The Bumpy Path To Digital Nirvana
By Elsa Peterson
The PhotoStockNotes articles "Image Software Can't Do It" (2/28/01) and "Picture Research in a Digital Age" (4/1/01) forced me to think about issues that I often wish would resolve themselves. Soon.
You see, I belong to a small, but -- in my opinion -- vital profession: I'm a freelance picture researcher specializing in college textbooks. Because there aren't very many of us, we freelancers who acquire the photos for America's higher education publications often find ourselves misunderstood by stock providers, ignored by software developers, and sometimes even questioned by our own valued clients.
I respect and enjoy the editors who hire me -- I wouldn't be in this profession if I didn't. But because the Internet has enabled them to surf their way to zillions of photos, I find that some of them have trouble understanding why it takes me days or weeks to track down a rights holder and clear permission for an image, not to mention obtaining it on film or in a high enough resolution to reproduce properly. The day will probably come when every website containing a photo has "click here and type in your credit card number" on-demand rights clearance, and hi-res delivery capability, and I bet some of my clients imagine they won't need me when that day comes, but that day is not here yet.
Now, about software. We've all heard of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft PhotoDraw, and maybe even Paintshop Pro. But these programs are intended for people who create and modify photos. Where's the software specifically designed to help professionals who view, evaluate, organize, and track photographic images without modifying them? There are a number of programs that can be used for this purpose, but none is widely enough used to be considered the industry standard.
Although these issues are perplexing, the big communication gap, the one that really impacts my day to day work, is with the providers of the photos. Let me articulate three false assumptions that they seem to be operating under.
THREE FALSE ASSUMPTIONS
False assumption number 1: That in-depth, conceptual research into their files is a waste of time or, in newbiz-speak, "not profitable." If it's not keyworded a certain way, or if my specification didn't happen to coincide with the keywords, then suitable images will inevitably be bypassed. The time-honored method of physically pawing through drawers full of transparencies may have been laborious, but by doing this, stock providers would gain familiarity with their holdings. It seems that keyword searching does not give them the same in-depth knowledge of what they have to offer and where to find it.
For example, if I request photos of Chicanos in the Texas-Mexico border area, and a stock provider's keyword search turns up several police-drama type shots of Border Patrol agents nabbing people out in the sagebrush, guess what happens? Do I get (a) a phone call or an e-mail asking me if this is what I had in mind, or (b) an e-mail lightbox full of the above, with no offer to look further in case I wanted regular, law-abiding Chicanos riding the bus to work? The answer is (b). And what are the chances of inappropriate Border Patrol images being considered for use? Zero. Do the math: how "profitable" is it for the stock provider to eschew in-depth searching?
False assumption number 2: That photos submitted by Agency A don't need to be compared side by side with those from Agency B, Agency C, and so on. Once I've received batches of images, I need to organize them. A typical textbook could easily have 350 photos, hence 350 different concepts tied to manuscript pages that need to be illustrated photographically. My authors need to select images based on what they illustrate, not what agency they came from or who shot them.
If I could afford hardware and software on a par with what the most techno-savvy agencies are using, my slicing and dicing task would be just as easy, if not easier, on the computer compared to the low-tech method of inserting transparencies into little paper folders labeled with concepts and keyed to manuscript pages. But -- surprise -- my budget is limited. And the fact that different agencies use different systems means that I would have a very hard time setting up my office to be compatible with all of them.
False assumption number 3: That the final say as to which images are used rests with me or my client. My job is to eliminate photos that are technically inferior, and those that fail to illustrate the points in the book. It is also, as described above, to organize batches of photos conceptually. But it is not to choose them. The authors do that.
Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but I'm old enough to remember the days when publishing companies would fly authors to New York and sit them down with people like me in a photo selection meeting that might easily last two full days. We would discuss the relative merits of each photo, and I would come
But we have quite a way to go before an entire book's worth of photo "candidates" can be e-mailed, or sent on CD-ROM, to authors, with any hope of them being properly opened, viewed, and selected on the other end. Yes, most authors have computers. But many of them have been dragged willy-nilly into using them by the universities where they're on the faculty. Like me, they tend to be interested in their own professions, not in acquiring computer goodies. It would hardly do for me, a mere freelancer, to tell a 70-year-old emeritus professor, "Listen, you'll have to go out and buy XYZ software in order to view the 1,000 photos I'm about to send you. Oh, and you do have 256 MB of RAM, don't you?"
I've discussed some of these issues with my clients, and my sense is that they are just as perplexed as I am. We all seem to be lurching and feeling our way along this rather bumpy path to digital Nirvana. I hope what I've written will inspire stock providers to give some thought to these dilemmas and how they can be solved.
Elsa Peterson, based in Norwalk, CT, is a freelance editor specializing in college textbook development. Email: epltd@earthlink.net
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