Tag: Storage

Storage means everything in digital photography. Without a place to keep photos, and without the speed and reliability of a storage medium, there’s no business. All that’s left is an expensive camera and fancy lighting equipment! Storage is also an integral part of the photographic workflow, and it can even be the central repository for an e-commerce site where clients can purchase photographs or browse watermarked images.

Most of us wear several hats in addition to photographer, one of them being archivist. That used to mean organizing and storing film; today it means managing multiple copies of images, from the original RAW file through numerous versions for different end uses. What hasn’t changed is the importance of safeguarding our images, making data backup perhaps the most important step in our workflow.

Because photography is used as evidence in courtrooms and relied upon for strict documentation in fields like insurance and medicine, there has always been a need to apply a measure of security to the images in these fields. With the rise of digital photography and the early suspicions about rampant image manipulation, keeping these images secure has taken on a renewed urgency.

Whether you prefer Macintosh or Windows, keeping your hardware up to date is essential to take full advantage of the latest software and peripherals. Photography is a competitive business, and current equipment helps ensure that you can meet your client’s demanding deadlines and deliver impeccable images without a hiccup.

At some point in all of our careers, it’s going to happen. A disaster will strike and, for the briefest of moments, we’ll consider sending the assistant to find Dr. Kevorkian’s contact information. What kind of disaster could create such an extreme reaction? For a photographer, only a loss of images could make you want to have Suicide Hotline on your cell phone’s speed dial.

Think “insurance policy.” Your digital files are your most important asset as a working photographer. No matter how secure your studio or how frequent your backups, if you lose your images, you lose income.

On September 27, 2004, Adobe announced the Digital Negative Specification (DNG), a file format that was supposed to unify the cluttered atmosphere of proprietary RAW file formats by offering a non-proprietary template that would act as a universal raw file. The DNG format was released, free from any legal restrictions or royalties as an open-source file for hardware and software designers to generate, process, manage and archive RAW images for any program, from any camera, and easily accessible as an archive at any time in the future. Almost four years later, DNG hasn’t found the ubiquitous acceptance the industry had called for, but there’s growing hope for the future.