Working The FlowWhether on assignment for National Geographic or managing his massive stock archives, Frans Lanting’s studio is constantly adapting to handle extreme challenges in digital-asset management |
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| By William Sawalich, Photography by Frans Lanting | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Page 4 of 4 “There’s no doubt about it,” Lanting says, “what we’re doing today is infinitely more complicated and process-oriented than when we were handling film. The process is more complicated, but it also enables us to do things that simply weren’t possible even five years ago because we can move the images instantly around the world. I can work with my picture editor coast to coast, plus we can develop projects that wouldn’t be possible in the film era. The Life Project (www.LifeThroughTime.com) is a good example of that. We’re working with other entities in other locations and other countries, putting together the multimedia performance with Philip Glass’ music. For the performance, we worked with a video editor; for the traveling exhibition, we worked with labs in Europe; and for the website, we worked with yet another entity. None of those endeavors would have been possible if we didn’t have such a sophisticated system for processing, archiving and circulating high-quality image files.”
“We’ve squeezed most of the gold out of a film library that contains many tens of thousands of edited images. From that, we’ve created a super-collection of 9,000 images at high-resolution on our licensing website,” Lanting says. “Our standards are evolving. The whole system is much more fluid now. In the future, our workflow is bound to change to meet the needs of an expanding collection. It’s the ever-changing nature of modern collections.” Part of the genius of the system—involving so many disparate pieces of software and hardware—is that at any point, a faulty or underperforming piece of the puzzle may be removed and replaced by better technology. It may make for a more cumbersome process, but the modular protection is there, even more than in the film era. “It’s a lot simpler to think in terms of original Kodachromes or Fujichromes and a couple of dupes,” continues Lanting. “Typewriters were a hell of a lot easier to use than computers, too. But when you start thinking about writing a novel, there are a lot of advantages to working with computers. It’s the same thing with photography. We’ve developed a sophisticated workflow with all kinds of systems, processes and redundancies so that we’re able to work with the images in a number of ways that simply weren’t possible in the past. We are in total control of the images that go out. Plus, we can do certain things in 20 minutes that previously would have taken days, if not weeks.” See more of Frans Lanting’s photography at www.lanting.com.
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