January 15, 2004

Come on. Chant it with me.
"Back up.... Back up.... Back up...."

It should be the holy mantra of every photographer, no matter if you shoot digital, slides, or negatives. Case in point is provided today by an article in the New York Times, detailing the story of Jacques Lowe, a photographer who took over 40,000 images of JFK and his family, but lost all of the negatives when a fire destroyed his bank vault at 5 World Trade Center on 9/11.

Enter some contactsheets, a drumscanner and Photoshop.

"Mr. Adelman (Lowe's collaborator on a proposed book about the Kennedys) doubted that technology could turn contact-sheet-size images (most of them 2¼ by 2¼ inches) into photographs worthy of a coffee-table book.

But that was before Woodfin Camp, Mr. Lowe's New York-based agent, delivered several of the contact sheets to the Manhattan office of Quad Graphics. Quad used its highest-quality upright drum scanner, an $85,000 machine called the Heidelberg's Prime Scan 8400, to turn the photos into digital images, at 350 dots per inch. Then it used Photoshop to match the tones to those of actual prints made during Mr. Lowe's lifetime."

How cool is that?

Still - I back up my original slides and negs as 16-bit scanned tiffs, then make 2 copies on CD - with one going into my fire-safe, and the other into a filing cabinet in my office for quick access.

With digital however it's even more risky. There is no hardcopy around. Prints and high-quality contact sheets are even more unlikely. A simple crash of the harddrive could wipe out all that work (not to mention time and money) you've invested into a shoot. Don't let that happen.

The digital images off my 10D immediately get burned onto CD in RAW format, without my having even laid a single Photoshop finger on them. Then I make 2 back ups of the converted and photoshoped (if necessary) Tiffs (with one going into the safe again), and keep only medium-sized jpegs on my hard-drive for reference and web use.

I know it's a lot of work - but CDs are cheap and I just know that the time invested in keeping properly organized and backed up will pay off in the long run.

So if you're thinking about going digital, consider this: make sure you have a well-organized office - otherwise the likelyness of finding an image when you really need it is greatly reduced, if not squashed. Get binders with CD organizers, clearly label them, and make triple - not double, because your backup can bomb on you too - backups. Oh, and an image management software helps too.