Come on. Chant it with me.
"Back up.... Back up.... Back up...."

It should be the holy mantra of every photographer, no matter if you shoot digital, slides, or negatives. Case in point is provided today by an article in the New York Times, detailing the story of Jacques Lowe, a photographer who took over 40,000 images of JFK and his family, but lost all of the negatives when a fire destroyed his bank vault at 5 World Trade Center on 9/11.

Enter some contactsheets, a drumscanner and Photoshop.

"Mr. Adelman (Lowe's collaborator on a proposed book about the Kennedys) doubted that technology could turn contact-sheet-size images (most of them 2¼ by 2¼ inches) into photographs worthy of a coffee-table book.

But that was before Woodfin Camp, Mr. Lowe's New York-based agent, delivered several of the contact sheets to the Manhattan office of Quad Graphics. Quad used its highest-quality upright drum scanner, an $85,000 machine called the Heidelberg's Prime Scan 8400, to turn the photos into digital images, at 350 dots per inch. Then it used Photoshop to match the tones to those of actual prints made during Mr. Lowe's lifetime."

How cool is that?

Still - I back up my original slides and negs as 16-bit scanned tiffs, then make 2 copies on CD - with one going into my fire-safe, and the other into a filing cabinet in my office for quick access.

With digital however it's even more risky. There is no hardcopy around. Prints and high-quality contact sheets are even more unlikely. A simple crash of the harddrive could wipe out all that work (not to mention time and money) you've invested into a shoot. Don't let that happen.

The digital images off my 10D immediately get burned onto CD in RAW format, without my having even laid a single Photoshop finger on them. Then I make 2 back ups of the converted and photoshoped (if necessary) Tiffs (with one going into the safe again), and keep only medium-sized jpegs on my hard-drive for reference and web use.

I know it's a lot of work - but CDs are cheap and I just know that the time invested in keeping properly organized and backed up will pay off in the long run.

So if you're thinking about going digital, consider this: make sure you have a well-organized office - otherwise the likelyness of finding an image when you really need it is greatly reduced, if not squashed. Get binders with CD organizers, clearly label them, and make triple - not double, because your backup can bomb on you too - backups. Oh, and an image management software helps too.

January 14, 2004

So I've started an experiment with my website.

Sparked by the optimistic article Blogging for Dollars, I decided to give it a shot - what the hell, right? - and try and make some cash off the long and laborious hours I spend on my blog.

And after all - that silly little resource page on my site about the "NMI: Parity Check Error" consistently places in first position in Google on search terms of "NMI Parity Check", "Parity Check error", etc. (you get the idea), and I get quite a bit of email from random strangers, who have found the page and are looking for help.

The cited article above stresses that blogging for dollars should only be attempted if the topic you write about is reasonably narrow. The NMI Parity Check subject certainly is just that - ask anyone who has wrestled with that error and they'll tell you that there is virtually no information out there on the Net about it (which I guess would explain why my page rates so high...).

As suggested in the article, I went ahead and signed up with Google's Adsense program which pays you a few cents every time a reader clicks through on an ad. While I'm not particularly fond of advertising on personal websites (people, please stop putting those horrible blinking neon ads up!), I was pleasantly surprised to find Google's text ads to be as elegant and understated as ads can possibly be.

24 hours after putting them up (and I refrained from placing any ads on my blog homepage as y'all can tell), I remembered to check my Adsense account - and looky there! I'd made $3.24! With an average click-through rate of 4.5 percent! And all that without having to lift a finger. Zero-effort money is of course always the best.

Encouraged, I decided to do a little grassroots marketing for the site, and put a short note about my resource page into some newsgroups where the Parity Check error had been discussed. The next day, my Google stats told me that traffic on the page had gone up nearly 400 percent!

And yet - my click-through rate was exactly 0.00 percent.

What is happening? Are the ads not interesting? Is the placement not obvious enough? Is the experiment a failure?

I'm afraid it's too early to tell. But input from any alert reader is most welcome...