Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Value of Post Production

I've just posted over at my agency's blog - Black Star Rising, an article on the Value of Post-Production, a little insight into what I charge, and so on, as promised in an earlier post this week Cost Justification Time.

Long gone are the days where we made the last frame, and sent it to the lab via courier, and it returned to show us the glory of our work (or where we’d made a disasterous error.) Yet, this “ship and forget” system meant more time shooting, doing what we love (and hopefully are most talented at.)

Today, a photographer’s time is spent far differently. The biggest leech of our creative time is that of post-production. The time from final capture, to ingest, process from raw to TIF/JPEG/DNG and the necessary noise reduction, metadata application, and proper redundant archiving.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This weekend I'm going to a beautiful hotel/castle in the Scottish Highlands (where I live) to do portraits and group shots of six teenage girls. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun.

But the part of the job that I'm looking forward to most is processing the photos. That's the part I'm best at, it's the time when the photos really become something special.

When the girls see the out-of-camera shots on my laptop I'm sure they'll be delighted with them, but when they see the finished prints they'll be blown away.

Unknown said...

The parallels between our professions are ever increasing.

In the days before the computers, the process of architectural design was continuous, from the first napkin sketch to the final working drawings. Today, the process is about 10% design, and 90% "post production" work of codes, working drawings, and related technical and (sigh) legal work that must be done.

I am having a hard time believing that i am old enough to romanticize the past, but I truly miss "drawing by hand". Do you ever miss your ship and forget process?

Anonymous said...

I was wondering why putting an image onto an FTP site is $75 per. Does this line item include more than just copying the file that would be on the CD-ROM onto an FTP site and sending out the location? This is the type of thing where it would appear that the setup time is practically the same for 1 as for 100 coming from the CD, so I would expect to see a high cost for the first image, but then far lower costs for each additional image.

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