Dateline Beijing: By now you're probably wondering how all of these pictures I'm taking are being organized and managed. For that matter how the international press makes what they do seem to happen instantly. The world of news photography has always stressed the "information super highway" and at every Olympics the ante gets raised.

In 1984 the first "Video Still" cameras were used and, believe it or not, the Opening Ceremonies were photographed by one American Newsmagazine on 8x10 Polaroid film, scanned in the stands and sent via telephone modem to New York. How things have changed! Today we have constant connectivity and images and stories are transmitted in real time.

Above is Doug Mills from the New York Times working on his laptop wirelessly connected at poolside. So imagine if you will: Doug captures the shot as Michael Phelps touches at the end of the pool to win Gold. After the jubilation, Doug puts his memory card into a reader, transfers the images to his computer, edits, select, crops, color corrects, and captions the images. He then transfers them to his paper via FTP where they are ready for publication. How long did this take? He was ready to shoot the next race a few minutes later.

And that is slow in comparison to what I saw at the Opening Ceremonies. Many of the agencies and papers had Ethernet cables directly connected to the shooting positions. One of the Chinese News Agencies went one better. They had wireless links directly from their cameras in real-time.

Sports Illustrated is "ingesting" and sending all of their images back to New York where they are edited. A far cry from chartering private jets to courier the images back to the office.

What am I doing? First of all, I'm shooting a ton of pictures which translates into GIGA BYTES of data. As of this post I am at 175 gigs of images; the file count is at ~17,000 images! This is Day 6 and I am more that half way past my total in Torino!

In my "office" I have set up two USB2 750 gig hard drives and one 1 TB Raid Drive which is also an FTP server

I am using 2 Fire wire 800 and 2 USB card readers to download my images. Incidentally, I am using 8 gig 300X UMDA Compact Flash Cards in my cameras.

So Richard, what is your post capture workflow? So glad you asked. (This is definitely for the techies.)

First of all, I have set up a very strict set of rules on how things are filed using a standard windows folder tree.

I am using a couple of high-end downloading and browsing software packages as well as PHOTOSHOP and an FTP CLIENT. One of them allows me to move the pictures off the memory cards and add IPTC and or XMP data to the image file.

Once the files have been transferred to their respective folders, I open them in the browser and tag the images I want to do a Quick Pick of.

Then I copy the JPEGS (I am shooting both JPEG and NEF (raw) files simultaneously) to a Quick JPEG folder

Once in the Quick JPEG folder, I open the images in Photoshop and do the cropping and color correction. After that is done I run a batch process that adds sharpening. These gets saved to a file that's called Cropped and Fixed

Now the images are pretty well done, except one important thing, the are HUGE. So next I run a little program that one of my friends and co-workers Andy Cooper wrote that batch processes the images and makes then into smaller JPEGS. These become "Richard's Pictures of the Day".

Then it's off to the selection process for the Blog, and those images are posted on a server here in my office in the MPC and mirrored to a server in both Bldg 83 (Kodak Research) and at another server at my home in Pittsford.

Once all that is done, all of the Pictures - JPEG and NEF - are moved to The Network Attached Storage Server here in the MPC, all of the "Richards Pictures of the Day" are moved to the servers in BLDG 83 and my home, and then once that is complete the NEF files are moved.

Sounds complicated? Well, I couldn't have done it without some support! Thanks to Ken Harvey for making sure all of the IT stuff keeps working, and John Dyer for handing all the images in Rochester. Andy Cooper for his piece of code, Tom Hoehn and Jenny Cisney for publishing the blogs, and Jane Ryan and Bruce Graham for their wordsmithing!

6 days down. 10 to go.

Still shooting on...
Richard
The Photon Wrangler

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