Gulker labs

So, really, we’re not a lush, or, at least, not a complete lush. We do enjoy pinot noir, among other vintages, but we also spend many hours a day working on hard problems like finding exactly the right data and physical schema for my photo archive.

Today we took advice from Peter Krogh’s book (The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers) and friend Scott about the lowest-cost method (in labor and other resources) to catalog my (at this point) 41 years in photography.

We have, roughly, some 100,000 digital images created in the past 10 years or so. Worse, our garage contains about 200 boxes stuffed with prints, clippings, negatives and transparencies, which may constitute a similar or much larger number. Almost none of these images, of course, are cataloged, digitally or otherwise.

Krogh’s book makes the point that the greater part of a photo’s value is the ability to find it. A mediocre image that is well tagged with so-called meta-data is more discoverable, and thus, potentially, salable than a fantastic image languishing, unheralded, in one of the boxes in my garage. Krogh proposes a work flow that automatically attaches info, with relatively few keystrokes, that make photos far more searcher-friendly. We’ve already started doing this for InMenlo assignments.

As for the garage stash, we decided ‘in-situ cataloging’ was a good match for the Krogh/Loftesness hybrid work flow. Basically, we’ve printed out a bunch of 3×4-inch sticky labels with box numbers – Box 1, Box 2 etc. – and are slapping them on the Kodak 11×14 and 8×10 Kodabromide boxes that hold the vast majority of my archive. We then scan as much of the box’s contents as seems wise – from a few prints to the whole contents.

The result is an archive of high-res images (both prints and negs go to high-quality, high-res scanners) of the best images with pointers in the keywords field to the location of the print or neg. Other photos of similar vintage, frequently the outtakes, are in the same boxes, so there is at least a vector to these previously utterly unavailable images, and I’m not stuck scanning thousands of images to get the few I care about.

In the process, I’m editing, and thus adding value (if you believe Krogh) to the archive. The artist’s hand is visible, as it were.

Next up, we’re thinking about integrating 2D barcodes on the boxes, the prints (with removable, archival labels) and on the web. In theory, a prospective buyer could point their iPhone cam at one of the photo archive’s barcoded web-page images, and buy it with a click. We at the archive could find and ship it quickly. Ka-ching!

Nice having an electronic payments genius for a close friend. But, getting back to my other favorite topic, drinking wine, did we mention the unwisdom of posting after a few cups of the grape…?

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We got home from Fry’s today with the bits and pieces we needed to get Gulker Lab’s latest ‘op center’ up and running, right here in our literal Silicon Valley garage. As the temperature this afternoon climbed into the high 80s (one of the reasons startups seek funding is to get out of too-hot, too-cold uninsulated garages), we lashed together a previously-idle Mac mini, a large, cheap (on sale) Chinese monitor, a very large storage array and a few unspecified peripherals. The major necessity – 26-buck powered speakers with subwoofer, completed our powerful UNIX- (actually BSD-) based workstation. The industrial-strength vacuum cleaner is handy, too.

The odor of hot plastic as we fired up the new rig was, well, intoxicating. However, right here and now, it will be a good thing to dispel any rumors or hearsay (without spilling the beans about what we are up to). We are NOT:

- doing anything with the PENGUIN pattern-recognition and link discovery code we wrote in the late 90s. The Narus STA and other, more modern advances are way out ahead of our decade-old code in practice, if not in principal. Besides, we think it’s unethical that a bunch of clowns in DC know which fetish porn DVDs you rented while the spouse was away.

- BTW, the ‘antenna farm’ on my roof is really just a bunch of Radio Shack products aimed at improving reception on the FM set in the family room and indulging my hobby of short-wave listening. Really. RF is so yesterday, in any case.

- while it’s true that the demo code I wrote for peering, self-syncing databases could well have rescued the TSA from its numerous, ongoing, embarrassing ‘no-fly’ blunders, this effort has nothing to do with that. TSA, basically a jobs program, doesn’t want to fix problems. It just wants to get bigger.

- despite the advanced, high-resolution imaging device some trained observers may note in the photo above, we are doing absolutely nothing involving ‘remote sensing.’ Those pernicious rumors involving me with the KH-11 upgrade, and even more laughably, KH-13, are just that, and don’t even go into MISTY (especially that ’signature suppression’ patent stuff) or Rhyolite (I’m not that old fer chrissakes).

Really, we’re just a geezer who has a hard time hacking Wordpress templates, so don’t expect too much. We’re only having fun!  Investors, please note we are available Tuesday mornings, after our Scott-and-Lily walk, from 8 to 10 AM,  for term-sheet discussions…

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The argument of whether photography is art is not something I want to touch with a ten-foot sable-haired No. 3 paintbrush. Let us just say that, in my experience, there are times when a photographer sees something, and it sparks a vision.

That vision might lead, as it so often did in the case of photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, to an idea for a print. The photographer would figure out (or would serendipitously arrive at) the time and place to snap the picture. Said photographer would then take the processed negative into the darkroom and begin the labor-intensive practice of making the print.

Photographers have a huge collection of techniques for manipulating prints – burning, dodging, water baths, hot swabbing, bleaching (to name a few) – to achieve a vision that may lie outside the range of unmanipulated film and paper. Since these were manual, analog techniques, some of which require skill and practice comparable to an artist with brush or pencil, each print was a performance, and it was rare that two prints would be exactly the same.

In the modern photo world, good photographers spend no less time putting their vision into a form that successfully translates to a print (or, increasingly, a screen of some sort). The available tools for manipulating image files are vastly larger (Photoshop alone has hundreds) and the time spent is scarcely less, in my experience, than it was in the old analog days.

The big difference is that everything the digital photographer does is captured in the image file – both the original information and everything the photographer does to nudge the image closer to the vision. Once the photographer has a successful interpretation, that image can be reproduced any number of times, with great precision in every case.

While my goal as an analog photographer was usually a print, my goal as a digital photographer is the ‘digital master file’ that captures both the image and my intent (so-called ‘meta’ information). The photographer’s version of a ‘digital master’…

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