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Digital Workflow Seminar Highlights Evolving Technologies and Processes for Unit Still Shooters and Publicists
By Jon Silberg |
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As part of the Guild's ongoing efforts in education and training, the Stills branch presented a digital workflow seminar (April 27, 2008), targeted at both unit photographers and publicists, to review key points about what happens to digital photographs after they're taken. For many photographers, particularly those who switched to digital cameras after years or even decades of shooting film, the information served an essential purpose, if not a necessary professional goal: while photographers are typically not responsible for processing, converting or editing their RAW files, consequences may follow if they don't know how to communicate with the people that do. Likewise, the attending photo publicists were able to come away from the event with an expanded sense of the technical and economic issues unit photographers face and, during the “speed dating” portion of the day, with some new talent to add to the pool.
"The technology to both shoot and manage the workflow is constantly changing," said Local 600 Unit Photographer Kim Gottlieb-Walker, organizer of the event. "We had a representative from Nikon talk about their newest camera, the Nikon D3, and we learned about the latest technology from Adobe Lightroom (V 1.4.1 and Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta). We talked about the challenges of archiving digital images, and even presented a 'speed dating' session with photo publicists. They saw a large number of portfolios in a short time to give advice and provide more resources."
ICG Magazine spoke with some of the people who participated in the event to distill the pressing issues related to unit publicity and photography. First and foremost, the question of whether a still photographer really needs to shoot digitally was forever put to rest. "There is no transition anymore," says Greg Dyro, director of the Warner Bros. Photo Lab. "There is no movement. This is it. If you didn't get onboard a couple of years ago then you're on the dock and the boat's left."
Dyro says his lab at Warner’s has the capability to process negative film but it’s not receiving any. “The last rolls of negative we processed were for underwater shots on Poseidon (released in May 2006),” he notes. “And that was because the underwater unit photographer, Richard Foreman, only had an underwater housing for his 35mm camera, and not his digital camera. We've also done some work with Panorama photography and a little bit of medium format film for gallery shoots. But even that's almost entirely digital. It's been more than two years since we processed a single roll of reversal film. The only scanning we do is for archival."
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That’s not to say that Warner Bros. Photo Lab and other Local 600 labs are no longer processing images. An important fact that a lot of people, even photographers, aren't quite clear about is that RAW images out of the camera - the kind still photographers are expected to shoot for feature film and some TV work - require processing before they are in a universal format, such as TIFF or JPEG. Those RAW file formats, proprietary to specific camera manufacturers and often different from camera to camera within a manufacturer's line, need to be opened through one of several RAW converters on the market. They must be interpreted in terms of color and contrast before being stored in a format that can go to talent for approvals and to news outlets and advertising agencies.
This work used to be done as photochemical, and then digital printing of images that started out on film, and now it must be done on digital images, especially with the many different RAW file formats now available. It's important for productions and Guild photographers alike to understand that this kind of processing of images - labeling, and certainly retouching and manipulating stills - is the contractual domain of Guild photo labs and not something with which the photographer is typically involved.
Adobe Lightroom has become a key workflow tool. It allows still photographers to make general sorts of non-destructive corrections to batches of photos and send these to the photo lab, much like the methods used by DPs to suggest overall looks and biases to dailies colorists. "It can help the photographer maintain a look," says Dyro. "We’ll get the images and see this blue cast and want to take it out [in the processing]. But if the photographer has used a program like Lightroom to communicate, 'No, the cinematographer and director intended to make this look very blue and sterile,' then we can do a better job processing the RAW files." [Dyro also singled out Adobe’s new DNG file format, an attempt by the San Jose-based company to have a universal RAW format for archival purposes. He said not everyone is onboard, but Dyro’s Warner Bros. lab has embraced DNG.]
Photographer and Adobe-certified Photoshop instructor Peter “Hopper” Stone prefaced his remarks at the event with an important caveat. "Just about everything I said concerned things you are not supposed to do as a unit photographer," Stone says he cautioned. "We don't own the work. We aren't supposed to handle it or process it. Many photographers simply shoot and turn over their (memory) cards to the lab. So most of what I said functioned as a service to photographers to think about that portion of their practice that isn't unit photography."
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That said, Stone says he feels it's important, even for unit photographers who learned their craft in the photochemical era, to have a handle on the digital workflow. And even if a photographer is not going near a RAW processor such as Adobe Raw, they may still want to take advantage of the ability to sort or edit what they turn in. For this work Stone generally uses a $150 piece of software called Photo Mechanic, which doesn't offer quite as many options as more broad (some would say cumbersome) photo editing packages like Aperture 2 from Apple Inc. But Photo Mechanic does specific tasks - sorting, naming, and organizing - quickly and efficiently. Unit photographers usually do that before they turn in their images, though Stone warns that many photo publicists do not want photographers to edit their work at all. "We can all be insecure sometimes," Stone says, "and maybe we think we'll never work again if we let the photo publicist see we made a mistake. But they're looking at the images in a different way. Maybe the actor's eyes are closed but the body position's good. Maybe the actor on the left is out of focus but they're in focus in the next frame."
And this points to another reason why Stone thinks unit photographers should have an understanding of programs like Photoshop even if they never intend to use it themselves. "Unit photographers need to shoot for the Photoshop process," he says. “Like it or not, most photo editors look at individual frames as elements for a picture that can be constructed in Photoshop and they do not want photographers holding back any frames that might have an arm or a mouth or a clean view of a bookcase in the shot.”
Like everything else, unit photography has been forever altered by digital technology and, Stone observes, it's important for those who have been doing this work for a long time to understand the new paradigms. Shooting digitally, especially in RAW formats, requires some understanding of what can and can't be altered during processing. "You have to be careful of your highlights like you do with slide film," Stone notes. "But you can also recover quite a bit of detail from a RAW image. You can't depend on what’s on your LCD screen and you shouldn't bet the farm on the histogram either.
"It borderline angers me," he says, "when I meet photographers who say, 'I don't want to learn any of that.' It's like many years ago saying, 'I don't want to learn how to shoot color slides.' Too bad! If I could have made a living shooting black and white negative, I would have. But I couldn't. Today, in this digital world, it’s essential to understand how images are processed and how they're used. It's important to be able to do work that isn't unit photography and to understand what happens to the images you shoot."
The process of approvals or "kills" - a glass-half-full or half-empty way of referring to the images the talent permits to see the light of day - has been rather slow to catch up to the digital realm. In some cases, it still means multiple copies of expensive paper proof sheets going out physically to talent and their reps for consideration. Kevin Matossian, founder and president of PhotoKill Online (www.photokillonline.com), spoke at the event about his service, which works with photo departments and labs taking in images, sorting, tagging and captioning, and then posting watermarked thumbnails online for approvals. The firm has deals with Warner Bros, Sony and 20th Century Fox and works with publicists, producers and photographers to make sure every important piece of data, about every image, follows the image through the process. He says the system is popular with younger actors, used to looking at pictures almost exclusively on computer monitors, as well as veteran performers who appreciate the efficiency and the environmental benefits of not using paper.
Even as technology continues to change, the value of good unit photography remains constant. The savvy directors, producers and executives, Greg Dyro points out, understand how powerful good still photography is in selling a movie. “The director and cinematographer are doing motion but the still photographer has to capture the image that can convey something about the entire movie in one frame,” says Dyro. “Nine times out of ten, the stills that become the key images from a film are not from any camera angle that made it into the final cut of the movie. They may not even be from a scene as it was shot and yet they still capture the essence of that film better than any other promotional tool."
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