Bill Frakes: Photo Finish
Adding metadata comes next. All shots are tagged with basic info during import — location, date and EXIF data. Then he burns two DVD’s of the entire take to be stored in different locations.
Frakes adds more detail to his selects, including keywords and detailed captions. “There’ll be a ton of information on those shots because they’ll end up in portfolios or contests,” he says.
He streams selects to his studio via a VPN and then sends the five or six best shots to his PhotoShelter account. “Those shots are archived on several servers at opposite ends of the country,” he says. “They’re completely secured. PhotoShelter also powers my website so the process is tight and seamless.”
For Frakes Derby day ends at about 3:45 the next morning. He packs up his machines and lies down to catch a few hours of sleep before heading off to the next assignment.
Stabled
Frakes organizes and polishes all his work with Aperture at his Florida office. “The beauty of Aperture is that I’m finally able to have all these years of images in one spot,” he says. “I have hundreds of thousands of images in my Aperture library. It’s great.” He has migrated his digital images into the library and is constantly scanning and uploading his film archive. By this time next year he hopes to have around a million images archived in Aperture.
The photographer adds keywords and metadata to make searching a cinch. “I can do a complete run-through of the Aperture database in minutes and find just the image I need,” he says. “That has been impossible to do in the past.” Frakes stores his select images (the ones that are digital — either captured initially or scanned from film) on an Xserve RAID. He can access his Aperture library from any computer on his network via Ethernet or a wireless Airport network.
After his files are loaded into Aperture, Frakes tweaks exposure and color settings. Thanks to Aperture’s non-destructive editing, his original RAW files are left untouched. It’s a big deal, considering the time and effort that goes into each shot. “If you’ve worked so hard to get that information, why would you ever want to lose any of it?” he says. “It’s just straightforward. If I can make changes like sharpening, brightening, burning, dodging, color balance, without any degradation to the original file, that’s to my advantage. I always want to be able to maintain the original file because the next time I decide to burn or dodge or change the color balance, maybe I’d like to do it differently.”
That flexibility lets Frakes create new versions of his master files for portfolios, contests or just for fun. It also lets him work fast and efficiently on any project without the possibility of losing any irreplaceable shots.
© Bill Frakes
Aperture is Frakes’ main archival tool. He uses it exclusively to organize digital shots or images from scanned film negatives, and it’s at the center of everything he does with his archive.
“Aperture is a classic Apple program,” he says. “It’s stylish, it’s slick, it’s powerful and it’s reliable.”
