Home > Commerce > Digital Sources > Need a (Digital) Hand?
Need a (Digital) Hand?
By Ethan G. Salwen
In a print article on pages 14-16 of the Winter 2006 issue of the ASMP Bulletin, photographer and ASMP contributing writer Ethan Salwen describes how digital techs and digitally savvy assistants can offer invaluable support for a wide range of photographic needs. Here, Salwen provides additional insight, as well as links to Web sites and discussion forums about this subject.
Practical Strategies for Hiring and Providing Digital Assistance
Whether you are seeking total digital assistance or simply need help with one aspect of your digital workflow, the following strategies will help you locate and work with an assistant who best matches your needs — saving you time, money, frustration and boosting your level of service to clients. Regardless of whether you’re a recent photography graduate or an experienced photographer, if you want to turn your extra digital knowledge into extra dollars, you can also employ these approaches to edge out the competition.
Think Partnership. Whether you are hiring a digital assistant or lending your digital expertise, you must put extra effort into building a clearly defined working relationship — regardless of whether the relationship will last for only a one-day shoot or is intended to last for years. This relationship building is critically important because each photographer’s digital equipment, workflow and needs vary tremendously. And no two digital jobs are the same — even with the same photographer using the same equipment — because each client has different file format requirements and different post-production needs.
“There is so much room for error in digital photography,” says Peter Krogh, “Anytime you let someone get involved with your digital workflow, you’re giving them the chance to wreak havoc. So building trust between the photographer and the assistant becomes more critical then ever before.” Krogh also suggests photographers should focus on building a partnership that’s mutually beneficial for both the photographer and the assistant. “The fact is that in contemporary digital photography, a good digital assistant is becoming increasingly important to a photographer’s success,” Krogh says, “So it only makes sense to give that assistant incentive for sticking around.”
Developing such a trusting, mutually beneficial partnership starts with questions — lots of questions. Both the photographer and the digital assistant should come to their first meeting, even if it’s right before a shoot begins, armed with a number of specific questions about expectations. It is not enough to merely ask a digital assistant if he or she can use Photoshop or if a digital tech can run a Phase One back. And it is not enough for the assistant to merely say, “Yes.” Both parties must spell out precisely what they need, and how they will go about doing it.
Assistants should start by asking, “What will I be responsible for?” They should then continue with knowledgeable follow-up questions. The photographer should give a rough outline of his workflow — from the camera being used through preparing finished files — and then ask the prospective assistants how much of that workflow they know how to do. Pros should ask general questions like, “How well to you know the OS that I’m using?” But they should also ask specifics like, “What is the difference between assigning a profile and converting to a profile?”
Define Needs and Skills Specifically. When hiring a digital assistant or promoting your digital services, take the extra time to outline exactly what services you need or what skills you have to offer. Neatly detailing your skills and program knowledge on a form other than your resume will provide you with a marketing tool, and will also help you identify skill areas you need to improve.
Whenever possible, photographers and techs should have a pre-shoot meeting to go over specific needs. One digital tech suggests that, at a minimum, techs should cover the following key issues with the photographer before the day of the shoot-while there is still time to address problems:
- Power: Will there be AC power for the computers? If not, how will we handle powering laptops, digital back, etc?
- Computer: What type of computer will you be using? (Double check system compatibility.)
- Space: If the job will consume a lot of space, is there enough room on the computer’s hard drive?
- Backup: Will there be a hard drive provided to back up images?
- Naming: Does the client have a specific naming structure that needs to be followed? (This can be critical for catalog jobs.)
- Files: Does the client have specific requirements for the finished file? What color space, size, and dpi? Do they also require low-res JPEGs along with the processed TIFFs?
- Editing and Post-Production: Will the client be able to edit on set? Does the client/photographer expect editing and processing to be done after the shoot wraps? (Discuss how this will affect overtime costs.)
- Delivery: When does the client expect the files? Do they expect them on a hard drive, or burned to DVD’s? (This will affect delivery time.)
Consider Unique Learning Opportunities. Pros should consider the valuable educational opportunities of working with digital assistants. In addition to the role as a digital lifesaving subordinate, a digital assistant can serve as an invaluable teacher. “If a photographer has hired a assistant because of his or her digital expertise, the photographer might as well learn as much as they can from that assistant,” says Joseph Cartright. This attitude represents a new way to look at the pro/assistant relationship. The assistant is no longer just an extra pair of hands who performs tasks that the photographer mastered long ago.
Even if a pro needs to bring an assistant up to speed digitally, there are still valuable learning opportunities for that pro. Cartright points out that there is tremendous value in taking the time to teach new digital skills to an assistant, adding, “One of the best ways to learn is to try to explain information to another person.” Of course, this time is wasted if the assistant doesn’t stick around very long. Peter Krogh says that more than ever before, photographers need to find ways to maintain long-term relationships with assistants. “We need to make sure we are offering them incentive to stay around after we have spent so much time training them and developing efficient working partnerships,” Krogh says. Some of the ways Krogh does this is by giving his assistant access to his equipment; maintaining a commitment to educating his assistant; keeping an eye out for smaller jobs he can pass along to his assistant; and, most importantly, treating his assistant like a valued member of the team.
Work For or Hire Other Pros. Photographers have long depended on the support and expert knowledge of other professionals. But the complexity of digital photography has increased the amount of time one pro will have to dedicate to helping another. This has put many photographers in a position to earn money by consulting and assisting other professional photographers. “The most productive relationships are ones in which one pro hires another to help with an actual shoot and post-production services,” says Richard Anderson. “This is much better than calling in a consultant just for a stand-alone lesson. It allows the hiring photographer to charge the client for this help because it’s part of the regular job.” Instead of struggling on his or her own and wasting hours of time in frustration, the hiring photographer ends up with time-saving help charged to the client, and gains a teacher to boot.
Pros Helping Pros — For Free. Among pros, there are ways to partner that do not have to involve an exchange of money. “I’ve developed a great educational partnership with a photographer in the States,” says Lonely Planet photographer Greg Roden, who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “I’m putting my new Canon DSLR through the paces and passing along this field-tested information to my colleague. In exchange, this photographer is passing along his expanding knowledge of RAW processing and digital workflow. We exchange focused emails, and have an instant messaging session about once a week.” Roden, who says that it is important to define exactly how each party is going to help the other, says that he pushes himself harder to learn more about his DSLR, and to learn critical workflow information that he has heretofore found daunting.
Learn as Much Digital as Possible. To command big dollars as a digital tech, and even to edge out the competition for more standard assistant positions, there’s no doubt that the more digital knowledge one has, the better. This mandate to learn all things digital extends even to those photographers hiring digital assistants specifically to make up for their own lack of digital knowledge. After all, how are photographers going to be able to take full advantage of their new helpers (or make the most qualified hiring decisions) if they are not actively increasing their level of digital expertise? Luckily, when you have a digital assistant on hand, you also have a digital teacher on hand. This is why digital assistants’ abilities to help their employers learn are often as great an asset as their ability to perform a given task.
Books, trade magazines, and educational seminars are all great learning avenues. But one of the best places to learn digital photography is through the professional online forums dedicated to digital photography. These sites have the advantage of being the timeliest and attracting a number of different professional opinions. It is also possible to perform searches for specific questions as well as to post questions.
- Rob Galbraith’s forum is one of the most highly respected and professional sources of digital information.
- The Luminous Landscape is another highly respected site with extensive forums and articles.
- ASMP’s members-only forum covers technical topics.
- Digital Photography Review has forums — including a number that address basic digital stumbling blocks — and the site provides a good source of unbiased product information.
- The publishers of The DAM Book by Peter Krogh have set up a forum related specifically to issues regarding digital asset management.
- Photoshopnews.com, an Adobe-run site, primarily contains helpful, PhotoShop-related articles, but it also includes links to a number of sites and forums related to digital photography.
Two non-forum sites of particular value:
- Rawformat.com, which focuses on promoting an open digital negative format (the DNG), has a number of informative and clear white papers on digital photography.
- Sponsored by all major photography associations, the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines offer clarity on consistent digital practices.
Focus and Specialize. A number of experts insist that the best digital techs know “everything.” However, experts agree that digital photography has become too unwieldy to allow anyone a totally comprehensive knowledge base — thus the reason for digital techs in the first place. So while photographers and aspiring techs go about trying to learn everything digital, they should also appreciate the value of focusing and specializing as they increase their digital knowledge. “Everyone is drowning in production work,” says Peter Krogh, “And the new battle in digital photography is: ‘How do we deal with thousands and thousands of images?’ People who focus on understanding the complexities of efficiently operating digital archives will find themselves in great demand.”
Know Your Limitations. “The more you know, the more you realize how little you know,” says Cartright. And he cautions, “In digital photography, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.” The clearer you are about your strengths and weaknesses, the better suited you will be to identify and hire the most appropriate person for the job at hand, and the better able you will be able to market your skills. Cartright explains that the vast majority of self-proclaimed (and even certified) digital technicians are of mid-level quality. “They tend to be aspiring photographers who might have taken a seminar or two and know how to run a basic setup.”
Understand Computers. “For the digital tech, photography is secondary,” says Cartright. “What the tech really has to understand is computers — both platforms, with a true conceptual understanding of computer technology, not just how to run a few programs.” Cartright goes on to explain that a true digital tech must also understand color management and file structure at the highest levels. Because success in digital photography is becoming increasingly dependant on in-depth computer knowledge, most of the online forums listed above address computer issues.
Check and Build References. “I always stress the importance of checking a tech’s references, whether I’m hiring myself out as a tech or hiring a tech to work for me,” says Von Thomas. “Given the difficulty of appraising a person’s abilities without seeing them in action, carefully checking references and discussing a digital tech’s qualifications among colleagues is critical.” Of course, a photographer trying to market his skills as a digital assistant or technician must build up a number of good references. Categorizing references by type of equipment used and digital skills employed on specific jobs will make it easier for the hiring photographer to focus on the most relevant references.
Consult and Network with Rental Houses and Digital Capture Services. Jodie Mastromatteo, a high-level digital technician who recently started the color management consulting firm 127 Productions Inc., says that equipment rental houses are one of the best sources of information for finding or becoming a digital tech. “When rental houses started supplying high-end digital capture equipment, they needed to also provide support for this equipment,” she explains. “As a result, these companies have become clearing houses and networking hubs for all information related to digital techs.”
In addition to rental houses, there are also an increasing number of companies that specialize in digital capture services. Because many of these companies need to train new employees for their specific workflows, regardless of the technicians experience, there are often opportunities for aspiring techs with a great deal of computer and digital imaging aptitude.
To easily locate all major digital equipment providers in your area, consult Photo District News’s searchable, online Photo Source.
Contact Digital Departments. When seeking job opportunities, Mastromatteo also suggests that people directly contact the digital departments at large photography studios. “Increasing numbers of studios have their own digital departments,” says Mastromatteo, “And job-seekers can often cut out the middleman if they determine who heads the department, and contact that person directly.”
Consider the Advantages (and shortcomings) of Tech Certifications and Coursework. Manufacturers and rental houses — often in conjunction with each other — offer digital technician training seminars, some of which result in certification. Mastromatteo teaches a monthly workshop on the Leaf Aptus back which covers equipment, capture software, and workflow issues at NoHo Productions in New York. Leaf America sponsors this particular workshop, providing all equipment, and then lists all participants as certified technicians on its website. “This course is good for both aspiring digital techs as well as photographers trying to get a better handle on the technology,” says Mastromatteo. However, she and others warn that one class doesn’t turn anyone into a high level tech. (There is no written test for the course.) “One day is by no means enough time to master the complex and varied situations techs face on the job,”says Mastromatteo. “On the other hand, there are some amazing techs who don’t have official certification at all.”
Offerings in digital tech courses change rapidly. The best place to find the most relevant courses is through area rental houses, found at www.pdngallery.com/photosource.