Urban Motion Blog

© Ben Anderson
Strangers: Ben Anderson | la pura vida

© Ben Anderson

I recently noticed that my photography had become less dynamic. I think this is mainly because I’ve been concentrating on shooting medium and large format cameras. The cost of film & processing, the bulk and considered nature of shooting heavier equipment, had subconsciously altered how and when I chose to pull the trigger.

Predominantly this manifested itself in a shift away from recording life moments as they happen toward planned excursions with a camera. This has been both good and bad, some of the photos I’ve taken on MF/LF are without doubt my best work, but at the same time this has caused me to lose some of the spark I enjoyed about photography.

What I needed was to keep a foot in both camps so in an effort to address this I recently picked up a camera that provides is the exact opposite of the studied moment, an Olympus MJU II, a fully automatic point and shoot 35mm film camera. More photos to follow.

I have a print available for purchase through Nova Gallery.

The print is taken from my work in progress series 30 Something.

I’m not using this gear enough to warrant keeping it, so am selling it all, prices are open to reasonable offers. All of it is in excellent condition. ***PRICES REDUCED***

© Ben Anderson

• Canon EOS 1DMKII – brand new shutter, boxed (£700) AVAILABLE
• Canon EOS 50/1.4 boxed (£200) AVAILABLE
• 6 Bowens Pulsar Radio Triggers – (£110 per pair) 1 SOLD 2 LEFT
• Metz 76 MZ-5 boxed (£350) AVAILABLE
• Interfit blue portrait backdrop 2.4m*2.7m (£20) AVAILABLE
• Peli 1650 hard case, Padded dividers & lid organiser – (£200) AVAILABLE
• Canon EOS 17-40L boxed (£425) SOLD
• 2 SB-28 Strobist style Flashes boxed (£60 each) SOLD
• 2 Manfrotto 001B Nano Stands (£30 each) – SOLD
• 2 Manfrotto 122B Back stands (£15 each) – SOLD
• 3 Umbrella Swivels, 2 have cold shoe’s (£10 each) – SOLD
• 1 Bowens 115cm silver/shoot through umbrella (£15) – SOLD
• 1 Bowens 90cm silver/shoot through umbrella (£15) – SOLD
• 1 Westcot 100cm silver double fold (compact) umbrella (£15) – SOLD
• 2 Manfrotto superclamps (£10 each) – SOLD
• 1 Lastolite EZ Box Hotshoe (£60) – SOLD
• Interfit Background Support System (£35) SOLD
• Interfit washable White backdrop 2.4m*2.7m (£35) SOLD
• Telescopic Reflector Arm (for disc reflecors) (£25) SOLD

Drop me an e-mail if you’re interested – bennyboy@benneh.net

Myself and Ben Roberts and a few others will be heading to the Colin O’Brien private view at the Basement at Pages, Hackney on Thursday Night. We’ll be going for some food afterward so swing by if you fancy it.

Here’s Ben’s ugly mug so you can recognise us on arrival:

© Ben Anderson

© Ben Anderson
Stanley passed away in the early hours of May 14 2009 after a long struggle with illness. He lived his life to the fullest and revelled in his friendships to the end, a lesson to us all.

Here’s to you Stanley! You’ll be sorely missed.

Here’s some of my recent 8×10 portraiture:

© Ben Anderson


© Ben Anderson


© Ben Anderson

© Ben Anderson

If there’s one thing which torments me more than anything else as a ‘serious photographer’, it is finding time to go out and chase my project aspirations.

My wife and three children all vie for my time (and rightly so, they are after all the most important people in my life), as does my busy corporate career. This means that I’m often left with only snippets of the weekend or the hours after darkness available for shooting, neither of which lend themselves especially well to involved and engaging project work.

The flip side of this situation is that when I do get out there it is all the more satisfying precisely because I know just how difficult it has been to find the time to get the shots that I want.

And now I’m attempting to shoot with a large format camera – could I really make this any more difficult for myself? I guess I must be addicted to having some kind of obstacle to overcome (or something to moan about!).

I’d be interested to hear from you if this sounds at all familiar.

© Ben Anderson

I primarily shoot using a Mamiya 7II 6×7 rangefinder, it’s a wonderfully simple camera to shoot with. The camera has a couple of viewfinder idiosyncrasies to overcome when you first start out with it*, but once you know what to expect from the framing it is really rather liberating to use. It is quiet, relatively compact, and above all incredibly portable.

The fact that it is a rangefinder means the camera is very easy to hand hold, removing the necessity for a tripod in all but the most extreme situations. This means you can shoot quickly and inconspicuously in many more situations than when carrying a cumbersome tripod. The upshot of this is that this camera has become almost like an extension of my body, it is with me almost all of the time. So it is particularly wrenching when the camera breaks. And it has done it twice now.

I don’t get much time to shoot which means I plan what I’m going to do – I like to take random meanderings from what are normally A-B routes, this way I find new rat runs for commutes whilst also reccying new locations to shoot. I also spend a fair amount of time using google maps satellite view to explore possible locations (as I know others do). Turning up at one of these locations to have my camera freeze after frame 1 is disappointing to say the least. The most recent time this happened I wasted 2 rolls by reloading to check if it was just some bizarre jam. Alas No – another day wasted, another month and a bit away for repair: 3 out of 11 months without the camera to date.

With the camera now safely back in hand I’m shortly heading out to run a roll through, hopefully this time 7 will once again be my lucky number.

* with a 65mm lens, parallax issues mean the frame lines crop peoples feet for full length close up portraits, and images at infinity are approx 20% larger than the frame lines.

Introduction

Put yourself in this scenario, you have just received an e-mail about one of your online photos, the sender would like a hi-res copy for print (be it a competition entry/client/magazine/whatever), this is great news, but where did you put the original media??? If you’ve been taking a lot of photos for a while you could be wading through an awful lot of files or film to find one image, and that’s time that you either don’t have or could better spend on something else.

This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) comes into its own. In this post I will describe the methods I use to store and catalogue my photographs in order that I can quickly locate the original media for any print or digital file. These methods add a very small initial overhead to storing your photos, but deliver an easily searched and cleverly indexed image catalogue.

For my purposes I use some software called Iview MediaPro, but Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, or any other photographic/media cataloguing software will work just as well. In order to use this method successfully you will need to have some of this software installed on your computer.

Organising your files

Folder Structure

I organise all of my files in a very simple, but very powerful hierarchy of folders on my hard drive. The folders can easily be archived onto other media and backups can be taken at any point.

I have a folder for each year. The folder format is: YYYY

In the year folders I have a folder for each shoot based upon the year month and first day of the shoot. All of the digital originals and film scans for that shoot go into this folder. The folder format is: YYYYMMDD_Location_Subjects_OtherInfo

In the shoot folders I have a folder where I keep all edits, in my case PSD files. I DO NOT catalogue edits. The folder format is: EDITS

© Ben Anderson

File Names

Digital cameras do pretty well at giving your photos unique file names, but some will re-use the same filenames after counting though a particular range. By storing your shots in ‘shoot folders’ as described above it’s very unlikely that you’ll get duplicates in one place that will overwrite one another. Cameras insert a lot of metadata into the headers of your files, this metadata can describe exposure, time, date, image resolution, camera model, and much more, all of this is information that your catalogue software will import.

Film scans on the other hand contain none of this information, if you’re lucky you will get the scan date/time and scanner model. It is VITAL that you use a numbering system for your scans. I use a very simple but, again, very powerful system which I will now describe:

I store all of my negatives in film binders, be they 135, 120, 4×5, or 8×10. Each binder is numbered, the first being 0001. The negatives are inserted into archival film pages. Each page is numbered, the very first page being page 00010001 (the first 4 digits are the binder number – this stops pages being put in the wrong binders later), each individual frame is simply the frame number on the film. So, if I scanned frame 9 on film page 1 from binder 1, it would be named 00010001-9.tif This makes it exceptionally simple to locate an original film frame from a scan.

Cataloguing

File Import

Every time I add original files into a ‘shoot folder’ that folder gets imported into Iview MediaPro – it’s just a drag and drop, the tool itself only ever keeps one catalogue copy of a file so dropping the same files in more than once does not create duplicates in the catalogue. This means that if you ever forget to add something you can just drop your entire folder structure in again, all the missing content will get added.

Adding Value

Now that my catalogue knows about the files, I want to record some additional information about them.

Star rating – Each photo gets a quality rating from 1 to 5 stars (* -> *****), you can use this later to thin down the catalogue, or simply to pick out your best images.

Colour coding – At import time I generally do not assign a colour code, I do this as I work though processing the shots from a shoot, here are the codes I use:

Yellow – This is the default colour, it means that the image has been tagged, starred and, obviously, colour coded, but no post processing has yet occurred. Assigning this colour as I process the images makes it easy to identify any images I’ve missed – especially handy when importing files from the past that I forgot to add, the newly added images will have no colour coding.

Green – the image has been post processed (so a PSD should exist in the EDITS folder)

Red – the image requires some post processing/is of interest.

Orange – the image has previously been post processed but needs working over again

Tagging – this is where the real power of a catalogue lies, by tagging effectively you can easily and effectively search your files for common elements. I tend to add names, objects, film type, location, and anything else I think might prove useful later.

What Now?

Locating Original Media

Now that you have catalogued all of your originals, how do you exploit it? Easily, whenever you make an edit, make sure you follow your naming convention, keep the original filename or add the name as a tag to wherever it gets uploaded. Write the filename on the back of your prints. It can’t get much easier than that, now you will always be able to quickly find the original media for any of your edits.

Scalability

If you take a LOT of photos, perhaps you are a pro or have simply just been shooting for a LONG time, you can split your catalogues into smaller chunks, each catalogue can contain just a year, a month, or even a single shoot. IView allows catalogues to be catalogued, so you can create a master file for the rare occasions where you need to search your entire body of work (or a smaller subset)

Conclusion

You now know how to effectively keep track of your photographs, so get to it, the sooner you start the better. If you have a backlog of photos to be catalogued it will be daunting, but you may find some gems you’d previously overlooked or forgotten about. Have peace of mind that you will always be able to find your original media.