Vincent Laforet:
In Tight in Torino
Point, Shoot, and Push
Looking to reclaim that critical 10 percent at the Olympics, Laforet, an early adopter of Aperture, decided to share his workflow goals with Apple. “I asked if there was a way to have an editor remotely edit my photographs,” he says. “Could I just stick my disk into my computer and have someone who has access to my Internet connection edit live while I continue to shoot. To be able to pop that card in the card reader and then immediately continue shooting — that was the key.”
Leveraging standard Mac OS X features, Apple engineers quickly designed a workflow that allowed Laforet to capture his images automatically on his PowerBook and share them remotely with a photo editor over an Internet connection.
The Aperture Advantage
On the night of the pairs competition in Turin the system worked without a hitch. To keep Laforet focused on the skaters, the new system required that he stop shooting only long enough to insert his CompactFlash cards into a card reader attached to his PowerBook. From there, Image Capture and Automator scripts automatically copied and moved high-res images (for eventual transmission to the Times) and corresponding low-res images (for immediate transfer to his photo editor over an unexpectedly slow ADSL connection) into separate files on Laforet’s PowerBook.
Several miles away, in the main media center, Times photo editor Jeremiah Bogert accessed Laforet’s file-shared public folder on one of the dozens of Aperture editing stations (PowerMac G5 Quad Macs with 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays) made available by Apple to photojournalists and editors in the Kodak Pavilion. Bogert took full advantage of Aperture’s multi-image viewer to compare similar sequential images — shot fractions of seconds apart — side by side. And he used Aperture’s Light Table feature to refine his selection of candidate images.
By the time Laforet returned to the media center from Palavela, Bogert had picked a half-dozen “selects” from the 2000 images Laforet had made. These were then moved to the Times FTP site for publication on their website and in the paper. As other photojournalists returned to the media center to begin the hours-long task of sorting through their take, Laforet and Bogert were essentially finished.
Final Standings
Among the event highlights that Laforet captured for the Times was American pairs skaters Rena Inoue and John Baldwin’s throw triple axel — the first ever landed in Olympic history. That he could capture such images is a credit, says Laforet, to the hands-off editing workflow.
“It would have been so hectic to edit and transmit at the pairs competition,” he says. “I was doing my job and my editor was doing his, on the other side of our connection. That’s the way it should be for these events.”
Laforet’s PowerBook and card reader set up for hands-off downloading of images.
Laforet believes that the solution he used could significantly change the way most photojournalists work. “Although the wire services have been doing something like this for three to four years now, with very high-speed lines, lots of advance networking people, and a fair amount of expense, this solution makes it possible for the individual photographer, working for a newspaper or for themselves, to compete,” he says.
And from what Laforet heard ice-side at Palavela, the change may be coming fast. “All the other photographers at the Olympics were asking, ‘What’s he doing? Why isn’t he editing his images?,’” he says. “But they were busy editing as the event was going on. I was busy shooting it.”
