Ron Shoots

I’m in Charlotte for the day before heading towards Florida for 3 days of stock industry meetings in Key West and then a few days of production in the Miami area. Worked with our awesome digital team on color today. We look at images on calibrated monitors and compare to the laptop I use while shooting on location. With digital and using FlexColor with the Hasselblad H2D-39 camera, the process can start from the time of capture. We’re always trying to improve our workflow so we can spend the maximum brain time being creative.

Fun = creativity = great images!

And the creativity was flowing today if the amount of laughter is any indication! I’m a firm believer that having fun at work and during shoots optimizes creativity.

Here’s what the studio part of the studio looks like:

The quantum leap in connectivity over the past few years is amazing. I remember reading, and being profoundly affected, by a 1995 book “On Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte. My take-away premise at that time was if your business can be digital then it should be digital. In 1995, the internet was only a few years old and most of us connected via dial-up. I remember asking Rob Norris, a much more tech-savvy guy than me, what was this “WWW” thing? Photography, of course, could easily be an entirely digital process. In fact, our company had just begun to experiment with digital the previous year. Reading the book accelerated my enthusiasm for transforming our studio.

Today, jets really don’t travel much faster, but the data sure does. I’m at the DFW airport, checking email and updating this blog on a high-speed T-Mobile wireless connection. If I wanted, I could have a 50Mb file on my laptop in 13 minutes. I left Maui 7 hours ago, and I’ll be at our Charlotte, NC studio in another 2 hours.

Our studio now, and for the last 6 or 7 years, has been 100% digital. F-I-L-M is a 4-letter word. Sometimes we also have 4-letter words for digital, but those days are now few and far between. Computers rarely crash and software tends to work most of the time. Yes, hard drives still fail but now we have a solid back-up process so our workflow hits nothing more than a small speed bump.

Digital has completed transformed the stock photo business and the rate of change is growing as high resolution cameras and high speed connections are now available to any aspiring photographer anywhere in the world.

Today, almost 12 years after “On Being Digital” was published, 80+ million people have a MySpace page and 70,000 new blogs are created every day. We rarely buy software in a box and transfer gigabytes without a second thought.

Can’t wait to see what’s next!

Just received an email from OtterBox- they are replacing our laptop case for free! Read the “Real World Product Testing” post about how we backed over our laptop with our 9,000 lb Ford Excursion last week.

I sent a note over the weekend to their customer service team regarding our mishap. While OtterBox has a lifetime guarantee if anything goes wrong with their products, but the warranty certainly doesn’t cover this type of incident.

Many thanks to OtterBox and their customer team! Check out their cool products at www.otterbox.com.

Our days start early, often when it’s still dark. We loaded the truck and began backing out of the parking lot when the front tire of our 9,000 lb Ford Excursion bumped over something. Momentary horror set in as my assistant and I looked at each other and simultaneously said “What was that!?” and perhaps a few forgettable phrases. Getting out of the truck, we realized the laptop case had been left next to the front tire and we had just backed over our brand new Apple 2.0Ghz laptop!

Fortunately, our laptop was protected by an OtterBox case. The side of the case was crushed, totally destroyed. Nestled inside was our laptop, safe and sound. Not a scratch! I touched the return key and the laptop sprung to life. Yes, we did some real world testing for OtterBox! Their web site says you can stand on the case, but never did I think that we would run over the case with the truck!

We’ll be ordering a replacement. If you plan on running over your laptop, you might want to check out an OtterBox at www.otterbox.com.

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Why did this happen? We broke one of our cardinal rules that we call the “idiot check” which is the last look around to make sure we haven’t forgotten something at a location, left something sitting outside the truck or anything else really dumb that can happen. It doesn’t matter if its 5:30am or you’re worn out from shooting all day- a last minute check can make all the difference in the world. You can be sure we look everywhere 3 times now!

Here’s a snapshot of my studio on the road. I’m shooting with a Hasselblad H2D-39 camera which creates magnificent 39 megapixel files. The camera works best when tethered to a computer, or where files can be quickly downloaded and evaluated. Every click creates 80Mb of data! The cool part is you can set up the FlexColor application to make color adjustments on the fly so incoming files are automatically color-corrected. (Thanks to the fine RCS digital folks for figuring this out!) So I don’t really have a truck, I have a four-wheel drive firewire port!

The GPS gizmos are for collecting trackpoints during the day. We then download a GPX file and mash the data with the images based on image capture time for accurate keywording.