 |
November 21, 2009 |
  |
Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
|
|
Articles |
|
TGP: Not every kid grows up with National Geographic photographers hanging around the house. How did that happen? Peter Krogh: It really had to do with belonging to a family of lifelong, multigenerational Washingtonians. National Geographic is based in Washington, and when you grow up in a town where a particular company has its headquarters, you’re likely to meet some of the people who work there. These were just the people I was lucky enough to meet across the family dinner table.   TGP: Were those the glory days of the Geographic? Peter Krogh: There was something special about the staff Bob Gilka put together, and the way he ran it. The staff has always been intensely competitive with each other for the best assignments (back when there really was a staff). But there was also a very collegial atmosphere in those days. I didn't have much interaction with the magazine, other than as a star-struck kid coming to the place every now and then. But I could tell what a wonderful group of people those guys were. I had a sense of the kind of support they had from the magazine and the kind of access they were granted by the rest of the world. Of course, I missed out on it. I was a contract photographer in the Geographic’s studio for about a year and that was really an eye-opening experience. It certainly gave me great insight into how the place worked. But being in the studio is a different animal from doing magazine stories.  TGP: You grew up with film and darkrooms. When did you go digital, and what were your concerns when you made the transition? Peter Krogh: I did a couple of contracts with digital cameras in the late 1990s but didn’t feel that digital was ready for me, or that I was ready for it. The big change was around 2002 when they released the Nikon D10, which was the first affordable, high-quality DSLR. Once I got hold of the D10, I went totally digital within the space of about a month. Just entirely stop shooting film in about 30 days. And as soon as I went digital, I became intensely interested in taking care of my images and making sure that they were preserved as long as possible. I’ve always felt that I’m building a body of work that has long-term value, and I became kind of worried about image preservation in the digital world. Certainly, there are lots of problems with storing film. It can get lost or eaten by mold while sitting in filing cabinets, or disappear in lots of other ways. But at least you have the illusion of permanence from having a physical object to hold. I didn't have the same feeling of permanence with digital. I was also afraid of not being able to find pictures. Not that they might be lost or wiped out or that the media might fail, but that they simply might be not findable. So I started working on those issues, which ultimately led me to write The DAM Book about digital asset management.  Peter Krogh: With film, you had to have the camera loaded with the right kind of film for the lighting conditions. Otherwise, it might be nearly impossible to make corrections in post processing. Digital cameras let you make adjustments that solve the whole white balance problem. Another big difference with digital is the way you shoot. When I go back and look at my black-and-white work, I’m amazed at how many situations I’d put on one roll, and how few images I shot of any particular subject. I remember being in situations that I thought were great, and having the impression that I shot the hell out of them but when I went back and looked, I only had two or three frames. With digital, I'm not even warmed up till the tenth or 15th frame. In a situation where people are moving fast, you can shoot until you’ve got it. Even if it’s low-percentage shooting With film, you only have 36 frames in the camera. Then you’d better have another body loaded and ready to go or the moment is broken.  TGP: You think that the software for optimizing, organizing and preserving digital images still has some distance to go before it deserves to be called photographer-friendly. What are the problems? In the more modern photography tools like Lightroom or Capture One, you see tools that are more geared towards what a photographer wants to do. You have highlights and shadows. You have color tools that are about, well, I want to make the blues more red or green or brighter or darker or more saturated. It's more about photography than about pushing around the numbers. That’s where we’re headed. Instead of having to push stuff around a graph, you go into this thing that has a light-table metaphor and you push around color and brightness the way a photographer thinks about them.  Peter Krogh: It was my first time although I got to go back again later in the summer for three weeks entirely by coincidence. An organization called African Media Online asked me back to teach workshops. Their goal is to help historically underprivileged Africans and women get into the global information marketplace doing photography. Their tagline is: Africans Telling Africa’s Story. The idea is to tell a different story of Africa than you normally find in the mainstream media. It was a very rewarding couple of weeks for me, teaching these people about best practices and working with images. Actually, I was on the phone with Africa earlier today, judging a competition of images from people who went through the program. A lot of them learned really well. My parents made their first trip to Africa many years ago with Bill and Lucy Garrett of National Geographic. While they were there, they met Franz Lanting on one of his first African assignments for the magazine. They fell in love with Africa and have been back a number of times and recently took the whole family.  The first thing that struck me was that there was no billing consistency, no consistency in terminology. There was, and there still is, no consistency in business practices. So within the relatively severe limits of what a trade association of independent businesses can do without violating anti-trust laws, we came up with some ideas about how to promote profitable business practices in the digital age. We got quite a bit of traction in terms of how to bill for the time and expense that digital entails. Then we came up with consistent terminology and put the information out there, and a lot of that has become the standard way that people talk about stuff now.  TGP: What were some of the challenges and some of your recommendations? Peter Krogh: The challenges are that professionals face a huge amount of expense to buy the equipment necessary to go digital, and invest a huge amount of time learning how to use the equipment and software. All that is in addition to the huge amount of time you spend in actually doing the work In the film days, a lot of that was included in film and processing charges. When people went digital, clients said, ‘Well, it’s all digital, so it should be free.’ That’s a misconception, and we came up with ideas to correct it. We ended up highlighting a reasonable approach for all parties concerned. We said there was a capture charge that was fairly equivalent to the film and processing charge. The capture charge covers the equipment and hard drive space you had to buy as well as the time to process the images. After a couple of years, we could look back and see that the basic economics of digital were not all that different from the cost for film and processing. When I stopped shooting film, I was charging about 35 bucks a roll for 35mm film, and my digital capture charges are similar to that now—about $1,000 for 1,000 processed and optimized images delivered in a web gallery. My fee is on top of that, and it covers the time to shoot the picture and the intended usage of the images. Some people use the term day rate but that's antiquated. The more current-thinking photographers prefer the term ‘creative fee.’ On top of that are production charges and retouching. Sometimes the image compositing and retouching can be more than the creative fee for the entire shoot. For retouching, I work with a photographer who started out as my assistant and now shoots a lot himself. Darren has always been digital so he handles quite a bit of that work in the studio. Oftentimes, he’ll do most everything that has to be done in postproduction. That actually makes it fairly easy for me to insist on billing production charges because I have to pay somebody else to go to do it. Darren has become an invaluable part of the business. It’s gotten more challenging as he starts to shoot more and more of his own jobs but so far, we've been able to make it work. Any experienced photographer who does a lot of digital work should try to find somebody who can do their production on a regular basis. That frees the photographer to go out and do the things he should be doing, such as shooting jobs or selling his services.  TGP: So kind of work is your studio doing these days? Peter Krogh: The work of the studio now is more oriented towards writing, testing, research and development, lecturing, workshops and stuff like that. Which is not to say that we’re not doing photography projects. We've had a couple of good ones this year, but this other stuff has really taken off and become fairly all-consuming in terms of the requests that are coming my way. 
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
© 2002 - 2009 Take Great Pictures |
|||||||||||||||||||||
