Photographs
and Pixels

How I use computers in photography Computers are changing photography. But because there are so many different kinds of photography - sports, wedding, studio, industrial, news etc. - the changes are affect in different photographers in different ways at different times.

We have used computers for our accounts, quotes and letter writing for a long time but the really important changes started to affect my work about three years ago when clients stopped ordering large prints for exhibitions. Instead they ordered a small print, had it scanned and printed out on the newly available large format digital printers. Then some clients started to ask if I could send them images down the telephone line. I knew I had to go digital.

Three years on I am much poorer from the cost of the equipment and my assistants and I are tired from the long hours of learning how to use it, but we have at last mastered the new skills and use the computer every day. In fact we enjoy using it and would be lost without it.

Here are some of the ways we use digital imaging. Scanning - The scanning of slides, negatives or prints is the starting point for most of our digital services. It turns the tones and colours of the image into pixels - tiny dots on the computer screen, We could often skip this stage if we had a digital camera, but even the expensive ones don't offer high enough resolution for our requirements yet.

Scanning not only allows us to work with our own images on the computer but it also opens up new markets for us, eg. designers give us drawings and photographs to scan so that they can montage them together into advertising illustrations or to put into Web page designs and computerised sales presentations.

Image Manipulation - Once an image is scanned it can be changed in limitless ways. The kind of photography that I do requires very little change, but I do repair scratches and tears and routinely eliminate dust marks. Occasionally I change or enhance colours, make details disappear or move them a little to make a tidier and more effective image.

I usually prefer to take photographs on colour negative because it is easier to improve the final prints by lightening and darkening different areas or changing the colour balance during printing. I have not been able to do this with slides however. You can just deliver what you get at the point of making the image. Now however it is easy to scan the slide, make the improvements I want and deliver the scan instead of the slide.

Digital Printing and Copywork - We have a machine called a dye sublimation printer that makes prints from digital files that look and feel just like traditional photographs. This has changed the way we make prints from slides. Instead of using special paper and chemicals we scan the slide and make a dye sublimation print.

Photographers are often given prints with no negative to make copies of. We used to have to make a copy negative first. Now we just scan the print and again make a dye sublimation print. Often we are asked to put three or four small copy prints onto a single sheet of A4 paper. This is now so easy.

Filing and Finding Images - The Image LibraryThe heart of our digital set-up is the computerised filing system. Nearly all the photographs that I deliver to customers are scanned to high quality and then lower quality versions are made from each of them.

The high quality scans are compressed and stored on a CD. Each CD holds hundreds of images. The lower quality copies are captioned and put into a computerised filing system or database. I can keep tens of thousands of these low resolution images on the computer and can find them again simply by typing in some of the words that are likely to be in the caption.

This collection of images is building up into a useful, easy to use photo library. I now have a customers who phone us up and ask us if we have a suitable photograph they could use in their reports and leaflets. The computer allows us to find examples quickly and to deliver them instantly.

Delivery - There is less and less need to deliver images as slides or prints. After all as soon as the designer gets the pictures, he or she is going to send them to a printer or repro house to be scanned. Because we have already done the scans we can deliver the images in new ways ready for the designer to use.

Small images can be compressed onto a floppy disk, but larger ones need to be put onto other types of disk. We mainly put them onto CD because they are cheap, don't need to be returned and nearly everyone has a CD drive on their computer.

Even more exciting is the ability to send the image down the telephone line. We deliver the reference images people ask for from our library this way. More and more we are asked to send images on line to meet tight deadlines.

At the moment we run a traditional darkroom along side the digital imaging services. However, with new technology coming ever faster and ever cheaper it is hard to say just how much longer the familiar smells of the chemicals will continue to be part of our working lives.

My shot of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Molem speaking at a conference in Bournemouth. It hasn't been manipulated to make the point that digital imaging is more than fancy Photoshop tricks, but part of the reason that I got the job of covering the six day conference was because we could deliver each days photography down the line via modem allowing the designers to meet their printing deadlines.

Paul Carter 1999