"As part of the process of terminating the business operations of Digital Railroad, Diablo Management Group has informed PhotoShelter of their intent to shut down the DRR site as early as 11:59PM, PST, on Friday October 31. After this point, it is very likely that all the images located on the Digital Railroad servers could be permanently inaccessible. Given the strong possibility of this event, PhotoShelter, on its own initiative, is strongly suggesting that customers migrate their files from Digital Railroad immediately. Digital Railroad, at the present time, has no plans or resources to accomplish this task."

Full Press Release here.

We have been trying to work along side former DRR employees to bring about a graceful closure to the impending liquidation. I've spoken to their liquidation firm and their bank, and we've tried to have a little more clarity around the situation. We've been trading e-mails and phone calls with everyone and their mother. We've fielded phone calls from photographers literally in tears -- from students to some of the biggest names in the industry. The whole thing is sickening.

There will obviously be time to deconstruct everything, but right now, we only have one concern: to notify as many affected photographers as possible. We anecdotally know that some portion of DRR users are traveling and haven't even heard that the company is liquidating and that their files might be gone forever. We do not have a full list of DRR users, and as of this posting, we've been unable to negotiate access to the user list.

PLEASE HELP US NOTIFY THEM TO REMOVE THEIR FILES IMMEDIATELY.

It doesn't matter where they move them. They just need to move them. Blog, e-mail, phone and shout to them. If you want to help the industry, then help us spread the word to our colleagues.

I am honestly shocked at the rapid pace at which things have unfurled on the Digital Railroad front. We have been trying to assist hundreds of photographers since DRR notified their customers that they would be shutting down within 24 hours. From what we understand there is a single FTP server that is handling all outbound requests, and it is under heavy load. People are literally waiting for hours to transfer their files. But you should keep trying.

Here is what we know.

Digital Railroad was taken over by a liquidation firm a few weeks ago. The liquidation firm's goal is to find a buyer or liquidate the company. It is not in their best interest to drag the process out because the company simply incurs more debt, and it makes it increasingly more difficult to unwind the company. For example, if you keep the company up and running another month, but don't pay the server hosting bill, then the server company might refuse to give you your hardware until you pay the bill (that is one less asset to liquidate). Then there is the possibility that they sue you for unpaid bills, etc, etc.

The staff of DRR that you probably know has no control of the company. You might be inclined to point a finger at them, but insofar as the events of the past 2 weeks are concerned, the staff had no ability to alter the outcome after the liquidation company came on board. Was there prior mismanagement that led to this outcome? We have no purview into the inner workings of the company. I will say that the economy has adversely affected the way that entrepreneurships operate. Deals that might have existed 6 weeks ago, could have evaporated 5 weeks ago. I'm certainly not defending the outcome, but I do know that there are individuals at Digital Railroad who are personally very concerned with the welfare of their customers, and it's beyond their reach to help them at this point.

Many people have let us know that they recently renewed their accounts with DRR, or made a sale through their Marketplace. It is very unlikely that you will be able to recover anything from Digital Railroad. When a company undergoes liquidation, there is an order of preference to the liquidation proceeds. Customers happen to rank very near the bottom of that preference list. You will likely have no recourse.

On October 21, we extended a special offer to DRR customers, and since then we have been trying to migrate as many users and images as possible from that platform to the PhotoShelter Personal Archive. However, at this point, we are at the mercy of the liquidation firm. We are trying to see if we can negotiate a way for people to get their files off, but we have no sense right now as to whether it will actually end in a positive outcome.

Given the circumstances and the rapid introduction of PhotoShelter to so many photographers, we have decided to have an "open house" at our offices on Thursday to walk people through the product and give you an opportunity to meet our staff face to face.

PhotoShelter Open House
33 Union Square West
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003
2pm - 7pm
THURSDAY 10/30/2008

We really hope for the best outcome for all the photographers affected by this event. We will do our very best to support the community through this turbulent time. We hope that you will consider the PhotoShelter Personal Archive moving forward.

UPDATE: As of 00:36 EST, DRR stopped allowing image transfers out of their system, instead transferring a small JPG that says "Image Unavailable."

UPDATE 2: Around 1:30pm EST, FTP of images was restored. We are unsure how long this will be available.

PDN's Daryl Lang did a little piece on our new FTP & Embeddable Galleries features:




And I'm happy to report that the Super FTP option is now available to all Standard and Pro account holders. Here's a brief video on how it works:




Here are a few potential use cases for this feature:

Uploading to your own account via FTP:
The standard upload mechanisms for PhotoShelter (e.g. Upload through the web, Photo Mechanic, Aperture, Lightroom, etc) upload and process the image in real time. We do this, in part, so that you can see any errors with the files as they go up. The downside to this mechanism is that it adds a few seconds to each image as you are uploading.

The FTP option, by contrast, stores all the images on an FTP server, and as the images are processed, they are systematically removed from your FTP and added into your archive. So for large transfers, this should be a faster way to move images up to your server.

This is also the mechanism that many Digital Railroad customers are using to migrate their archives to PhotoShelter.

Working with a retoucher
The PhotoShelter inbound FTP works differently than most systems in that we've decoupled it from your normal PhotoShelter login/password for security reasons. A by-product of this separation is that you can set up multiple users who have FTP access into your account. You determine who they are, which folder they can upload into, and when their access is cut off.

If you send a 20MB file to a retoucher, you can set him/her up with FTP access to a "retoucher" folder. They might send you a 200MB file back. This is a very easy and direct way to work. After you've received the file, deactivate their account until you need them again.

Working remotely with an art director
By setting up FTP directly into a gallery, you can work with a remote team. If you shoot tethered or with a WiFi transmitter, you can have the images FTPd into a gallery. The gallery could be password protected and you could set-up high-resolution download capability with your art director ahead of time. As the shoot progresses, the art director could be viewing the take remotely, and then pull down high-resolution files of only the images they are interested in. If you grant permission to a retoucher simultaneously, the entire team could be working together in real-time, and eliminating a lot of the transfer issues that have plagued creative teams in the past.

Shooting a Wedding or Event
I've talked to a number of wedding shooters who have started bringing LCD screens with them to the event to show images. But more often than not, they have a digital assistant who is ingests cards manually, does a quick edit, imports into a photo application and then displays them on the screen. We like the idea of going straight from the camera into a gallery in your archive. This eliminates the need to upload later, and gives you e-commerce capability from the moment that the images are first viewed.

The ability for an individual to effectively work as their own wire service is a compelling advantage in the information age.

How will you use the Super FTP? Let us know.

Thanks to everyone who has stopped by the PhotoShelter booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. We've been overwhelmed with the response to our new release, and have signed up a bunch of people on the show floor. The website customization templates have made it very easy for people to set up their websites while we're talking to them.

If you haven't seen any pictures yet, here's a few that we shot live (and displayed with our embeddable gallery function -- you can grab this gallery into your blog too by clicking the up-arrow in the lower right corner):




Daryl Lang from PDN stopped by to see what was up and we told him about our new embeddable galleries, and Super FTP option, and demonstrated it to him while he was interviewing us.




If you missed my last entry, what we did was take a Nikon D3 and WT-4 wireless transmitter that Mark Suban from Nikon Professional Services lent me. I set up the WT-4 to connect to the my PhotoShelter FTP site, and configured it to go straight into a gallery, which I made public in advance. So as I was being interviewed, I took a photo of Daryl (and Grover), that appeared on the screen about 15 seconds later.

This, of course, is a whimsical application, and not really that applicable to most situations, but I can definitely see a commercial shoot where the art director is in a different city reviewing images remotely, and downloading images that he/she is interested in. And once the art director makes the selection, a retoucher could grab the high-res file and start work immediately. A wedding shooter could set up an LCD screen and display images live with a watermark that directs people back to his/her website.

And of course, when it's all done, I can use the single image embed to have the image spread virally. You'll notice the little "BUY" icon in the lower right. That's because I priced the image for Electronic Personal Use -- you know, in case Grover's mom wants to use it as a screen saver.

I haven't had a lot of time to walk around, but I did get to see a little bit of John Harrington's presentation over at the liveBooks site and bumped into founder Michael Costuros and CEO Andy Patrick. And we've had a nice stream of liveBooks users asking about how they can integrate their portfolio sites with PhotoShelter like Stacy Bass (who's birthday is on Halloween!).


My lunch.

I had a nice chat with Dan Heller, with whom I've traded some thoughts via email over the years. Other photo folk that stopped by included Dave Einsel, Michael Grecco, Jeff Sedlik (UsePLUS), David Riecks (Controlled Vocabulary), Jim Heiser (Apple), Mike Brice, Louie Palu, Daniel Cox, Andy Biggs, Fiona Aboud, Jeff Spielman, Todd Bissonette, Dan Murdoch, Kim Bova, Peter Koval, Rob White, Carl Santoro, Lawrence Maskin, Ramin Talaie, Chris Sorenson, Veronica Lukasova, Sharon Brooks, James Escher and many more!

Cradoc also provided some great discounts on fotoQuote software, so stop by the booth to pick up a coupon.

See ya tomorrow!

P.S. A lot of people have been asking us how they can quickly transact a sale in PhotoShelter. We put together a quick video to show you the "Instant Sale" feature:

You might have already seen the hubbub around our PhotoShelter Personal Archive 2.0 release. It's hard to believe that you could upload images, set up e-commerce, price images, and set up a digital storefront website in under five minutes.



You might have also heard about our offer to Digital Railroad users who are concerned about their business continuity.

Well, we have one more trick up our sleeve for the PhotoPlus Expo 2008.

When we were discussing how to move over Digital Railroad users, we realized that we needed a way for those users to FTP images into their PhotoShelter account to avoid the dreaded re-upload. So our developers created a mechanism to handle in-bound FTP with all the security precautions that you would expect from PhotoShelter.

Then the developers figured that this ability would be great for any event shooter or photojournalist who was working a live event and perhaps needed to move images very quickly to their photo editors or end clients. They also figured that a small agency might want to be able to have multiple photographers upload images directly into their account. The same might be true of a wedding photographer who hires a second shooter, and wants that person to upload images without giving them full access to their account.

So instead of having a very rigid system of FTP access, our developers created a system whereby you could create multiple users who are allowed to FTP into your account. You can activate them or deactivate them at will to prevent someone from "spamming" you and overwhelming your storage quota.

As if that wasn't enough, the developers said that it was a pain in the butt to upload these live images into the archive, and then have to take another step to move them into a gallery. So they created a way to FTP directly into a gallery. Think about this. Now, an individual photographer can act as their own wire service. You could create a gallery in advance, set up high-resolution download permissions, and invite select users. As images are being uploaded from an event, these users could review the images as thumbnails and screen res images, and pull down the high-res images that they want. They wouldn't have to wait for all the high-res images to be transmitted to their site before reviewing them.

We think this is pretty cool.

How cool? Well, after the engineers mentioned this to me, I called up Mark Suban from Nikon Professional Services. He met Grover at the Javitz Center yesterday and handed him a Nikon Wireless Transmitter WT-4. Grover got back to the office and we hooked it up to my Nikon D3. Sam set up the camera to FTP to my PhotoShelter account, and we are using our new embedded galleries below, so you can see a live feed of images we're shooting at the PhotoPlus Expo. We are wirelessly transmitting from my camera to the PhotoShelter FTP site, which is automatically putting it into a gallery, which is embedded in this blog entry.





This feature will be available to all Standard and Pro account holders starting next week. So get ready to start changing the game. (and a total shout out to our tech staff.)

Don't forget, we have some discounts available till the end of the month for the Personal Archive:
Current customers upgrade here.
New customers join here.

A number of Digital Railroad customers have contacted us in light of recent events.

We want to be able to help you with your business continuity. So we've created a special offer for Digital Railroad users only, which provides you with three months of free service as well as a method to FTP your images from DRR to your PhotoShelter account.

Here's the gist of the offer:
- Sign up for an annual PhotoShelter Personal Archive 2.0 account
- Provide us with proof that you're a DRR member
- We will then credit your PhotoShelter account with an additional 3-months free
- We will provide you with FTP instructions on how to move your archive to PhotoShelter
- Read the details here

We are confident that we can provide the same high quality features and service that you were accustomed to at Digital Railroad. And with our 2.0 release, we are confident that we can provide you with a host of new features that are not available elsewhere.

UPDATE: John Harrington has posted a step-by-step guide on setting up your transfer options from Digital Railroad.

-------

Since we released PA 2.0 on Friday night, we've seen a ton of people get up and running with their customized websites in just a few minutes. Here are a handful of our favorites:

Kevin German
http://www.photoshelter.com/c/kgerman



Mike Cavaroc
http://portfolio.cavaroc.com/c/cavaroc




Adrian Young
http://www.photoshelter.com/c/adrianyoung,

With the meltdown of the housing and equity markets, and the general uncertainty with the economy, it seems that we're surrounded by a lot of doom and gloom. A glimmer of hope seems to be in order. So despite the fact that it's a Friday night, I'm throwing caution into the wind and posting about some exciting new changes around here.

Photographers, get ready to FREAK OUT.



PA 2.0 represents a full re-skin of the site, a trophy-case of new features that we developed in direct response to our users' requests, the cheapest/fastest/coolest way to get a personal photography website loaded with e-commerce capabilities (can you say ... website-in-30-seconds-or-less), and some cool new *viral* tools for getting your images for sale all over the place on the web. The forums are back, and our Virtual Agencies are now free!

But before getting into the details of some of my favorite features of PA 2.0, I want to mention a couple of housekeeping items first:

FORUM Q&A - THE ECONOMY, DRR, PSC - BRING IT ON
MONDAY 10/20, 12 NOON EST
First, I know we are all concerned with the current economic climate as a whole, and specifically with the health of the photography category. To help answer any questions about what is going on in the industry and what our position is amidst all of this, my management team and I will be standing by on the Forums for a two hour period this Monday. We welcome all questions and promise to be brutally honest in return. Now is your chance.

Monday Oct 20th, 12 Noon EST. Note that only Personal Archive Basic, Standard & Pro subscribers can contribute forum questions!

I also would like to say publicly and upfront, that we have touched base with the both the management and the investors of Digital Railroad and want to extend to them our fullest support and respect during this very difficult time. We always regarded them as a very capable team with a great community - and considered them to be a partner in moving the industry forward and creating opportunities for independent photographers. We are deeply sorry to see the news of their struggle and wish them the best of luck in the coming weeks.  We're also working on a solution to help facilitate migrations for DRR customers - expect more on this in the coming week.  

RECESSION BUSTER DISCOUNTS
Secondly, many of the most exciting new features of Personal Archive 2.0, will only be available for Standard and Pro subscribers. To help any Starter or Basic account holders upgrade to this new functionality, we are offering steep discounts on the Standard level account.

Standard Account Savings:
1 month free for new monthly subscriptions ($29.99 per month)
20% off new annual subscriptions ($289 per year)

To take advantage of the offer...
Current customers upgrade here.
New customers join here.

A tough economy has everyone fine tuning their businesses. We can help - by providing the tools you need to market your images online.  This offer is good through October 31 - so for a limited time, the extra savings makes it more affordable to achieve greater success online.

Ok, now the goodness....Introducing the PhotoShelter Personal Archive 2.0.
(BTW, on Monday you will each receive a system update email that will walk you through the new Personal Archive features in detail - this is just a preview - and you can log into your accounts now to see it all live.)

For two years fateful years in college, I was a geology & geophysics major, until I realized that I wasn't smart enough. But during that time, I spent a bunch of hours looking through a microscope to view and describe mineral samples. There is an awful lot of interesting stuff to see that can't normally be seen.

So it was very cool to come across a feature on the New York Times about the Nikon International Small World Competition. Who knew such a thing existed?

Eric Hegwer says he is "100% wedding photographer."

He studied Biochemistry, and became an actual real scientist. His love of photography led to shooting weddings for a few friends, and he developed a passion for it. After some time assisting other established wedding photographers, Eric went out on his own.

He's so into it that he applied some of his technical programming skills to create a social networking website for wedding photographers, called the "Social Wedding Network." (Link at the bottom of this story.)

Eric likes to try new things and push his business into new territory. One such recent adjustment to his product line was to make a shift away from selling prints, and more toward the "iTunes Model" of selling images on a per-download basis.

His business has been doing quite well, so I asked if he would be willing to answer my standard nosy questions about his business model, workflow, and the current trends going on in the wedding photo business.

Eric is a very nice guy, and happily agreed. Thanks, Eric.

The New York Times is reporting on a new piece of software developed by Israeli computer scientists that take a photo and make it more attractive based on focus group research they conducted with 68 men and women. The "beautification engine"makes minor adjustments of symmetry, skin tone, and other factors that have been associated with "beauty."

PDN's Daryl Lang covered a very bizarre FOX News broadcast regarding a Newsweek cover during which Republican media commentator, Andrea Tantaros, is incensed that the image of Sarah Palin was not retouched.



For comparison, they include a cover of Barack Obama. FOX anchor Megyn Kelly calls out in disdain, "I mean, come on! They literally put a halo on the guy..." The mock indignation is so played out.

First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this portrait of Palin. She's very attractive, and does not need to be retouched like "a supermodel." I don't think any reasonable person is thinking "Oh my God! I'm changing my vote because she looks like a hot 44 year old woman!" Maybe there's a little snaggle tooth action, but Obama has huge ears. Let's call it a wash.

Second, "put a halo?" Are ya kidding me? It's a shot where his head is partially obscuring the sun. If the implication is that they photoshopped in a halo, then they are flat out wrong. Yes, the editors selected the image, but they are a news organization with an editorial policy regarding manipulation of photos, and neither one of the photos was retouched.

Let's not forget that Newsweek wasn't the publication that made OJ appear darker...

Photography can be social. It can help us remember events in our life that we shared with others. But photography can also be informative, and in the case of photojournalism, often the goal is to be transformative -- i.e. to bring awareness to a social issue that might be flying under the radar.

Kosuke Okahara is a 2006 Eddie Adams Workshop alumnus based in Tokyo who recently covered the trend of "cutting" amongst teenage girls and young women in the society for Time magazine. Japan has a pretty spotty record dealing with their burgeoning social issues that is plaguing a hyper-polite, once dominant economic power that has floundered for many years. Okahara's work is eye-opening and distrubing, and points to the need for better social structures and mental health capabilities within society.

It feels really good to be back working full-time on the PhotoShelter Personal Archive again. It is, and always has been, our core product - it is healthy and strong and there's nothing else like it.

I am actually legitimately excited right now about all the upgrades we are about to inject into the Personal Archive. (That's right! Legitimately excited!) Our engineers are busy putting the finishing touches on things as I type this, and you'll get to see everything for yourself this month, in a few weeks, before the start of PhotoPlus Expo (which starts October 23 - we've got a large booth space -- #1808, so visit us.)

Here are my personal favorite updates:

1) Customization Templates. If you love the power of PhotoShelter's Seamless Customization system, but don't love all that HTML and CSS that comes with it, you're going to love what's coming. The process couldn't be easier and the templates, or "Themes", are nice and clean. The engineers showed it to me in action today, and I can't wait for us to roll this baby out for everyone.

2) Upgrades to the Virtual Agency feature. The Virtual Agency enables a series of independent photographers to "link" their archives together so that they can form a "virtual agency" of their own. The VA is getting an overhaul, will contain a host of new features, and one big huge surprise that I can't mention just yet -- but I am DYING to tell. (This is torture.) Let's just say that I expect people to really love the VA and there won't be any excuse not to use it. :)

3) New PhotoShelter Uploader. What's special about this version is that it allows threading. Translation: No more waiting for through that pesky "Processing Image..." period. Images will just immediately send one after the other without delay - which means even-faster uploads are coming. (Less time uploading means you'll have more time for beer.)

4) Member Forum. You'll finally be able to chat with other PhotoShelter Users right through the member forum. The forum will be broken down into a few different sections, and is similar to the message board we had within the PSC. If you're a fan of forums, but you've only got a free PhotoShelter account, you will be able to read the messages, but you won't be able to post. It will be a place for people to talk about all topics related to the business and art of professional photography.

5) Navigation Improvements. Getting around the site will be quicker, more intuitive, and very simple. Can I get a big "Yay!" for simplicity? Oh yeah.

6) PA Gallery Widget. We created a similar feature within the PSC, and it went over so well that we thought we should make the same thing possible within the PA. This will allow you to take a gallery of images, and create a widget that can be embedded in a website, blog, or even Facebook. You can go totally nuts and create one for every one of your public galleries if you want. Clicking on the widget will take you to the gallery itself within your PhotoShelter Archive. Super cool stuff alert!

We will be showing off these updates, and more, in our booth at PhotoPlus Expo, in New York City. If you do, I'll be happy to show you what I look like when I am "Legitimately Excited.

Have you ever attended a party where there are a handful of photographers mixed in with "normal" (as in non-photo) people, only to see the photographers group into a cluster, talking endlessly about topics only they could understand, and ignoring all the other non-photographers in the process? I see this a lot, and what's interesting to me is how they'll keep on chatting about the same things, over and over, until the beer runs out.

They're usually talking about "the business." Workflow, marketing, philosophy, the state of the industry - all popular topics. The problem with these meetings is that nobody ever writes all that good stuff down. (Which is probably a good thing. It would look weird.)

I thought I would poke my head into the PhotoShelter blog every once in a while, just to see if I could replicate that "party cluster," online and without the beer. This post is the first in a series of interviews and feature stories where I ask other photographers to talk about their workflow, sales and marketing strategies, philosophy and outlook about the industry, and what works and doesn't work from a business perspective.

Jason O. Watson is a Charlottesville, Virginia-based photographer who specializes in sports, action, assignment and travel photography.  His images have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, The Perth (Australia) Sunday Times, The (Portland) Oregonian, Boston Herald, Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Charlottesville Daily Progress, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Jason is successful with his business, so I thought he might be willing to share some of his secrets with the rest of us.  Lucky for us, he did.

First, a disclosure. Bill lives next door to me, as he has for the past 6 years. We are both photographers (although one of us is more accomplished, and I'm not talking about me). We've borrowed equipment from one another before. And we both fulfilled our civic duty by serving on our condo board.

Ok, now the relevant stuff.

I suppose at some point, every photographer goes through a nude phase. Most of the time, the nudes look pretty average. You know, get the girl naked against a black background and some moody lighting and pretend you actually have a vision. But in the end, it's just another average nude photo that no one really wants to look at because it's neither provocative nor interesting.

But when I received a postcard from Bill about his show, Figurations, I thought, "Boy, these are both provocative and interesting."

You know how sometimes you'll shoot a portrait and the person's arm will be hidden behind their back, and someone says, "It looks like they only have one arm!" And you think, "Geez, I'm an idiot. I'm not paying attention and this stuff just happens unintentionally."

Bill does it intentionally.


Photo by Bill Durgin

Photojournalist-extraordinaire, James Nachtwey, was awarded the TED prize last year, and has been working on a project ever since in secret.




""I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about.
I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof
of the power of news photography in the digital age."

All shall be revealed on 10/3....but what could it be?

Guesses:

• The plight of they professional photography industry
• The Nikon D3x
• Sarah Palin's IQ is actually 180

I kid. I'm a kidder. But really, what is it?