Main menu:

Recommendations and advice

Associations – professional

  • AIPP – Australian Institute of Professional Photography – Excellent national organisation, with a strong SA branch, support for professional photographers from copyrite to forms, to lobbying. Great seminars. Monthly Breakfast meeting here in SA.
  • AAPP – Australian Acredited Professional Photographers – Not as national as AIPP, but still has strong representation in Vic and WA, very strong in SA, lots of good seminars, very active.
  • UPDIG – Universal Photographic and Digital Imaging Guidelines. The UPDIG guidelines aim to clarify issues affecting accurate reproduction and management of digital images. These guidelines were created to establish photographic standards and practices for photographers, designers, printers, and image distributors. The guidelines cover Digital Asset Management, Colour Profiling, Metadata, and Photography Workflow. Paul Atkins have contributed to UPDIG in a small way over the past few years as a representative of professional photographic labs.

Books:

  • The DAM book – this will sort out your workflow. Buy it!

Boxes:

Data Recovery

  • CBL Data recovery are the guys and gals in white coats we trust. They have a clean room so can handle most physical repairs as well as the standard software recovery. Quite a high percent of recoveries end up at CBL, so why not look to them first. Please tell them that AtkinsTechnicolour recommended CBL.

Digital cameras:

Education:

  • Centre for Creative Photography. Gavin Blake bagan this institution in 1997 and it has been growing ever since. Arguably one of the finest opportunities you will get to master photography in Australia. The secret to Gavin’s success: his staff.
  • Gainsborough School of Photography. Norman Weedall, founder of Gainsborough studios, run an amazing course in all aspects of running a successful photographic studio. The proof is in the pudding is applicable here, as I have watched one of Norman’s students rise to the top of South Australian Photography, Julie Newcombe of Pearwalk studios. Julie has real natural talent, but Norman gave her the tools to make a career.

Graphic Designer:

  • Kate Burns Design. Nepotism runs rife at AtkinsTchnicolour and we are proud of it. Thankfully our family is stacked with talented people. Kate Burns (married to Paul Atkins) has been running her own design business since 2000, Kate specialises in branding and identity work that will see your business has it’s best “look” on in the public face. Your branding will set the tone of your operation, it is critical. See Apple if you want to debate this. Kate designs websites through to business cards and annual reports. Currently she is working on a book project with the Botanic Gardens of SA.

Internet Service Providers (ISP):

  • Internode – they are serious about what they do, no mucking around, when calling them you get the usual “press 1 for….blah blah”, however unlike most places Internode’s 1 is for support and 2 is for sales! Subtle but you can get the picture.

Laptop computers – which has the ideal screen?

Monitors:

  • EIZO Colour Edge – the one and only, we run three 19″ EIZOs in production and can vouch for their performance, consider the cost and the warranty length, is is quite cheap as a per year cost. Anything else will be a compromise.
  • NEC – the 2940 is not a bad cheap alternative. But by no means is it as good as the EIZO.

Monitor Calibration equipment

Social networking

  • Facebook is the hero here, while there are many others, FB does the trick and is the most popular.
  • Twitter is a neat, quick way of getting and keeping in contact with your “peeps”, think of it as bulk text messaging.
  • Ping.fm, this will save your socially networked self….seriously cool tool to post to multiple social networks at once, it saves my life daily!

Software for image manipulation:

  • Adobe Photoshop is the best by far, don’t even bother with the competition, if Photoshop is to pricey, go for Elements, it is a reasonable tool with many of Photoshop’s features.
  • Adobe Lightroom makes an easy workflow for photographers, if it was around before Photoshop, there would be a lot less photoshop users and everyone would have a quicker, neater workflow for their digital camera files.
  • Bibble, this is the fastest raw converter and processor, time and time again we use this little tool in the lab and it always beats Adobe in it’s speed, it is a simple effective Lightroom alternative.

Software for Studio Management

  • Proselect is a wonderful program to design and assemble albums and composites, it now has a good book layout module. Proselect is wonderful in sales sessions as it look gorgeous and runs smoothly on both Mac and Windows. Proselect connects with Photoshop to create the actual layouts. The best part about Proselect is Peter Howlet, the author. Peter lives in Perth and works diligently to maintain and improve his gem of a program.
  • Successware is a Mac and Windows compatible program that manages sales, customers, appointments, costing etc. It integrates with Proselect. Such a tool can fine-tune your business, and help you to make most every business opportunity.

Storage and back up

  • Drobo – I am in love with this little beast, Drobo is an ideal way to have your working storage (temporary storage) kept as efficiently as possible. Drobo allows you to stick four hard drives in the one enclosure and the software will set up a RAID of all four drives allowing them to appear as one big drive, and if one drive should fail, you can pop it out and add in another and then allow it to rebuild. I am using one as a nightly back up for our NAS server. The neat thing about Drobo, is that you can put in different sized drives, with common RAID systems, drives add up to the size of the smallest, so you loose the additional space of the bigger drives, thankfully Drobo has worked this out.
  • SuperDuper – amazing, simple software for Mac that will allow you to clone a hard drive and make it bootable.
  • Weibetech – this company has products that blow my mind. Hard drives as storage is coming to the forefront in professional circles, the thought is to keep two copies of the same drive, one on-line and one off-site in bubble wrap. Weibetech has an excellent quick swap system and drive holding system to make this happen.
  • Vantec – like Weibetech, they are making it easy to work with hard drives, the dual drive dock is a very useful device.
  • xxClone – great, simple software for windows to clone a hard drive and make it bootable.

Studio space for rent

  • Silverback studios have a vibrant atmosphere, excellent space, and good rates. This is the place to be. Contact Simon Vaughan via their website.

Trouble shooting

  • Is your camera’s RAW format not being read by Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom? Guaranteed either the camera is not supported yet, or you need to upgrade your version of Adobe Camera Raw, click here to go to the download area at Adobe, then look for the latest Camera RAW plugin and follow the instructions.

Website software

  • Wordpress. This site is a wordpress site, the site is hosted by us at AtkinsTechnicolour and we run Wordpress, which is a free website software. You simply download and install the wordpress engine, then pick a theme and off you go. Give me a call if you want more information. Photographers, here is a good theme to look at first: FotoFolio.
  • Squarespace. This is very cool, it is wordpress made easy, the Squarespace crew do all the hard work, including hosting, and all you do is drag and drop to design your site then load up with content. I may move our site over to Squarespace.

Write a comment

You need to login to post comments!