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Taking the Photographer Out of the Picture
BNH spoke with Gerry Gerlach, digital photo shop director at FoxIntegrity of Windsor
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Business New Haven
9/20/1999
By: BNH
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What are your responsibilities as digital photo shop director?
I'm the color department team leader, so I oversee all of the color that we supply, whether it's separated color or photography or digital photography. I make sure that all the color that goes to be built into files is okay, and I deal with customers in terms of any kinds of color issues that might be involved. My background is as a scanner operator as well as a photographer, so the two work very well together in order to take care of these kinds of issues.
Describe the basics of digital photography.
Digital photography uses CCB technology, which is basically just a video camera that captures the image really quickly. There are several different kinds of cameras, but the most popular are the ones that capture the image very quickly. So you have a digital photograph right there on the screen. From there you can do any number of things with it. If it's high enough resolution, of course you can print with it, which is what we do here primarily. But even low-resolution images are great for things like Web sites or sending images over the telephone line very quickly.
What kind of customers are most interested in digital photography?
Typically it's a high volume-type customer. There are a number of tremendous advantages with digital photography, because you instantly see the image. You don't have to go though a whole long photo shoot and wait a couple of days for the transparencies to come back, and so forth. You see the image instantly - right there. And the way we have always operated in the studio is to have the customer right with us and able to see instantly what the image looks like. If they want to modify it, if they want to change it, we can do it right there. We can adjust the lighting, or we can take out this or that. It's instant, so it's very user-friendly, it works really great with customers. Primarily, we use the camera with high-volume kind of work.
What kinds of projects have you been working on lately?
Now I'm doing an entire holiday mailing in all-digital photographs. I also did the grocery store chain, Edwards [Food Warehouse]. We handle all their digital photography for them. Their project was high volume, but it wasn't the volume so much as the convenience. We had a professional food-stylist come in and cook the food, the steaks, turkeys and all that stuff. They could see instantly how they were going to compose the whole page. We just supplied the images to the printer and it went to press. It's so much easier than going to transparencies, looking it them, doing the separations and so forth.
Are you finding that more and more customers are opting for digital photography?
Yes. It's very overwhelming, because as the cameras have evolved, every year they've just gotten better and better. We even see some clients who traditionally would only use conventional photography moving more toward digital work, because the quality of the image is so high. It hasn't replaced conventional photography by any means, and I'm not sure it ever will. We're at a point now where it's very difficult to even tell a conventional photograph from a digital photograph. We did a lot of work for people who had always used conventional photographs, but more and more we see digital photography being used.
Are there drawbacks to digital photography?
Yes, it's because all the [visual] information isn't there. You don't have the full range of dynamic tones you would find in a conventional photograph - it just isn't there. But with so many people and in certain markets, you can't even tell the difference. The print for Staples, you could never tell the difference by the time it gets to press. Any flaws that were in the image really just don't appear. But, again, you can't really replace traditional photography, because traditional photography has such a tremendous range of tones and you can't achieve that with digital. But, believe me, digital is getting closer and closer all the time.
Can digital photography be more cost-effective than chemical photography in some instances?
It's tremendously cost-effective, because the photographer's out of the picture. The way we operate it is, I work as a photographer and a separator. We supply the client with the finished digital image. Before he would have to go to a photographer, then have that processed, then find a separator to separate it, then have it printed. Now we've taken the photographer completely out of the loop. And, because of the speed of the thing, it really makes it very efficient. Many customers take advantage of that by giving us a tremendous amount of pictures that they need to have done very quickly. They get in one afternoon a number of pictures that would normally take them several days. You can sit right down and work with the client and the picture is right there, and I can show him exactly what it's going to look like once it's completed. And it just turns out great.
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