I just returned from 3 days at the Eddie Adams Workshop. Tagged as “the premier tuition-free photography experience”, this workshop is a total immersion experience in the best of photojournalism worldwide.  50 top college photographers, and 50 emerging photojournalists converge on Eddie’s farm in the Catskills.

The faculty for the program draws from the absolute best working pros, picture editors and producers. Photographers include Ami Vitale, Stacy Pearsall, Michael Williamson and so many more. Picture editors like Dave Griffin from the Geographic.  And producers are led by Brian Storm and Rich Beckman (my old UNC prof).  Tech support is led by Mark Suban, one of the very best in the business.

Read the rest of this entry »

More

I presented the dpBestflow project to a workshop of the iPres 2010 conference in Vienna yesterday, as part of a workshop called “Spanning Boundries.” This is a gathering of representatives from cultural heritage institutions worldwide, concerned with the preservation of digital objects.

More after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

More

This week, I have the honor of presenting a paper at the Archiving 2010 conference in Den Hague. I will be presenting original theories outlining data validationin practical image workflows. Specifically, the paper outlines the use of the DNG file format as a tool to protect the integrity of an image collection throughout the lifecycle of the image. It has been chosen as a focal paper for the conference, giving me a half hour to make an additional visual presentation before this very impressive group.

The paper, and my attendance at the conference has been made possible by ASMP and the dpBestflow project – thanks to both. (More info after the jump)

Read the rest of this entry »

More

You never can predict where and how things are going to go wrong, but you can have a good idea that it will happen eventually. I was going through security for my flight to Miami this morning and the baggage screener asked to send my bags back through the machine.  This has happened to me dozens of times, since I travel with a fair amount of electronic stuff packed in my computer bag.

This time, however, the screener did something unusual – he unpacked a bunch of stuff from my bag and sent it through separately. He did this without telling me, and out of my sight.  Worse, there were some other bags between my zipped-up case and the tray full of expensive camera gear going through separately. I picked up my bag, slid the laptop back in, and headed down to catch the tram to the gate.

As I was about to step onto the tram, a security officer appeared at the top of the escalator shouting my name. He informed me that they had unpacked the items from my bag, and that I needed to go back to security to pick them up.

If my name had not been on the camera and wireless receiver, they would not have known whose name to call, and that could have been the end of this gear (more than $4k – ouch).

Moral of the story –  put you name on your stuff.  Metadata for Physical Asset Management.

More

There are 2 slots left for my program on digital asset management at FotoCare in New York Wednesday. Here’s what I’m doing:

Tuesday afternoon, I’ll be doing a 2 hour presentation – this is entirely full (but room would be available for anyone signing up for the Wednesday program). On Wednesday, I’ll be doing an all-day program, as described below.  The day-long program costs $200, and includes attendance at both.  Call 212-741-2990 to reserve your spot.

Details after the jump Read the rest of this entry »

More

On Monday and Tuesday, Richard and I took the dpBestflow project to Adobe to meet with people on the Photoshop and Lightroom teams. We wanted to make sure they were aware of what we doing, and discuss how we might want to expand the project in the future.

While we were there, we had the privilege of becoming part of Kelly Castro’s “Exteriors” series. Using a super-secret (but deceptively simple and cheap) lighting rig, Kelly makes these stark and stylized portraits. Nearly all the post processing is done in Lightroom, where Kelly works as an engineer on the Develop module.

More

We got a surprise in the mail yesterday – the spanish-language version of The DAM Book! I knew a French version was in production, but this is a pleasant surprise.

Is anyone interested in moderating a spanish-language topic area on the DAM Forum?

More

A friend just pointed me to this pretty amazing new laptop, the Lenovo W510. Like it’s (really) big brother the W700, the W510 is really designed just for the digital photographer.  Here are a few highlights of the top-end model.

Quad Core i7 processors Integrated color calibrator
on board eSATA
CF and Smart Media readers
Touch Screen!
Can Take 16 GB RAM
1 GB VRAM
USB3!
Internal mobile broadband card slot
Blu-ray burner
Fingerprint reader
5.9 lbs

Full specs here.

I’ve got a W700DS here in the studio, which would probably be more accurately described as a portable than a laptop. This one looks very attractive for the location photographer.

More