I Never Leave Home Without It

Which is easy to do, I mean, wherever you have the internet. I’m talking about PhotoShelter. At the beginning of this year, I started thinking about the tools we use the most here at the studio. Cameras, to be sure, and lenses. Lights? Occasionally. 😉  Email? Oh yeah, so joyous, right?

But then I thought, well, PhotoShelter. We are constantly drawing on it, relying on it, shipping pictures on it. I am often confronted with last-minute stuff on the road, like to create an impromptu blog, or if something happens in the world and I have a picture I could perhaps tweet or publish that might relate to said event. Or, as you see above, the nomenclature on the grid of images. I gave a talk last year at the Winchester Photographic Society, and I tweaked my talk right up till the last minute. Which PhotoShelter enabled me to do. Or, as a for instance, I am starting a series on the National Geographic photographers’ Instagram site, @thephotosociety, profiling extraordinary people I have met during my time with a camera in hand. It will run for a while so I will have to be constantly diving into my archive, sometimes deeply, to retrieve imagery. I can do that from a hotel in just about anywhere, which is good, as I am often in a hotel just about anywhere.

As an example, this photo will be upcoming, at some point. I had to search out this older scan, and once I found it, to keep things up and on my radar screen, I transferred it to my PhotoShelter acct. where I have a personal folder, apart from client work. This is a collection of imagery that I am either fond of, and occasionally use in a lecture, or work that I think might be interesting to one day blog about or otherwise discuss. In a sense, nowadays, I use my PhotoShelter account as a virtual desktop.

It is easy to use, even for thunderthumbs, here. And Cali, our crew chief, who interacts with it even more than I do, says this: “The back-end of our website is where this we get the most bang for our buck. Not only do we get to use PhotoShelter to store our most important images at the studio… we are also constantly using this as a platform to share our images with clients, models, etc. It has become part of our daily workflow.” Cali is not the kind to get overly effusive about technology, so the above is high praise indeed. If I am on the road, and divert some work load to Cali, like for instance the supply of photos to someone, somewhere, he can literally have it done in minutes.

Food for thought, as we start another year of planes, trains and automobiles. I have a technology tether for my vagabond life as a photog. More tk….