Last week, we announced the partnership between GraphPaperPress and PhotoShelter which allows photographers a really easy way to integrate a WordPress blog with PhotoShelter. The benefits of such a system are tremendous: Get the ease of publishing + the SEO juice of a blog combined with the e-commerce and high-res distribution capabilities of PhotoShelter. We're already seeing a bunch of websites appear, and we figured it was time to showcase a handful of them.

LIA BALLENTINE
http://www.liaballentine.com/

Lia has actually been a GraphPaperPress user for several years, and was thrilled to find out about the PhotoShelter integration. She has some fantastic lifestyle imagery with a very contemporary style.

Fifteen years ago, the notion of storing your photos on a computer didn't exist, but since then the archiving of photos has become a major problem for professional photographers and consumers alike - particularly as the resolution of the cameras has increased significantly from the 1.3 megapixel first-generation devices to the 24MP devices of today. It is not unusual to have a single 70MB file.

There are many ways to store photos, ranging from the cheap to the expensive; the limited to the robust. In this article, we're only going to look at the ways of physically storing your digital photos. We won't be talking here about asset management strategies (i.e. which images to store, workflows, meta data, software, etc), but Peter Krogh's article on Digital Asset Management does a great job with that.

Why archive?
Photographs can hold tremendous emotional and monetary value. Before the proliferation of digital cameras, photographers could store a physical negative or slides with the expectation that the medium would last decades, if not longer, under a controlled environment.

But with digital photography, images are only stored as data, and the integrity of that data is only as good as the archiving system. None of the typical storage media, from CD/DVDs to hard drives, have proven to be as resilient as film, and therefore, photographers need to create archiving systems that support multiple copies.

Part I: Physical Issues to Consider
Before we jump into actual product recommendations, here are a few issues to take into account before you plunk down your money:
-    Initial investment
-    Expandability
-    Power requirements
-    Noise
-    Heat
-    Connectability

Initial Investment
If you own a car or a house, you know that the purchase price is only part of the total cost of ownership. Similarly, when you look at a long term strategy for storing photos, the cost of the storage device is usually just the tip of the iceberg. Insofar as storage as concerned, you have to think about your electricity bills, as well as the service plans that are often bundled with the higher-end offerings. Total cost of ownership is a non-issue for a single hard drive, but it becomes a real factor is you have large storage arrays that need maintenance, power and potential cooling to operate optimally.

For our purposes, we've created three pricing tiers to help you assess your options for your initial investment:

1.    Cheap: <$500
2.    Mid: < $1000
3.    High: > $1000

by Peter Krogh

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a term that refers to everything one does with image files from the point of capture onward.  This includes transferring, renaming, attaching metadata, rating, adjusting, proofing, backing up, archiving and more. Understanding the principles of sound DAM practices will help you design a workflow that is secure and efficient, and can help you increase profitability in the world of digital photography.

As professional photographers, there are a couple of functions of your DAM practice that are going to be most important. The prime directive, to borrow from Star Trek, is to make sure you don't lose the files. If the images can't be delivered, you can't be paid.  So the first thing a professional photographer needs to do is to evaluate the risk points in file handling, and develop an adequate system to protect against these hazards.

The second most important function of the DAM system for the pro is to create an efficient workflow, so that jobs can be delivered profitably.  If you are spending twice the time (or more) that your competitors do to get jobs out the door, you will be at a significant competitive disadvantage.  In a business environment that is becoming more challenging by the month, every advantage you can leverage is important.  Understanding the principles of digital asset management will help you to increase your efficiency.

A good understanding of DAM can also help the pro photographer to find images in the collection, and to combine them in new and valuable ways.  Because a photographer's collection can be brought together as a large body of work, the photographer can find and group images efficiently.  As both the technological and business landscape change, it becomes even more important to mine your collection for new sources of revenue.

Developing a DAM system will be an ongoing process.  As your understanding the tools improves (and as the tools themselves improve), you'll be able to do more.  Start with the prime directive (don't lose the photos) and move out from there.  Don't try to do everything at once, as it can make the process overwhelming, and lead to paralysis.  Let's take a look at some of the tools and principles, and see how to come up with a plan of action.

Use DAM Software
Implementing good asset management will be best done by making use of DAM software.  While you can do lots of the necessary functions by looking through folders of images and keeping a pencil and paper handy, that's going to be frustrating and inefficient.  DAM software is designed to help you with these tasks.

Miki Johnson wrote a story about (and conducted a video interview with) Art Wolfe and Jim Martin, released yesterday on the liveBooks blog. Art is a World-renowned conservation and fine art photographer, and Jim is executive director of Art Wolfe Inc.

I recently went up to Seattle to visit Art and Jim, and get a tour of their operation. We ended up going to lunch, spending some time talking about tequila, but most of the time talking about how they are changing their business model, in part, by selling Art's stock images themselves, via PhotoShelter.

During my tour through his gallery and studio, I realized just how diverse Art is in terms of his work (he shoots more than just "Fur and Feathers"), and his business model, which in addition to stock, includes books, a television show, classroom workshops and lectures, and in-the-field shooting workshops to crazy and dangerous cold arctic places.

Art's studio comes complete with a full classroom, with computers on every desk. I immediately envisioned PhotoShelter training sessions being conducted there. Hmmm... could happen. If you like that idea and think you would attend, send me a note.

Some other really cool photographers also use Art's studio to conduct workshops, too.

One really cool opportunity that just opened up is a 4-day "Master Class with David Alan Harvey," coming up pretty soon - April 11-15, 2009. If you ever wanted to spend some quality time with someone like DAH (member of Magnum, his work frequently appearing in National Geographic), here's an opportunity.

More info on that here:
http://store.artwolfe.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=175

If you're ever in Seattle, make a visit to the SODO neighborhood and check out his gallery. It's worth going out of your way just to see all the nice huge prints on display.

At lunch, I suggested that he needed to add a bottle of Don Julio 1942 to his tequila collection. It might make his trips to remote arctic regions a little warmer.

I've introduced PhotoShelter to a few people only to hear "Why would I want to do that when I can get a 1TB hard drive for $1000?" This sounds like a reasonable argument, but as any homeowner or car owner can tell you, the cost of purchasing something is not the cost of owning it. More significantly, PhotoShelter isn't just a hard drive, it is an archiving system -- part redundant storage, part digital asset management, part automated, online sales tool. So let's compare apples with apples.

Lacie is a brand that many photographers are familiar with, so we'll use them as a point of comparison. As a former Lacie owner, I can attest to the quality of their brand. They sell a great looking 1.6TB RAID (1.2TB usable) for $1599. (PhotoShelter uses RAID so we're quoting it here)

In order to deal with the potential physical threats (e.g. fire, flood, etc) PhotoShelter has RAID systems in each of two locations around the US, so you'd really need to get two Lacie's. We also have an environmentally controlled datacenter for these RAID systems. Assuming you have two houses with a little room for your RAID, you could get (2) 5500 BTU air conditioners for about $150 each.

To power the RAID (200W each) and the AC units (480W energy star) 24/7/365, would cost you about $2000 at 17 cents per kilowatt hour.

Our data centers come equipped with diesel generators that can power the equipment in the event of a power failure. You could get (2) Honda EU2000i generators for about $1000 a piece. We'll throw the diesel in for free. Two 450W UPSs (uninterruptible power supplies) with 30 minutes of battery life will run about $260 each.

We have multiple Internet connections from our datacenter, and obviously a massive amount of bandwidth. But let's assume that you have (2) DSL lines from each location for $40/month. That's about $1920 annualized. Don't forget hardware-based firewalls at each location ($206 for a Cisco PIX 501). We'll pretend that you're a network security expert, and it took you no time to configure your equipment.

Now in order to see the images sitting on your RAID and make them publicly searchable, you'll need to either commission someone to build a system for you, or you could build it yourself. I'm assuming that since you're a photographer, you have better things to do with your time. But let's say conservatively that you could find a programmer to build you a secure, password protected, fully searchable archive with automated print and online sales in 100 hours for $50/hour. That would be $5,000 (you won't find anyone to do it so cheaply, btw).

Using the figures above, 1TB of storage would cost you $1183/month. Even with a 3-year depreciation model on the capital expenditures, you're still paying $546/month. PhotoShelter sells 1TB for $400/month.

Here's one more pricing comparison for kicks:

Apple XServe Single Proc $2999

1TB XServe RAID (750GB usable) $5999

Quantum ValueLoader SDLT $5314 (1.6TB capacity, 8 tape autochanger)

(2) 10 SLDT Tapes $840 (two sets for off-site rotation, new sets annually)

Annual power consumption (assuming 750Wh at $0.17/KWh) $1116.90

1 hour of administration per week at $50 ($2600)

Total = $18,868.90 or $1,572/month/TB

With a 3-year depreciation model on the cap expenditures, you're still paying $776/month/TB. Once you exceed 1.6TB, you'll need two sets of DLTs to complete a full back-up, plus the manual labor of swapping out tape trays. And in a few years, what will you do? Continue to build a datacenter in your home?

You can see where I'm going with this. Sure, if all you want is to copy your images on DVD as back-up, then of course, you don't have all these costs. PhotoShelter will never compete strictly on price with removable media.

But we didn't create PhotoShelter solely as a replacement for your DVDs or hard drives.

Affordable archiving is certainly a component, but allowing others to view your archive (not just a portfolio on your website) gives you the ability to monetize your past work. This is a huge difference.

If you purchased 1TB/month for $400, and sold a single image from your archive as stock for $400, it would pay for itself, and you would essentially get the archiving for free.

Lastly, archiving is a numbers game because every device will eventually fail. So your digital archive system should mitigate risk, not simply create more points of risk. More on that soon...