Hi Joe,
You must be reading my mind! I planned to use the 3 x 5 card approach to have
it in the shot with the number or naming convention the client wants to use.
When I crop the product, that will be removed, but I can use that number/name
to name the cropped image! My assistant will also record the shots in order,
just in case. If all else fails, someone from the company should be able to
assist if I still get confused!
Thanks for the tip!!
Jim C.
Original Message:
-----------------
From: Joe Gwinn joegwinn@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 10:19:28 -0500
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] Catalog photography and configuration management
At 4:09 AM +0000 2/8/02, olympus-digest wrote:
>
>Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 6:33 PM
>To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [OM] Need some pricing advice
>
>
>Sorry if this is off-topic.
>
>I haven't done assignment photography in some time, but I have a job a
>company wants me to bid on. They are putting together a web-based catalog
>and want all their products photographed (well over 100). The products
>range in size from cookie-size boxes to a large oven. The job entails
>shooting the products, digitizing and removing the backgrounds in Photoshop,
>burning to a CD.
>
>I have no idea where to begin to price a job like this. I plan to shoot 35mm
>slides (with my OM4t, of course!). I would appreciate any advice any pros
>out there wish to share!!
Other posters have given pricing advice, but I have a different issue in mind.
With catalog photography, one needs to have an airtight procedure to ensure
that the photos don't get mixed up, ending up with the wrong titles and product
numbers. With 100 items, one can be somewhat sloppy, but embarassing mistakes
are still likely.
There are (were?) some big catalog photographers in the Boston area, and they
had a goodly number of administrators on their payroll whose sole purpose was
to keep all this straight. To theses companies, ~1,000 poroducts was a small
job, ~10,000 was typical, and ~100,000 a large job. They all cried when Sears
ceased publishing a catalog.
The traditional method is to use a bold black marker to block print the name
and number of the item on an unlined 3x5 card, and photograph the card along
with the product, but off in the corner where it's easily cropped out. This
low-tech method is pretty much bulletproof.
The other method is to use a Recordata back (or equivalent) to stamp a serial
number on the image, recording the serial number read from the camera back in a
notebook along with the product name and model.
A variant of this is to record on the image the time of day the photo was
taken, and record in the notebook the time that photography of each product
started and stopped. The time of day for the notebook should be read from the
camera back, not from some other clock, so that errors in setting clocks won't
confuse things. I prefer the time-of-day approach because it's far less
sensitive to human error. At four pictures an hour, timestamp resolution to
the second is unambiguous. However, the serial number approach is widely used.
The problem with time-of-day is to keep day1 separate from day2, et al, because
the Recordata back cannot imprint both date and time at once. The traditional
solution is to make the first frame of each roll a photo of a card saying the
date and job number. Recordata backs can be set to generate a serial number
stream that keeps on incrementing as one does roll after roll.
The notebook is a three-ring binder with a page for each product being
photographed. Write everything in ink, and if there's an error, cross out (but
do not obscure) the erroneous entry, and write the correct data nearby. The
cross-out rule is to allow things to be sorted out later. It's amazing how
often errors come in bunches, especially when we are tired.
Anyway, here's to bureaucracy!
Joe Gwinn
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