8thcross Photography

Every once in a while, some­thing comes along that rev­o­lu­tion­izes things. I think Drop­box fits this category.

My men­tor, Nancy Ori had an assign­ment to shoot hun­dreds of wine bot­tles for a prod­uct cat­a­log. As we started dis­cussing on how to go about doing this, we came up the fol­low­ing scenario:

1. It was deter­mined to setup the “set” down­stairs for sev­eral rea­sons (includ­ing trans­port­ing hun­dreds of expen­sive liquor bot­tles was not a good idea). The first task of course is to shoot the images with the cam­era. In this case, it was a Nikon D700 and 55mm macro lens, setup on a tripod.
2. Once enough shots had been taken or when card is full, the images would then have to be trans­ferred on to the stu­dio com­puter upstairs run­ning Aper­ture (or store them in a Wolver­ine device until later) . If shoot­ing teth­ered, there is a need to trans­fer the images stored in the net­book to the upstairs com­puter (via an exter­nal disk). Either way, there is a man­ual need to get the images off the cam­era to the upstairs computer.
3. Like all glass projects, this project requires retouch­ing (more about this in a later post). The idea was to have the retoucher(s) work on images on-site in the stu­dio upstairs. Those that can­not be com­pleted — the retoucher can copy on to a thumb drive or hard disk to work on them remotely on their per­sonal machines. All mas­ters to be stored back on the mas­ter stu­dio com­puter upstairs.
4. When and as images are ready to be shared with client, send images via email or one of the sev­eral dif­fer­ent options — FTP, web­site, web host­ing ser­vices, spe­cial­ized pho­tog­ra­phy sites (Pho­to­shel­ter, Smug­mug etc) etc.

As we started think­ing about this, we hit upon the idea of shoot­ing teth­ered and directly sav­ing images on the Drop­box folder.  A few thoughts on how this new process can ben­e­fit us:

• No need to wait until CF card is full, No need to run upstairs to trans­fer images back and forth b/w com­put­ers and cam­era. This alone is a huge time and effort savings…measurable in days!
• Client deliv­ery is easy and seam­less to man­age. Each retoucher as they fin­ish their work, sim­ply upload their final flat­tened images to the drop­box folder “client”,and be done with it. As it gets processed, it gets deliv­ered to the client in real time! The fact that it gets pushed down to the client’s com­puter directly is a huge plus as well. The clients don’t need to sit and wait to down­load their images. It is just there on their com­puter when they are ready to view them.
• Retouch­ers can be remote — any­where in the world and will get the images within min­utes of shoot­ing! No need to wait until CF cards fills up…If you are one of those wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phers who are look­ing into out­sourc­ing your post pro­cess­ing (An upcom­ing mar­ket –and already avail­able as ser­vice from sev­eral off­shore com­pa­nies, quite cheap as well), imag­ine shoot­ing your wed­ding and com­ing back home or stu­dio to an already “prepped” and “almost devel­oped” set of images back on your home/studio computer!

A few not so obvi­ous ben­e­fits of the new process:

• We have plenty of back­ups! The orig­i­nals as they are cap­tured from NKRe­mote are stored on the net­book. This then gets repli­cated to drop­box “cloud” (2nd copy), then on to all the com­put­ers con­nected to this drop­box folder (Upstairs stu­dio com­puter and the 2 retouchers’s machines). All hap­pen­ing within min­utes too!
• A use of a free tool such as All­way­sync, allows us to auto­mat­i­cally make a copy of the orig­i­nal image into the “Mas­ter” folder as it gets saved from by NKRe­mote. This ensures that no human hands touch the orig­i­nal fold­ers — there­fore less mistakes!

Here is how our work­flow design looks like:

There will be a sep­a­rate post on shoot­ing liquor and wine bot­tles, which was quite an expe­ri­ence all by  itself.

The cam­era is teth­ered to a MSI net­book run­ning Win­dows XP. For remote cam­era con­trol, it runs Breeze System’s NKRe­mote.  We selected this prod­uct over Nikon’s own Cam­era Con­trol Pro soft­ware because of the addi­tional cam­era con­trol ben­e­fits that NKRe­mote pro­vides over Nikon’s soft­ware (such as Focus stack­ing, HDR shoot­ing etc).

After using the sys­tem for a few days, we have found it to be sta­ble enough to use for all new productions.