Best Business Practices for Photographers [205]
Know, though, that you will spend a significant amount of time restoring your files, software, images, and such. It can easily take a week to get one computer back to where it was before a crash. Having a secondary computer in your office for this purpose, as well as having this same computer to turn to when your primary machine is running a processor-intensive task, such as converting images from RAW to DNG, will minimize the effects of a computer crash and, as a fringe benefit, make you more efficient.
Do not underestimate the potential risk to your business from natural disasters or a terrorist incident. Have a plan of action not only to evacuate yourself, your pets, and your family, but also to reestablish your business—whether temporarily or permanently—in a new location. The annual arrival of hurricane season (and tornado season for those in the Midwest), and the ongoing earthquake "season" I grew up with in California means few areas of the country are immune from a natural disaster. Moreover, just as the priceless negatives of Jacques Lowe, President Kennedy's personal photographer, were destroyed in the vault of JP Morgan underneath the World Trade Center, numerous photographers lost their entire photographic collections following Hurricane Katrina, as well as others before her.
Other solutions outlined previously in this chapter—offsite data storage of invoice records and redundancy of image archives—will be your saving grace when a crash happens. Note that I said when, not if. With statistics such as those outlined in the beginning of the chapter, you won't be able to dodge a bullet or a lightning striking forever.
Chapter 25 Digital and Analog Asset Management: Leveraging Your Images to Their Maximum Potential
During the days of film, there were a few ways the images we produced generated assets. We would deliver them to a photo agency, such as mine—Black Star—or all assignments would be in response to an assignment request, delivered to the client, and then returned to us and filed away. There was little to be done save for promoting your library of images to magazines, who would then call and request that you overnight the images to them, and then would return them to the agent again.
With digital files, there's no physical representation of the images unless you open and view the images, and the collection of files that you have compounds every day, with every assignment. Moreover, multiple versions of the same file emerge, causing more confusion.
By aggregating your image assets and then employing solutions to make them viewable to a photo buyer, you can exploit their value and earn more from each assignment—an idea that is the cornerstone of copyright.
Throughout this book, I have placed the recommended reading section at the end of most chapters. This is in no way meant to diminish the critical value of doing the homework, but, in continuation of the school concept, this is "in-class" homework. In this instance, there is a book that is a milestone in the development of a workflow to handle your image assets.
Recommended Reading: The DAM Book
Peter Krogh has written an exceptional book on the subject of digital asset management, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers—DAM for short. In the spring of 2009, Krogh updated the book to the second edition, and it's even better than the first edition. In it, Krogh sets forth solutions that are well worth putting to work for you.
Krogh outlines the critical value of metadata, including proper captioning, ownership information, and the ultimate in metadata value—the keyword. The more thoughtful you are about including in the keywords not just the who, what, when, where, and why, but also conceptual ideas, the higher your return on the images will