Digital Fusion:
The Future of Pro Digital Photography
Film is portable, durable, versatile. But its arcane chemistry is going out of style. Magazines, ad agencies and newspapers want their photographers to go digital — it’s cleaner, faster, cheaper. Digitizing a photographer, however, is no easy task.
The pros have tinkered with film for ages and they know how to get a great shot. They know how a perfect print is coaxed from a piece of photo paper. Digital is different. There are no chemicals, darkrooms or negatives. Contact sheets are composed on computers, not cut and pasted on paper.
Offering a new concept in pro photography, the Los Angeles-based DigitalFusion leads professional film photographers into the realm of digital photography and postproduction. “We could see that our clients were going to need digital experts,” says the company’s co-founder Jon Moeller. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘How do we make sure a shooter can go in, design and execute his vision and still not change what he’s done in his career for 20 years?’ We decided to get out in front of the technology, test everything and show them the path.”
“We were able to fly in and help an industry that was over 100 years old make the transition from analog to digital.”
Moeller and darkroom master Hugh Milstein came up with a formula that gives photographers everything they need to go digital: Rent out custom carts — called the FuseBox™ — loaded with Hasselblad SLR cameras sporting 22-megapixel digital backs, Apple Cinema Displays, Power Mac G5s and batteries. They can be shipped almost anywhere and come complete with technicians who manage all the gear.
Hugh Milstein (left) and Jon Moeller started DigitalFusion, a digital scanning, retouching and printing business, in a Venice Beach, California, garage. Now the company provides a complete solution for professional digital photographers. Photo: Art Streiber.
When the raw files from a shoot hit DigitalFusion, they’re color-corrected and processed, then archived on a colossal 40-terabyte Xserve RAID and ripped into DFStudio™, a custom online application, for viewing. From there, photographers can edit their shoot and deliver digital proof sheets to their clients.
“We were able to fly in and help an industry that was over 100 years old make the transition from analog to digital,” says Moeller.
Good Chemistry
DigitalFusion began in a garage in Venice Beach, Calfornia, in 1999. Moeller was running Apple servers and building websites for Sony Pictures and Milstein was cooking up prints for Hollywood movie moguls. “I really studied the medium of film,” says Milstein. “You could give me exposure readings and I could give you a depth of field calculation. It was the science of the stuff that I really dug.”
A veteran Mac user, Milstein knew there was potential in digital scanning, color correction and printing. “My professional life has always evolved around photography and the Mac,” he says. “I was waiting for those two technologies to converge so I could make a career out of it. Once the Mac got us to a place where we could scan and retouch the stuff, we just had to wait for the photo printers to come out and when that happened, man, this whole thing took off.”
The two longtime friends — they met in high school in Phoenix — decided to stir their skills into a unified digital photography solution. Milstein craved a slick, efficient digital photo lab and Moeller wanted to mimic movie editing and production workflow. They modeled their new enterprise on high-end postproduction houses. Photographers would meet with Milstein to scan and fine-tune their shots before making prints.
Whereas in a photo lab photographers would drop their negatives off to a customer service rep and come back three days later to look at a print, “we actually started with a different idea,” says Milstein. “Set up an appointment just like in a doctor’s office. Come in and sit with your custom printer. Make your decisions right there on the screen and leave with your prints. It turned the idea of drop-it-off-and-leave on its ear.”
”It was a very, very powerful change,” adds Moeller. “The film and TV business had done that with their editing suites — it’s the way directors edit their movies. But it was a very new experience for photographers. It took a while to get used to. They liked it, but it took a while.”
During the next few years, DigitalFusion outgrew its Venice Beach garage and two more offices. Moeller and Milstein gathered an elite group of digital artists and scanning specialists as well as a loyal following of top-notch photographers, including Art Streiber, James White, Dewey Nicks, Jeff Lipsky, Anthony Mandler and Mark Liddell. The shots they scanned and retouched were featured on the covers and in the pages of such magazines as “Vanity Fair,” “Flaunt,” “GQ,” “Glamour,” “Entertainment Weekly,” “Esquire” and “Marie Claire.
