I’m almost done redesigning and implementing the UVM Art Department website using WordPress 3 instead of the rather old and cumbersome “magicscript” template system that is the default for UVM. The test version is here: www-dev.uvm.edu/~artdept/new/

My work and a few other people’s sparked a discussion about using wordpress for a site-wide CMS. I really hope this happens. It would save a bunch of people time and money that nobody has.

Many people in the photo world find it difficult to keep up with the rapid changes in their profession. Digital SLRs are completely re-invented every three years. Now we have 1080i 30fsp inside our semi-pro Nikons and Cannons. We have a massive variety of digital paper and printers and all of the driver settings that accompany such complex equipment. We have lab networking and card-readers. We have monitor calibration and Wacom tablets. We have an endless stream of self-proclaimed “experts” telling us what to do and not to do. What seems lost in this endless shuffle of technical spawning is a focus on solid imaging and how to find that center within our contemporary world. To older faculty members in photo education, a default reaction to this current technical state of photography is to pull back and limit student access to advanced “new” tools. The idea is that a slower less-complex workflow will give space and time to the students to focus on their image-making and not their tool options. Many faculty who I’ve worked with over the years do not teach Layer masking for example. Some have reacted so badly to the contemporary currents that they haven’t even learned layer masking themselves. They are stuck within a Photoshop 4 world and seem to like it just fine. For students who are just learning Photoshop, they don’t know what they are missing with some faculty vs others. For the students who do know, they become bored and resentful of the limits the professor employs in-class.

While I think the idea of limiting ones tools in the digital photo world is an essential part of photo education, I also believe that curriculum adaptation to new non-destructive image editing workflows is critical for education in photography. If we do not teach our students the most up to date workflows, they will be limited in their ability to find work in their field of choice in the future. The trick is to teach these workflows in a clear, concise, and consistent manner in order to leave mental space and time within the class to hit home the really important aspects of how to make and take solid photographic images. It’s no good if the entire class is busy learning tools and doesn’t have time for critical decision-making around images in-class. Often the most important critical feedback is received in front of the screen when students are determining what images to include in a body of work and why. The interaction in a working lab between students, their peers, and faculty/staff is where a lot of the little nitty-gritty stuff gets taught. This flow between concept and technique that is covered during these times is a critical part of photo education. Therefore, I propose a set of curriculums built around up-to-date imaging workflows for photo students just learning the digital workspace. These workflows would be simple principles and techniques using Lightroom, Photoshop, and Epson printers within a Mac lab. The idea would be to teach RAW editing and input from digital SLR cameras, archival film scanning techniques and principles, non-destructive editing and image interpretation within Photoshop/Bridge and Lightroom, and common-sense color management during the image editing and during output on Epson printers with fine-art quality papers. What would be left out of these curriculum would be introductions to other Adobe software such as Illustrator, Flash, etc. What would also be left out would be vector editing, rote memory tests about bits, bytes, pixels, vectors, and all other such pieces of information that tend to fill a student’s mind with worry and crowd out vital information such as Layer masking, ICC profiles, raw editing, etc.

A companion critique-only class could be taught at the same time as this more technical class and would most likely complement the techniques class very well.

As a follow-up to these two digital classes, we could have an advanced digital class where color management is fully discovered and dissected. This would mean, introduction to print Rips (Colorburst for Epson printers), Linearization, Grayscale and RGB and CMYK ICC profile creation with Spectrophotometers, monitor calibration, and decisions about studio lighting and design. Within this class, we would also cover such advanced topics as how to set up a printer, share it over a network, and some other basic lab and studio setup knowledge that photographers need to know to be competitive in today’s world. Studio visits would be arranged. We would visit a pro imaging print-lab, a pro photo lighting studio, etc.

In this blog, I will be writing down my ideas about how all this might work out. My big question is, how do we create a photographic curriculum that is valid for today’s imaging world and that can be updated quickly to stay valid?

I am going to go out on a limb here and talk about the future of Digital Asset Management. I believe the reason why DAM software is not working well for most people is for a few really big reasons.

1. There are too many non-compatible non-cross-platform solutions out there.
2. Many of the best solutions are not open-source. That makes many institutions unable to buy contracts for the use of the software. The institutions are also dependent on outside programers and this is always a risk.
3. Many solutions don’t implement robust infrastructure. That is to say, the time it take to query and load an asset takes way too long for the DAM software to be useful. This is often a fault of infrastructure problems at each particular institution. Many institutions haven’t funded gigabit switches enough. They are slowly adding these switches to critical network nodes, but the increased bandwidth hasn’t trickled down to the end users yet. Added to this is the need for large enough servers to through out the data fast enough.

The solutions? Well, there are a few obvious ones.

1. Go with an open-source, standardized, digital repository system like Fedora Commons or Dspace.
2. Add an extendible and “sexy” front and back end online GUI for creating user accounts and the like.
3. This is critical. Create a FUSE-based File System “glue” layer between the repository and the end user. Why do this? Simple.
a. Increased unlimited security. The file system can be upgraded with various encryption methods very easily.
b. Platform independent.
c. Open source.
d. This is the best of all. End users can use WHATEVER desktop DAM solution they want to use. All they have to do is point their DAM software to a hard-drive on their computer and away they go. They can be importing files into Final Cut live off a Fedora server. They can be scrolling through Art History slides from the Thirties in Adobe Bridge. They can run a spotlight search on the entire archive. That search would be translated into a Fedora query and return as a Spotlight result. Boom, done.

Users would be able to use their preferred applications. The ones they use all the time. The documents they would be working on, however, would be organized, archived, sorted, and versioned, somewhere else. This increases security, decreases the risks associated with HD crashes, increased collaboration (just imaging typing in someone’s user-name in Spotlight to see their shared MS word docs right in a hard-drive on your desktop), and decreases the amount of time it takes to train everyone on some clunky, underdeveloped, solution that nobody will really use.

You want to archive 3000 songs? Drag them into a folder and the rest gets done automaticly. If iTunes can scrub through metadata on a drag-and-drop, FUSE can do it to.

You want to see multiple versions of a file? Do a search of the HD.

You want to manipulate the photo? Open it in Photoshop and do that.

You want to collaborate with a peer on a document? Set the permissions directly in the file with Get Info or any other platform independent permissions window.

The possibilities are endless and the learning curve is minimal. So that’s where the future of DAMs lies. Not monolithic solutions, microlithic solutions with solid translators in-between. Imagine two people working on a digital archive at the same time. One person is using Adobe Bridge on a Mac, another person is using a normal browser on a PC. They are doing the same thing in their preferred way!

1. Create a unified content front-end and middle-end system based on XML.

2. Create a unified live-data collaboration GUI set for faculty/staff/students and anyone else connected with UVM. This can be built on Flex and Spry frameworks.

a. Email –  Have support for full unlimited archiving and RSS feeds etc. The web gui should be Air compatible and rival OS X Email for search capability. That means live searching.

b. Calendars. Everyone at UVM should have a calendar. Not just faculty/staff. Students need that too. Use the opensource Darwin Caldav server. iphone, smartphones, and all sorts of applications and platforms can connect to it. Build in a Flex front-end to the calendar for admistration. Also a Spry front-end for UVM’s site.

c. Create a real database-driven content management system for UVM’s many websites that fully seperates design markup from data. Again, build the data from XML. This should be built upon an opensource CMS like WordPress or Drupal.

d. Create a real digital repository built on the combined force of Fedora 3 and Dspace with a flex-frontend gui and suitable Spry-like web-based front ends for students and faculty to search.

e. Give access to web developers and faculty to connect departmental websites with the DR content.

f. Give access to web developers and faculty to connect departmental websites with any DB content at uvm including calendars, news, rss feeds, etc. Half of this is done, but there is no centralized pool of data for retrieval.

g. Looking forward, we realized that more and more data will run in a live-update form. Any new modifications to sites should include live listening handlers for data updates. All of this is resource intensive, but the web will always be so.

h. Add mobile application layers to any and all portions of online-accessable content on the UVM infrastructure. This includes Calendars, Email, websites, student backends, facilities management, etc.

i. Create an encryption and security protocol for all new content and infrastructure that includes regular security updates of open-source components and regular penetration testing of all components. Closed source components should be minimized and isolated to non-line communications as they are a security risk that is hard to react to when compromized. That means getting rid of closed-source collaboration software that costs too much money, does not get updated because of financial problems, and can lead to massive data vulnerability.

+ much much more.