Adding in the clients name as a search criteria, returns only the files selected by and delivered to that particular client.

The key here isn’t what we’ve chosen to make 3 stars mean – you can assign any meaning to the stars and the bars that makes sense for your needs.  The key is using that meaning consistently so your three star images from 10 years ago have the same significance as the ones 10 years from now.

Already have a bunch of randomly rated and ranked images?  Don’t stress.  Just pick a date and implement your new consistent system moving forward.  That way, you’ll know what any images rated and ranked after that date mean.  If you decide you want to bring legacy images into alignment, don’t feel like it has to be perfect overnight.  You can re-rank and re-label images organically, as need arises.

By doing nothing more than setting 3 stars and Tif as our search parameters, we can exclude everything but files delivered to clients.

Judy Herrmann has taught seminars on digital photography since 1995 and is a presenter for ASMP’s dpBestflow program, I Need A Workflow That Works For Me.

Tips to make your Web site iPhone-friendly

[by Jay Kinghorn]

For most photographers, their Web site is their #1 marketing tool. As a result, your Web site should be compatible with as wide an audience as possible. Increasingly, this includes mobile devices like the iPhone, Droid and iPad.

To make sure your Web site is mobile-friendly, follow these few simple rules:
Make it quick. Avoid long animations and optimize images to improve download speed on slower connections.

• Keep it simple. Reduce or eliminate Flash, Java and other technologies that aren’t supported on all mobile phones. HTML and JavaScript is widely supported across desktop and mobile browsers
• Keep it small. Mobile Safari opens pages at a default view of 980 pixels wide. If your site is wider than that, site viewers will have to scroll side to side. Simplify your splash screen to ensure it all fits on the opening screen.
• Keep it separate. Increasingly, companies are creating separate, mobile-friendly versions of their Web sites to accommodate mobile visitors. For some sites, this can be accomplished through the use of JavaScript and CSS, but for more elaborate sites, you may need to create and maintain a duplicate, mobile-friendly copy of your site.

Resources:
- iPhone WebDev: http://www.iphonewebdev.com Forums, FAQ’s and tips for optimizing or developing sites for the iPhone.
- SiteCatalyst NetAverages: Free subscription with purchase of Adobe CreativeSuite CS5, aggregates data from Omniture’s web analytics customers to show trends for desktop and mobile browsers
- iPhone/iPad Simulator: Register for the free iPhone SDK to download the iPhone/iPad simulator application to test your site. (Or, save the 2GB download by asking your friends to test your site for you and send screengrabs.)

Phase One Buys Expression Media

Microsoft has sold Expression Media to Phase One, the Danish company that makes Phase One cameras and Capture One software.

Phase One is offering the following to existing customers:
* Capture One owners can get a free copy of Expression Media
* Expression Media owners can get a free copy of Capture One
* iView owners can get a free copy of Expression Media 2

Details available here. Offer good for the next month.

Keep Playing

[by Jenna Close]

Trying out new tools can lead to new discoveries.  Experiment with flashlights, LEDs, toy cameras and different reflective surfaces and objects.  Heck, don’t just experiment…PLAY.  You might find something to add to your bag of tricks.  Take, for example, this behind the scenes video of the Hennessy light painting campaign shot by Atton Conrad.

Jenna Close, along with partner Jon Held, run P2 Photography.  They specialize in imagery for the alternative energy market.  Contact Jenna at jenna@p2photography.net

Keep Your Blog Safe

[by Rosh Sillars]

Someone hacked the New Media Photographer site last week. It was a high-level attack through the GoDaddy.com servers.

These attacks have occurred in last six weeks to blogs and Web sites large and small. You might want to enlist a service to monitor your site such as sucuri.net . If you discover your site has been hacked they have scripts and tips to help clear your system.

I was able to clean out my site in forty-five minutes using their recommendations.

What tips would you share to protect your site?

Rosh Sillars is a veteran photographer, digital marketing consultant, host of www.newmediaphotographer.com and co-author of the book Linked Photographer.

Preserving Your Options in Photoshop

[by Judy Herrmann]

Want to keep the most flexibility with your data but still work in Photoshop?  Try using Smart Objects.
Smart Objects allow you to import a stand-in layer that references your RAW data.  The stand-in functions similarly to a normal layer – you can apply several different types of filters, add layer masks, apply adjustment layers, and more – but double-clicking on the smart object takes you right back to Adobe Camera Raw [ACR] where you can reprocess the RAW data if desired.  Your smart object will automatically update using the new ACR processing parameters you set.

Smart Objects don’t just let you reprocess the RAW data in ACR, they also allow you to resize the file or transform it and get back to the original size and shape without any loss of quality.  You can even crop (inside ACR) and remove or change the crop later.

There are some things you can’t do with Smart Objects – certain filters can’t be run on them and you can’t do any pixel level editing directly on the Smart Object (though you can create a transparent layer and retouch on that with the “sample all layers” box checked).

To create a smart object from within Adobe Camera Raw, click on the processing options tab (blue link in the lower-center area) and check Open In Photoshop as Smart Object. In Lightroom, select Edit In Photoshop as Smart Object from the Edit In menu. In Photoshop, use the File > Open as Smart Object command and navigate to your proprietary RAW or DNG file.

Top right: This crop at 100% magnification shows how sharp and clear a Smart Object (shown full frame at left) remains after being sized down to 216 x 288 pixels and then sized back up to full capture size (3024 x 4032 pixels).

Bottom Right: The same RAW file, exported into Photoshop as a normal pixel layer and resized the same way results in a pixelated, unsharp image at 100% magnification.

Judy Herrmann has taught seminars on digital photography since 1995 and is a presenter for ASMP’s dpBestflow program, I Need A Workflow That Works For Me.

Maintain Your Marketing Momentum with a Google App

[by Carolyn Potts]

When it comes to increasing your productivity– for the non-image-making part of your business–there are many great applications to choose from. Lots of people use Apple’s Mobile.me account. Yet there’s another good way of developing the workflow of integrating all of your contacts, tasks, and calendar events–no matter what operating system you use– and it lives within the free universe of Google apps. (There are even more feature-rich applications that a developed solely for the purpose of managing the sales and marketing aspects of your business, but that will be the subject of a future blog post).

Google has created yet another great productivity tool called TASKS. If you have a Google account, you can use it to help you take regular and weekly steps in implementing your marketing plan. 

Use TASKS to create a marketing to-do list filled with daily, weekly, and monthly “micro-steps” E.g. find the address & phone number of three prospects/add them to mailing list/pick image for June mailing/create subject line for promo/etc.Then add those items to Google TASKS. 

If you use Gmail, your preferences can be set-up to allow you to create tasks alarms, add items to your calendar, and always see your tasks list whenever you check your email. Because you can access and update your progress from any internet-enabled device, you can maintain a good marketing momentum. Enjoy the thrill of ticking off the check-box! Daily progress creates real progress.

Carolyn Potts, perpetual photo evangelist; international consultant & speaker; and former photo rep, shows seasoned & proactive photographers how to get more work. Find her at www.cpotts.com

Save and back up your Photoshop Actions

[by Jay Kinghorn]

Don’t forget to save and back up your Photoshop Actions. Should Photoshop crash, you will lose any unsaved Actions. More likely, unsaved actions can be lost when you reinstall Photoshop or switch computers.

To save your Actions, first group them into Action Sets then single-click on the Action Set within the Actions panel and select Save Actions from the flyout menu in the upper right corner of the Panel.

I recommend saving your actions immediately after creating or modifying your Actions and integrating them into your regular file backup routine. Losing the Actions you rely upon daily to process images can be a significant blow to your productivity.

Jay Kinghorn is a workflow trainer and consultant. His company, Kinghorn Visual helps companies use photos and video for marketing and outreach purposes.

Monetization Matters

[by Judy Herrmann]

My Mother’s day gift this year included a leisurely morning that allowed me to make a small dent on my rapidly growing stockpile of New Yorker magazines (I love the New Yorker but I mean, seriously, does ANYone have time to read an entire magazine every single week!?!).

The issue I grabbed (March 29, 2010) included an article on Polyvore – a fashion website that encourages members to clip photos of clothes & accessories from all over the internet and create collages or “sets” demonstrating their sense of style.  The author, Alexandria Jacobs, likens the experience to “…playing paper dolls with real clothes.”

The question of who created, owns or paid for the creation of those photographs wasn’t raised anywhere in the article.  Now, before we get all outraged and up in arms and cry “it’s the Napster of the fashion photography world” let’s look a little deeper.

The creators of this website are tracking pretty much every click that users make.  The data they’re collecting has enormous value to the apparel industry, which has started to embrace and in some cases, even sponsor, Polyvore sets.  Well, sure, you say – they’ve got nothing to lose, they make their money from the clothes.

But, that same data has potentially even more value to photographers and other creators. Rather than using copyright to prohibit such uses of images, as the music industry has tried to do, why not try to monetize them instead?

Tracking the relationship between users of the internet and the data they touch is rapidly becoming an entrenched business model for everyone from major players like Google to small start-ups like Polyvore.  The next step – forging a connection between the data and its creator – is coming soon.  At the ASMP Copyright Symposium last month, Jeff Sedlik noted that the Picture Licensing Universal System (www.usePLUS.org) has developed machine-readable licensing codes and plans to launch a creator registry that will link images to their owners later this year.

We’ve learned from the music industry that trying to shut these sites down or arrest the users isn’t really viable.  If instead we embrace these technologies and find ways to work with sites and their users to make sure that the creators of the photographs and other content they’re appropriating receive fair and just compensation, we may just build system where everyone wins.

Acclaimed advertising & editorial photographer Judy Herrmann conducts seminars and one-on-one consultations that help people grow their businesses and build more satisfying careers. Judy@HSstudio.com

Are You Using a Mac?

[by Carolyn Potts]

Want a rarely-used, no-brainer business tip for photographers who rarely read instructions because Macs are so easy-to-use. (i.e. about 90% of us!)?

Invest just 5 minutes with any of your applications’ Help files. It will increase both your productivity and the R.O.I. of your Mac investment.

Challenge: Take 5 now with the app displaying this blog post (e.g. Apple Mail, Safari, FireFox, etc.).

Carolyn Potts, former rep & perpetual photo evangelist, international consultant & speaker, shows seasoned and proactive photographers how to get more work. Find her at www.cpotts.com

New Technology = New Opportunity

[by Rosh Sillars]

Using new technology, photographers can test drive and implement new business models. One such way is the selling stock or print images directly to buyers without meeting in person, the assistance of agents or agencies.

Sites such as PhotoShelter offer great image display options and delivery systems that make it easy for Web site visitors to purchase your photography. You can set up a private gallery that gives buyers the opportunity to purchase prints and products based on their schedule.  A custom stock library of photographs can be created for your clients to download as needed.

If you want an e-commerce solution, but don’t want customers to leave your site, Fotomoto is a good option. Visitors can view your images on your Web site or blog and  purchase them without leaving the page. All you need to do is install a little bit of code or a plug-in to make your site capable of handling sales transactions.

Imagine placing a simple QR bar code next to your beautiful photographs on display in a coffee shop. (Create a QR code at qrcode.kaywa.com.) Customers in the coffee shop, who have smart phones and are interested in your photograph, can take a picture of the bar code using a special phone application that displays  the purchase information on their phone screen.  Purchase information  may include a Web site address that might offer one of the above options for instant purchase of the image.

I’m not suggesting that the above technologies are right for everyone. New technology develops at a fast pace; I recommend you use your imagination and plan out a new business model that would work best for you and your customers.  You might be surprised at what is possible.

Your Computer: A low paid, yet highly productive assistant

[by Jay Kinghorn]

What if you could pay your best assistant $1.87 per hour to process your images for you? Consider this: A fully loaded, new MacPro with a stunning Eizo monitor, pro-rated over the three-year life of the equipment costs you less than two bucks an hour.

It is tempting to save money by delaying the purchase of a new computer, monitor or software upgrade. However, in the long run, the productivity costs of waiting for files to process or making an extra round of prints because the color isn’t right, far exceeds the cost of having the right equipment.

Once you have the right equipment, the next step is putting it to work for you. What steps in your workflow can be automated using Photoshop Actions or presets in Lightroom or Aperture? I’ll bet there are more than you think. Automating even small steps makes you more efficient, minimizes errors and allows you to focus on the creative areas of your image processing. Do the skin tones look right? Does the light need to be warmer? These are the questions you should be asking.

The repetitive, mind-numbing tasks like resizing images for a client; that’s work for your electronic assistant.

Beyond the Routine Back Up

[by Judy Herrmann]

Everyone reading this blog should already be backing up their data regularly.  If not, or if you’re not sure how to set that up, check out dpBestflow’s section on back ups.

An equally valuable CYA habit is to create a bootable back up drive.  Bootable back ups include a pristine copy of your OS and applications.  If your OS gets corrupted or your primary hard drive fails, you can boot off the back up drive, keep working and deal with the problematic drive at your convenience.  You can even boot someone else’s computer off your drive and keep working with minimal downtime.

You can purchase a “bootable external drive” which comes with its own cloning software or create your own.  For the DIY route, you’ll need cloning software – Super Duper!  and Carbon Copy Cloner for the Mac or Acronis TrueImage for PCs – and the right kind of drive.  Power PC based Macs require a Firewire drive with an Oxford-based Firewire Bridge set – Oxford compatible chipsets won’t work.  OWC, WiebeTech, Lacie and Maxtor Firewire drives should be a safe choice.  Intel Based Macs can boot off Firewire or USB 2.  Windows machines require USB 2.

At a minimum, put your OS and key applications onto your bootable clone.  This will let you boot up your computer and keep working.  Depending on your computer’s requirements, you may be able to use a thumb drive, iPod or even your cell phone’s memory card.  This approach is particularly useful for location photographers who don’t want to lug any extra weight around.

For extra safety, create a bootable mirror or shadow drive that includes a complete clone of everything on your primary hard drive – your OS, applications, personal settings, actions, presets, font library, etc.  You can even include any current projects that you’d want immediate access to if your hard drive failed.

Most computers from 2007 to present can boot off an external drive with no problems.  If your computer is circa 2006 or earlier, check to make sure that the BIOS (basic input/output system: the firmware that initializes system devices and launches the OS) is capable of pointing to an external drive.  If not, you may be able to upgrade the firmware to a version that supports an external boot.

Making Copyright Part of Your Workflow

[by Jim Cavanaugh]

Photographers often cite one of the barriers to regular copyright registration is assembling the submission of images. In the old film days, it was a significant challenge to get physical copies of all your work in an acceptable form for registration.

In today’s digital world it is much easier to assemble a registration, especially if you’re taking advantage of the Copyright Office’s electronic registration or eCO. All that is required for the majority of submissions is a small j-peg copy of each image you would like to register.

Creating these j-peg images as part of your regular assignment workflow will make timely registration much easier. Most Image processing software’s common automation features can be used on large numbers of RAW files or other formats to create the smaller j-peg files.

Here is what I do. On each assignment, I create a web gallery for my clients to review using Adobe Bridge CS4. This web gallery is created from the edited raw files that have had global color and exposure corrections made. Once the gallery is created, I simply copy the j-peg files from the web gallery folder (Resourcses-Images-Large) into my copyright registration folder. At the end of each month, I register all of the images in the copyright folder.

A special note, creating the flash based web galleries in Bridge CS4 deletes all metadata from the j-peg files. I have a copyright registration metadata template with my contact and copyright information that I apply to all of the images.

Use a Validated Transfer

[by Peter Krogh]

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.

Organize Your Image Collection with a Catalog

[by Peter Krogh]

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.

Spending Your Money Wisely on Digital Image Storage

[by Richard Anderson]

With every New Year, digital photographers, (which is pretty much all of us now), face decisions about how to make room for a new years worth of image files.

Most of us have been shooting digitally long enough to know approximately how many gigabytes we create in a year’s time. It has inched up as we traded up to higher megapixel cameras of course, but the good news is that hard drives have become larger and cheaper. So what is the least painful way to accommodate these growing collections?

There has always been a lot of buzz about RAID enclosures, but I would propose that buying the largest available drives and arranging them in JBOD enclosures is the easiest, cheapest, safest, and most workflow friendly arrangement for digital image storage.

I’ll make my case:

• Easiest—Each drive needs to be backed up. Take a 2 TB drive and fill it to approximately 75% capacity. Now do the same with a second 2 TB drive. Now your hard drive storage is properly backed up. Easy!

Take the backup drive offsite for maximum protection. If that isn’t an option, keep the backup drive disconnected and only connect it when you need to synchronize with the primary drive.

• Cheapest—In a JBOD setup- you get full value of the drive cost because you get to use the whole drive for storage. With any RAID other than RAID 0, you lose some portion of the drive space to redundancy. With RAID 5, you will lose the entire capacity of one of those 2 TB drives. On an energy saving note, RAID arrays keep all the drives running when they are on. A JBOD enclosure can have drives on or off independently of each other.

• Safest— If RAID 5 didn’t have to be backed up, you’d come out ahead moneywise, but unfortunately RAID 5 doesn’t protect you from data loss due to equipment failure, file corruption, Fire, theft, or other disasters, so you will still need to back up all the data on the RAID, the same as you would for JBOD. I have discovered that many people don’t back up their RAID 5 setups because they focus on the word “redundant” and figure they’ll take the risk. Since JBOD is cheaper, there is less temptation to “cheap out” and not make your setup truly redundant.

An important fact that impacts safety is that in a RAID 5 setup, when one disk fails, there is a high chance that a second one will fail.  The theory behind the error correction in RAID assumes that failures of drives are independent. It is often the case that the drives making up the RAID are the same ages. Since all drives are on when the RAID is on, this means that they all have the same number of hours of use. This means that the chances of failure of all the drives in a RAID are statistically correlated. Occasionally, manufacturers have a run of bad drives. Think about what happens if the RAID is made up of these drives.

• Workflow friendly—RAIDs are great until you run out of space. At that point, you will need to offload ALL of the data on the RAID, rebuild it with larger drives (or get a bigger box), and then restore ALL of the data back. It can take 6 to 8 hours to migrate each 2TB of data using a validated transfer utility. If you skip the verification, you will save some time, but you can never be sure that every “bit” of your data has transferred and is uncorrupted. With JBOD, you can migrate your data to larger drives on a less hectic schedule because you only have to do it one drive at a time.

Data Robotics DROBO enclosures relieve some of the pain of scaling up your storage capacity because you can mix and match different drive sizes. DROBO enclosures still consume more drive space than JBOD however, and the data contained on a DROBO still needs to be backed up.

My advice is to stay away from the fancy boxes. Get a sturdy multi-bay drive enclosure and a double set of 2 TB drives. It’s Easier, cheaper, safer, and more workflow friendly IMHO.

For more information on hard drive storage go here.

Future Success

[by Rosh Sillars]

The last decade brought the standardization of digital photography, an increased interest in the craft and the commoditization of photographic images.

Many of the bread-and-butter jobs that once fed our families are now gone. Let it go and don’t look back.

Change is constant. Turn around and face the future. Technology, which has taken our opportunities, now offers new possibilities.

Photographers can be more creative than ever with higher quality image capture, unbelievable post processing and multimedia opportunities.

The Internet and social media have eliminated the barriers to sharing your vision with an international audience.  Photographers are connecting with people in cities, states and countries not even on the radar just a few years ago.

Over the next year we will hear more about real-time applications and augmented reality. People will become more connected, social and mobile.

In the future, photographers will need more creativity, communication and marketing skills to succeed.  One thing that will not change: people and relationships. They are and will continue to be the foundation of a photographer’s success.

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