The Digital Insider

As a photography hobbyist and former semi-pro I have had quite a bit of experience in the arena of sports photography. For me sports photography was a natural fit as I am an avid sports fan and love the excitement of trying to snap that great shot right when the moment happens.

For me, none of this would have been possible without digital photography. By being able to immediately review my images on my laptop I am able to make all the adjustments I need on the fly. So when that breakaway goal is scored late in the second half I have had a chance to adjust and re-adjust my camera so I can capture the moment perfectly.

As a photographer, athletes are coming at you very quickly and the focus points can be tricky. I find along with that the lighting varies in different spots and angles on an indoor court and when outdoors you need to always take into consideration where the sun is overhead and the changing cloud conditions.
While I would like to take a perfect shot every time, I am just not that good nor will I ever be. That is why I never miss an opportunity to review the images I have taken. The instant feedback of being able to view my own work has been every bit as valuable as any instruction I have received. Knowing what angles are working best with the lighting and how to adjust my equipment gives me an edge I would not have without the digital format.

Many of my best shots can be considered lucky by others and that I just happened to be in the right place in the right time. But most all of them were later in the game when I have had a chance to make adjustments and put myself in a position to be successful. It’s amazing how lucky one can get when they put in the work to get there.
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian

Getty Images, the leading provider of stock photography and video, agreed to a buyout offer today from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman.  At ScanDigital, we continue to work closely with professional photographers wishing to digitize their life work and monetize the image through the sale of stock photography.  The move today by Hellman & Friedman supports our belief that this segment of the market will continue to grow.  Getty Images owns iStockphoto.com, a site that provides royalty free images.  This cost structure has proven itself to be particularly attractive for many web developers and companies seeking images for their website.

iStockphoto as well as other web based companies that sell stock photography continue to be a great source of ongoing income for professional photographers and are an invaluable resource for web designers and graphic artists.  Images that once could have cost hundreds of dollars now cost only a few dollars which has increased overall volume.  The stock photography industry has also grown as meta-tagging and search capabilities have been improved allowing users to more readily find and access images matching the user’s specifications.

It will be quite interesting to watch how Getty grows and changes as a company under Hellman & Friedman’s management.  It will also be interesting to see if other private equity firms make a run at Getty’s competitors, such as Corbis.  At ScanDigital we continue to be excited about our ability to assist photographers to bridge the gap from analog to digital.  It is an all around winning situation: professional photographers are able to increase their income through the sale of the images, the stock photography sites enjoy a larger library, we have additional digital conversion work and, perhaps most importantly, the end user has access to better images in a larger library at a lower cost.

I was very excited when I recently learned that the DigiPac shipping option was added to ScanDigital’s artillery of high performance parts. DigiPac, the only way to ship your precious memories, eliminates the hassle of printing out a mailing label and locating appropriate packing materials for your treasured photos.

All ScanDigital customers have the convenience of registering online for the service. The process is really so easy from start to finish: gather your photos, create an account, request a DigiPac and for only ten dollars you will receive a box, pre-paid shipping label, bubble wrap and small plastic bags by mail within two to five days. All packing materials are recyclable and reusable. Then you just drop your photos in the box and about 10 days later the same box returns with your materials, a disc and instructions on how to access your photos online.

I was personally excited when I heard we were about to launch the DigiPac. It was one of those things that I knew immediately would help our customers because let me tell you, there have been so many times where I want to ship something that I end up in a mad scramble to put together a makeshift box only to realize that I do not have all the proper shipping materials. DigiPac eliminates the hassle of going to the UPS store or if you’re like me, creating a box practically from scratch.

Some of the most respected companies in the world use the pre-paid packaging method, the vision at ScanDigital was to model this while maintaining the highest customer service rating among our clients. I’m sure many of you for one reason or another have had to send a laptop or computer back for repair. When the packaging from, lets say Apple in this case arrives, you are instantly put at ease with the contents of the shipping package. A sturdy box, extra cushioning, and a label. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

The ScanDigital DigiPac…helping everyone sleep better.

About Brian Samuelson: ScanDigital welcomes Brian Samuelson, the newest member of the ScanDigital PR team. Brian comes from a variety of backgrounds within the of public relations, marketing, and event planning fields. Outside of the office, Brian enjoys photography, surf, and travel.

When we set out to create ScanDigital, one of the primary goals of the business was to eliminate the fine print. Meaning we never want our customers to have to dig through pages and pages of our website to understand the service we provide. Growing up my mother always emphasized with us the golden rule and this has carried into to my business life. I constantly try to put myself in our customers’ shoes and imagine how I would want a company to interact with me.

I am very proud of our customer service team and the superb service they provide to our customers. I have been encouraged by the enthusiast positive reaction and feedback our customers provide on this front. It seems in this day and age people are pre-conditioned to expect to spend much of their time on hold when dialing a toll free customer service line. I am not sure how this happened, but I can tell you it goes against almost every business principle I have ever learned.

I came across an article about a month ago called “7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers” (the full article can be found here: http://foundread.com/2007/10/18/7-habits-of-highly-effective-managers/). As I was reading the article, I realized that many of the principles correlated with the same principles I have tried to instill in our customer service team. The principles mentioned in the article are as follows:

1. Know Your Limits
2. Listen First Before Speaking
3. Ask “Why?” not “What?”
4. Be Decisive
5. Be Responsive
6. Communicate Frequently
7. Manage Passion

From a customer service perspective many of these are the same. To correlate these, my keys for our superb customer service:

1. Know Your Limits - If you do not know the answer to every one of a customer’s questions they will be much happier if you turn them over to someone that can answer their questions.
2. Listen First Before Speaking - Our customers’ questions span a broad range of topics and often the best thing we can do is listen first and speak second.
3. Ask “Why?” not “What?” - This is a particularly important one and not necessarily the most intuitive, but in order to provide the highest level of customer service we need to understand why our customers are using our service and how they intend to use the digital images. For example, a customer who wishes to use the files digitally we will want to recommend our “Normal” resolution levels; however, if the customer wants to create enlarged reprints or plans to use the images in a professional capacity then they should use our higher resolution settings.
4. Be Decisive - The process of digitizing is foreign to many of our customers and they are looking for us to provide clear, straight forward answers in a decisive manner.
5. Be Responsive - Our customers trust us with their precious photos and memories which makes it critical to our business that we be available and responsive. Doing otherwise would be unfair to our customers and would be terrible for our business. On top of that, its just the right thing to do.
6. Communicate Frequently - This idea is similar to #5, but again the idea is to keep the customer informed at all times. This puts their mind at ease.
7. Manage Passion - Our service is great and I love the passion our employees feel for it, but that does not mean we should stop improving our service. My goal is to constantly tweak and improve our service and system to provide the most user-friendly, hassle free service possible. Sometimes this means we need to recognize that our customers have great insights into where we can improve the service and in turn we need to be open to their suggestions. It is for this very reason that I still personally make time to take customer calls from time to time. It is important that we understand our customer their needs and motivation for using our service.

Greetings!

It is our pleasure to introduce The Digital Insider, ScanDigital’s monthly publication highlighting new and intriguing offers from ScanDigital. In addition, The Digital Insider will serve as a forum to present other topics of interest to our valued customers and digital photography enthusiasts. Enjoy!
ScanDigital’s Gift Cards are here! Ideal for the Holiday Season!

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New and Enhanced Affiliate Program Features

Due to the overwhelming success of ScanDigital’s pioneering Affiliate Program, we are excited to announce the release of a fully upgraded and enhanced online affiliate interface. The new, unique console provides unprecedented tracking capablities for our affiliates to view their progress and earnings. The program is free to join and provides numerous highlights including:

20% commission on all revenue generated plus $2 for all user registrations

Average order size over $200

Real-time statistics and monthly payments

Perfect for online and offline partners through the use of both custom referral links and trackable coupon codes

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ScanDigital Featured in The Los Angeles Business Journal and The Daily Breeze

ScanDigital has recently received some exciting press coverage. These articles, as well as other ScanDigital press coverage can be found at: www.scandigital.com/news

Enhancements to ScanDigital’s Online Gallery Create Friendly Functionality

Major upgrades to our online gallery released last week provide all registered users with access to the most user-friendly online photo gallery. The latest upgrades include:

• Multiple views (thumbnail, album, full view) for easy navigation through large photo collections
• Built in photo slide show functionality
• The ability to rearrange albums using ScanDigital’s proprietary drag & drop technology
• Enhanced ability to add titles and comments to photos, providing users greater flexibility for online photo organization
• Optimized Qoop integration allowing faster access to order prints and print products

Click on the image to view an enlarged version:

The Digital Insider Online Blog

In addition to the monthly newsletter, the Digital Insider is also online. Each week we post several articles of interest to our valued readers. To read and subscribe to the online version of the Digital Insider, please visit: www.scandigital.com/blog We are constantly looking for exciting and relevant topics for newsletter and blog articles, if you have any suggestions or would like see specific subject matter please email us at digitalinsider@scandigital.com Best Wishes!

Right off the bat here, I must admit that I have never been involved in any kind of evacuation. A few earthquakes and some school drills are about all I’ve attended. When it comes to fires, tornadoes, hurricanes or even an alien invasion I couldn’t even imagine the thoughts that run through a homeowners head. Having just a few minutes to get yourself, your family, and anything else you may find important out and on the move has got to be tough. What items do you take? What do you leave behind? What types of questions do you ask yourself? Do you really get the time to ask these questions?

Recently we here at ScanDigital have been receiving materials from those who have gone through just that. As I’m sure you know by now, Southern California has been fighting wildfires from Santa Barbara all the way down to the Mexican border. Thousands of homes have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the devastation. The story we are hearing first hand here every day is that of families gathering up whatever they can, clothes, heirlooms, and pictures and seeking shelter. The luckier ones have been able return to their homes and are working to return everything with minimal effort.

Having started as part of the ScanDigital team only weeks before this tragedy, I’ve realized in these dangerous evacuation situations it simply makes sense eliminate the burden of trying to rescue your photos by having them preserved and digitized in advanced. One of my favorite parts of our service is that the images are backed up to our offsite, secure servers, meaning our customers do not even need to worry about grabbing their CD/DVD in an unforeseen tragedy. If leaving pictures behind allows for more time to gather other items that can’t be replaced, I say save those. Printing out photos later just makes sense. It’s a problem one could worry about after all the other hassles are squared away. I like to think that the work I am doing provides a bit of the safety and piece of mind to our customers who know their photographs are safe offsite and online, hopefully this helps people during times like these.

Going to photography school with passion, enthusiasm and a longing for photographic knowledge can sometimes make the most open-minded student hang on every word a professor utters in his/her lectures. This can create a nightmare for by-the-book photo students that go out in the field thinking that the way they were taught was the best, most efficient and in some cases the only way to do something. Having worked as an assistant while completing the last semester of the photography program at Santa Monica College I quickly learned that there are several ways to skin a cat…if you take this literally, well, I really don’t like cats.

Now, whatever you learn in photography school it’s just a primer. First, there are several photographers out there that have no formal training.  Second, 99% of the potential clients out there could care less. And lastly, the bottom line is can you do the job.  No one cares if you went to Pasadena Art Center, Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara or Santa Monica Community College. Hell, technically speaking, they all give you the same education. In seven years, I have only encountered one situation where an editor actually said to me that she preferred people from a certain school. I wasn’t from that school but was hired and paid my day rate just the same. I delivered the goods and that’s all that mattered.

You are probably wondering what the hell this all has to do with the above title. Well, for the first few years out of photography school my bread and butter income was assisting two architectural photographers. One guy had several cameras, a studio full of strobe and hot lights and every gadget imaginable not to mention that he was on eBay every single day looking for more gadgets. There were glass filters with specific holders, center filters for every lens, a shutter release with a wind up timer on it; you name it he had it. And it wasn’t out of character to use 12 or more lights on one shot as a matter of fact it was common.

The other guy was a total minimalist. We would go out with a field camera, a basic Lowell light-kit (1 - 750 watt and 3 - 1000 watt lights) and one HMI. He even used his son’s old white bed sheet as bounce and he would put filters on the camera lens with blue tack and cheap plastic Lee filters.

The bottom line is that they are two of the top five and most sought after architectural photographers in southern California.

I learned a lot from working with each guy. Hence, when I was working on my own as a still photographer or doing work on low-budget independent films as a cinematographer, I employed everything I learned from both guys. If there was a budget for some gadgets I knew the most effective way to use them and if there was no budget, which was generally the case, I knew how to do the best with what I had.

So, work with anyone and everyone you can, absorb as much information as you can then go forth and do what you do.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with Muhammed El-Hasen from the Daily Breeze. We had a great discussion and covered topics from how we founded the Company to our plans for the future. The article was great and I have been meaning to post it for everyone to see. Have a read when you have a chance. The article can be found online at the following address:

http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/articles/10663116.html

Alternatively, the print version (including photos) can be found here:

http://www.scandigital.com/newspress.php

I miss film and knowing everything about it. Okay, I knew a lot about a little…anyway, it was fun to study or just experiment with how various film reacted to light, chemistry and the calculated manipulation of both. Certain films had specific characteristics especially, the different films of the two main brands Kodak and Fuji. Very valuable information back in the day and now of no consequence in the digital age.

So begins the lament, provided that you haven’t stopped reading this which would mean that you are still reading this and this and this and… Whoa…I just woke myself up.

Learning the specific characteristics of Kodak, Fuji and even lessor known brands like Aftra films made me very good and valuable at my job and fueled my passion for my then immersion into photography. Yeah, I just patted myself on the back and smacked my ass saying you da man. I worked 30 hours a week at a professional photo lab and was enrolled in photography full time as well as working as a photo assistant periodically and working freelance for the school newspaper. That just prompted some warm nostalgic feelings. Forgive the drooling reminiscent tone but damn those days were exciting and memorable.

Kodak’s film characteristics were a little magenta. And if you pushed the film, especially slide (E-6) film in the chemistry it would start to go really magenta after about 1/2 stop. Fuji was a bit on the green side for negatives but there slide film Provia RDPIII was awesome. You could push it in the chemistry up to 1 1/2 stops before there was a noticeable difference in the natural colors on the film. This could be a life saver if you are shooting something and for whatever reason your light meter reading and/or assistant mis-read the exposure by a stop, you could push it in the chemistry 1 stop and another 1/2 stop if that wasn’t enough and still maintain the color integrity of what was intended, not to mention that the grain structure would also hold damn well against this strain.

You still there? Get us another beer wouldya.

Quick lesson if you don’t know: pushing and pulling films are terms used in a lab during post production. If you push the film you increase the exposure on the film as well as time in the chemistry. Hence, pulling film is the opposite. Your are trying to remove some exposure/overexposure from the film when pulling. Film reacts more drastically in terms of color shifts when pushing film than pulling it. Also, grain is increased the longer the film is exposed to the chemistry, etc.

My favorite thing to figure out was how different films reacted when cross processing them. If you don’t know, all negative film is C-41 which is the lab or professional reference and E-6 is the reference for all positive or slide film. Now, each of these has a very specific and different type of chemistry and process including temperature for developing. You develop a negative and you still have to print it on paper to see the positive image or photograph. A slide on the other hand is a positive image and once developed you, in affect, have your picture. Going back to my aforementioned favorite, if you take pictures using positive or slide film (E-6) and process it in negative (C-41) chemistry that is called a cross-processing. And yes, it’s called the same for going the other way - negative film C-41 developed in positive E-6 chemistry.

Without visual examples you will have to take my word for it when I say that when you figured out how different films reacted, and/or didn’t react. Cross-processing film would create photographs with a texture, vibrancy and mood that was so much fun to play with. A fun example is one photograph I took while hanging out in New York with my friends. The printed photograph looked like it was painted. It was a relatively calculated event. I knew that by shooting and then cross processing Kodak EPP (E-6) film in negative chemistry that the finished photograph should have an overall cyan hue, with saturated colors and more than normal grain. I had also remembered a photographer that shot for Billabong had mentioned to me that they did a few campaigns with this idea and that they used hot lights as the light source. If you don’t know, hot lights or any incandescent light is yellowish-red or warm in color temperature. For whatever reason, this made colors pop with the aforementioned process. Meanwhile, back in New York, I’m looking at the Brooklyn skyline from Manhattan totally front lit by the sun on a clear spring day at dusk. My calculated and educated guess ended up producing one of mine and my friend’s favorite photographs for quite some time and people still see it and think that it was manipulated somehow. Well, it was…by film, chemistry and a warm evening sun.

Last week, Greg Soblete from TWICE magazine spent some time discussing ScanDigital and our new affiliate program with Anderson Schoenrock. When you have a chance check out the article posted over at . The interview and article was also featured in TWICE’s print publication. The full article can be founde here: http://www.twice.com/article/CA6487977.html?q=scandigital