Sunday, October 2, 2011
2011 Hockey Shoot
Each year I shoot images for the Mornington Peninsula Jockey Club Year book, this involves shooting action and group photographs of each of the teams in the club, some 28 teams, but then I also photograph as many of the finals matches that I can get to.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
An Annual Report
I have just wrapped up three days of shooting for the Australian Synchrotron's Annual Report, three very solid days on location, but oh wow! I have had the privilege of shooting there a number of times now, including last years Annual Report, and am continually amazed, everywhere you turn there is something to catch the eye and imagination. I have only myself to blame if I was to come away from an environment like this without the shots.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Major Projects
Continuing our documentary shoots of both the Northern Sewer Project and Melbourne Main Sewer Replacement, it is a fascinating process. These are a couple of stills shot along the way.
NSP. Steel worker cutting the steel reinforcing in place for the lining of the Brearley Reserve Shaft
MMSR. The Yarra River Crossing, down under the Yarra welding plates in place ready for the GRP linings to be inserted.
Monday, July 18, 2011
51 Location portraits
I have just wrapped up shooting 51 environmental location portraits for Melbourne Water. Every couple of years they recognise their people who have served the organisation for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years with a commemorative book, a great idea, giving something back to their dedicated staff and also creating a tool to promote the organisation as a long term career option for their new staff.
The brief was to capture the recipients in an environment that reflects something of who they are and where they work. I travelled more than 2000km all over Melbourne for this one, including Tarago Reservoir, Maroondah Dam, Sugarloaf Reservoir, Eastern and Western Treatment Plants and a few other locations such as Head Office.
One of the nice things about this assignment was getting to spend some time with each person getting to know them, all spoke positively about their time and experiences with MMBW and Melbourne Water. I felt it was a privilege to photograph these people.
Below is a selection of a few images.
The brief was to capture the recipients in an environment that reflects something of who they are and where they work. I travelled more than 2000km all over Melbourne for this one, including Tarago Reservoir, Maroondah Dam, Sugarloaf Reservoir, Eastern and Western Treatment Plants and a few other locations such as Head Office.
One of the nice things about this assignment was getting to spend some time with each person getting to know them, all spoke positively about their time and experiences with MMBW and Melbourne Water. I felt it was a privilege to photograph these people.
Below is a selection of a few images.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Front Page
OK it is just a Local Magazine, but given that I am not in the photojournalist side of photography seeing an image of mine as a cover shot is always nice.
This image was part of a series I recently photographed for Albert Park College. This newly opened college is working very hard to attract students and professional photographs have certainly helped with raising their profile in the community.
The initial brief for the photo shoot did not include images for media release, however with a library of high quality images the college has been in a position to do press releases and very quickly respond to requests from media for photographs. My brief for the shoot was quite comprehensive as our studio was also commissioned to create their website, signage and a variety of brochures and documents, with so many end products in mind media was simple for them to accommodate.
Albert Park College being so new is in the enviable position of being able to approach the construction of the school and the delivery of its curriculum with current technology being integrated in all areas. Each of the students at the college has an Apple iPad and content, home work, even blogs are all designed and structured with this environment in mind. Visit their website we designed and manage to learn more about the college and to see some more of my photographs in use.
This image was part of a series I recently photographed for Albert Park College. This newly opened college is working very hard to attract students and professional photographs have certainly helped with raising their profile in the community.
The initial brief for the photo shoot did not include images for media release, however with a library of high quality images the college has been in a position to do press releases and very quickly respond to requests from media for photographs. My brief for the shoot was quite comprehensive as our studio was also commissioned to create their website, signage and a variety of brochures and documents, with so many end products in mind media was simple for them to accommodate.
Albert Park College being so new is in the enviable position of being able to approach the construction of the school and the delivery of its curriculum with current technology being integrated in all areas. Each of the students at the college has an Apple iPad and content, home work, even blogs are all designed and structured with this environment in mind. Visit their website we designed and manage to learn more about the college and to see some more of my photographs in use.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Shooting digital stills and video? Backup!
Many an article and post written on this topic, but after today I thought I would just add my thoughts to this.
Now that we are shooting stills and video straight to disc there is no tape or film to fall back on, we have to be organised and backup and archive.
The difference?
Backups
Our back up is relevant to our live projects and is in two forms, an hourly occurrence of our working files and at time of ingestion we back up all our digital image and vision files.
Archiving
Our archiving process, this is our chance to consolidate projects and remove them from the system, they are moved onto two external drives, one kept in the studio for ready access and the other drive offsite in case of the worst.
Does it take long, yes and no, the majority of the process occurs in the background and allows me to work over the top of it, albeit with a hit to performance of the system. The copy process takes a while, identifying what to copy, pretty quick and easy.
Quantity
Well the thing that prompted me to write this today was the fact that I am moving over 1TB of data around, archiving jobs off the system and backing up vision from a shoot. How often do I move this quantity, probably monthly, high definition video takes up a huge amount of disc space. How many drives, sitting next to me are over 30 drives, giving around 40-50TB of storage, this is then duplicated offsite as well.
Where to
We decided on using an external Hard Drive solution, whilst it may not have the benefits of tape it does have other key benefits,
simplicity of implementation;
ease of use;
data is available by simply plugging in the drive;
For us this last point was the winner, for us being able to access material quickly is critical, clients will often call asking for a job to be accessed, for any number of reasons, and for it to be turned around quickly. In reality even if they were not asking for it quickly the fact that the jobs are on hard discs reduces the amount of time it takes for us to reinstate a project making better use of out time.
Is this system infallible?
NO, NO, NO, hard drives will fail, note that I said will, that they do is not questionable, it is a matter of when not if. This is an additional reason for the offsite drive, when the drive in the studio eventually does fail we will bring in the offsite and make another two copies immediately, discarding the second drive.
Cost effective?
Yes it is, now, when we were tape based for video, no it was not, but then all vision was backed up on the original tape anyway.
The future
As network speeds and capacities increase and costs reduce I will move the backup and archiving to a cloud solution, this is already a viable option for the average home user with a few GB to look after, but the video that we now all shoot to disc based cameras, well that will still be a couple of years away.
Now that we are shooting stills and video straight to disc there is no tape or film to fall back on, we have to be organised and backup and archive.
The difference?
Backups
Our back up is relevant to our live projects and is in two forms, an hourly occurrence of our working files and at time of ingestion we back up all our digital image and vision files.
Archiving
Our archiving process, this is our chance to consolidate projects and remove them from the system, they are moved onto two external drives, one kept in the studio for ready access and the other drive offsite in case of the worst.
Does it take long, yes and no, the majority of the process occurs in the background and allows me to work over the top of it, albeit with a hit to performance of the system. The copy process takes a while, identifying what to copy, pretty quick and easy.
Quantity
Well the thing that prompted me to write this today was the fact that I am moving over 1TB of data around, archiving jobs off the system and backing up vision from a shoot. How often do I move this quantity, probably monthly, high definition video takes up a huge amount of disc space. How many drives, sitting next to me are over 30 drives, giving around 40-50TB of storage, this is then duplicated offsite as well.
Where to
We decided on using an external Hard Drive solution, whilst it may not have the benefits of tape it does have other key benefits,
simplicity of implementation;
ease of use;
data is available by simply plugging in the drive;
For us this last point was the winner, for us being able to access material quickly is critical, clients will often call asking for a job to be accessed, for any number of reasons, and for it to be turned around quickly. In reality even if they were not asking for it quickly the fact that the jobs are on hard discs reduces the amount of time it takes for us to reinstate a project making better use of out time.
Is this system infallible?
NO, NO, NO, hard drives will fail, note that I said will, that they do is not questionable, it is a matter of when not if. This is an additional reason for the offsite drive, when the drive in the studio eventually does fail we will bring in the offsite and make another two copies immediately, discarding the second drive.
Cost effective?
Yes it is, now, when we were tape based for video, no it was not, but then all vision was backed up on the original tape anyway.
The future
As network speeds and capacities increase and costs reduce I will move the backup and archiving to a cloud solution, this is already a viable option for the average home user with a few GB to look after, but the video that we now all shoot to disc based cameras, well that will still be a couple of years away.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
New website
A website at a minimum is a brochure for a business and like a brochure needs to be updated regularly, at Digital Image we have just updated our site, new work, clients and services. Head over, have a look and let me know what you think.
The site has been planned by Wayne and Mark, with Mark doing the design and programming for the site and the majority of the imagery being mine.
For us the public side of the site is there to promote our services, though the behind the scenes gets far more traffic and use. We have set up secure upload and downloads areas for our clients and this service is invaluable being able to deliver design, video and photographic work through this interface. For our corporate clients to also upload material to us in a simple secure environment is also essential.
That said, the vast majority of our photographic work goes up onto our dedicated photographic site hosted by Photoshelter. We worked for a few ears with having images on our website in a gallery format, the restriction being the inability to search these images. For us Photoshelter is the ideal solution for delivery to our clients and our clients love it. In addition to our own site we have also set up two client dedicated sites one for Melbourne Water and another for Goodman Fielder. More on those another time.
The site has been planned by Wayne and Mark, with Mark doing the design and programming for the site and the majority of the imagery being mine.
For us the public side of the site is there to promote our services, though the behind the scenes gets far more traffic and use. We have set up secure upload and downloads areas for our clients and this service is invaluable being able to deliver design, video and photographic work through this interface. For our corporate clients to also upload material to us in a simple secure environment is also essential.
In the studio we all have dropbox accounts and use these to sync between our different machines, this system could work with our clients but for many of them in the corporate environment, in addition access to this type of service is restricted by their IT departments there is concern about the security of their data.
That said, the vast majority of our photographic work goes up onto our dedicated photographic site hosted by Photoshelter. We worked for a few ears with having images on our website in a gallery format, the restriction being the inability to search these images. For us Photoshelter is the ideal solution for delivery to our clients and our clients love it. In addition to our own site we have also set up two client dedicated sites one for Melbourne Water and another for Goodman Fielder. More on those another time.
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