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Notes on software and processes for collecting, analyzing and acting on data |
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Photography and Deciding: Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the term "the decisive moment". He thought of photography as a tool to live in the world, (more . . .) About this siteSyndication available
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If you photograph enough you end up with a lot of images. This is the story of how I've treated and mistreated my image archives over the years. The trail leads to some current projects here. I started taking photography seriously during my MD/PhD training. In a neuroanatomy lab in the early 80's, you learned your way around the darkroom in order to publish photomicrographs. With a well outfitted darkroom, it was natural to start taking art photographs. I still have the Minolta SRT 200 that served me during those years. Early on, I developed a simple chronological filing system for negatives. Each roll has been year then roll number for the year. When I worked in the darkroom, the contact sheet and some of the proof enlargements would have the roll number in pencil on the back. The physical images led me back to the negative if I ever wanted to reprint from the negative. When I began research again during my residency, the darkroom wasn't as well set up and I stopped shooting seriously. I had a point and shoot and the color negative went to the local labs. The prints (4x6) went into an album. Unfortunately almost all of the negatives from this period were tossed. It was Phil Greenspun and his Photo.net site that showed me how digital technology could not only give my darkroom back, but would actually allowing me to work in color for the first time and publish my work on the web. Phil also showed me that the point and shoot was producing photographs that could be compared with my old SLR. When Dave Winer began his great experiment, editthispage, where he set up his Frontier management system and gave out free sites using Manila. I started getting negatives scanned to PhotoCD for the net. I still maintain my site, On Deciding . . . Better four years later. Roman wall with shadow was the first image I posted there, from my first PhotoCD. I shot a lot of negative film, using Ofoto for developing and low res scans. I created a photoessay about our Newfoundland trip in the summer of 2001. Over the last 6 months, I've started shooting a lot more and I'm shooting slide film. I've got a couple of Photo CDs filled, with lots of rolls waiting to be scanned. My chronological filing of negatives continues, with Ofoto as the reference. The slides get edited down so that there are a few pages of keepers, put chronologically in a binder. Put them on the light box and the images are there. Now with the scanner and my increased involvement I need a system to manage the link between the film source and the digital versions. I've got scans and versions of scans scattered across CDs, two computers and group of servers. The consensus seems to be that files need to start in a simple directory system. Phil Greenspun used PCD1234 as he was saving a few rolls to a PhotoCD. If you're backing up to CD, then CD0001 would work. iPhoto creates a folder for every day you import an image. However, dealing with text files, Blosxom doesn't do this. Everything is put into category files. They can be displayed by date easily enough because the filesystem tracks the date. I'm thinking that the scan's file name has to contain its link back to the negative, perhaps in the form of year.roll.exposure.. This means that scans can go into subject folders with names and be pulled out by date or sorted by the roll information embedded in their name. Special use versions of the scans need to be accounted for. There are the original files (PCD,TIFF or PSD depending on source) and then there are the various size jpegs and thumbnails for the web. It seems that this has usually been addressed by a folder inside the scan folder that contains the modified files with the same name, different path. |
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Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov |