June 10-16, 2007: The beginning

June 10 - 16, 2007

It starts. Well, the work started a long time ago, but the journal starts now, two days after my (gulp) 29th birthday. I hope I have a degree by the time I’m 30.

I worked on reorganizing everyone’s files from my semester, which often means moving and renaming. I am appreciating the people who were meticulous and followed instructions, and groaning at the people who completely ignored them, despite our persistent pleas. If I had this to do another go-round I would simplify our instructions even more. People are busy, which means the more complicated the instructions, the less likely they will be followed correctly. Thank god we got rid of the web galleries, there would have been mutiny.

Working off of the server is like pulling hairs out one by one. Painful, takes too long, and ultimately not productive. Adobe Bridge keeps crashing. To do anything of volume (like rename files that are incorrect) I need to copy them over to the desktop, and then Recopy to the server after I’ve made changes. Bridge simply refuses to work with the server. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. We desperately need that hard drive….right now it takes 14 minutes to copy 2 gigs. That’s 28 minutes of copying to make changes to 2 gigs of files. We have 300 gigs total. Not all need changes, but a lot do.

Also, building the Adobe Bridge caches for each folder is what’s going to take the longest time. Once these are built, it will be easier to move among the folders. My guess is that people either didn’t use Bridge, or used a centralized cache, so that we don’t have access to it. Frustrating, but also partially a problem with our computers, since they’re set to centralized cache, and you have to remember to change it every time you open up bridge, since it won’t save preference changes. Got to be a better way.

Files and naming, individual changes and notes:

Kyle McDaniel
Deleted web galleries and RAW files (since he had both RAW and DNGs). Bless his heart for making all those web galleries.

Can’t find more than 20 prarie park images. Emailed him about this. (follow up: he doesn’t have them)

One issue where he shot jpegs, and then forgot to copy them into his dng folder. Luckily I checked every folder I deleted to see if it matched. When I figured out what happened, I renamed these jpegs properly, since they were never given titles.

Alex Cooney
Moved all of his individual story selects folders (one for each date) into one folder. We need to get the rest of his files, and the portraits. The portraits will make great references.

Spent about an hour trying to figure out why one of his one folder kept crashing bridge. Pretty sure this was more than just the server being snarky – I think it was a corrupt .xmp file, which I’ve removed.

Emailed him about missing files.

Julien Semanchuk
We had to track her down at the end of last semester to get her files, but all now looks in order.

Shane Epping
He’s missing some Mary Burge files, maybe more. I emailed him. (follow up: we now have all his images)

Karen Stockman
Nothing is named or organized properly. I’m copying everything to the desktop to rename it all per our specs and then reorganize.

Ashley Henry
I only see one African American history shoot. I know this was right around the end of the semester, but I thought she went back. I’m wondering if she turned it directly into Rita. I’ve emailed Rita about it, and if she doesn’t have it, I’ll email Ashley. (follow up: Rita didn’t have anything additional. Ashley did not respond to our emails or phone calls).

Kit Doyle
Everything seems to be in order! I love Kit!

Kristina Tercero
The folder organization is a bit of a mess and will take sorting out. A lot of stuff not named. Lots of duplicates. For some reason all her NEF files have duplicate jpeg ones that are included in naming, meaning that sequential nef files now read 0002 0004 0006.

Sean McGann
Everything seems to be in order! I love Sean!

Leah Gallo
That’s me. All of my files are in order that are on the server, but I still owe the server everything I shot after the semester ended. I will transfer this all within the next few days. (follow up: this has all been done).


I have been organizing as follows:

Multiple shoots which have a host folder named:

Lastf_ar_slug
(date folders inside of this)

Single shoots named:
Date_lastf_ar_slug


This helps get rid of the folder within a folder within a folder syndrome, created partially by us because of the whole web gallery thing.

This past week or so Abby and I have continued to organize files, as well as fleshing out a document that contained story summaries of every project or event that has been covered. On Wednesday of last week (June 13th, 2007), Abby, Shane and I attended a viewing of Tom Sawyer, filmed in Arrow Rock in 1973. It was quite a hoot, with four Arrow Rockians in the front row, calling out everyone’s faces they recognized during crowds of extras. Donna Huston would get very excited every time she saw herself. “There I am!” she would exclaim. By the end, the four had the twenty odd attendees clapping and cheering for them.

Abby and I continued on to the Bingham exhibit in the Art and Archeology Museum. It was interesting to see his views of western expansion expressed in his paintings.

On Thursday, we had a meeting with Rita to hash out where to go next. This led to another scheduled meeting on the upcoming Monday to figure out how to direct Shane.

Abby and I also plan on concentrating on getting all of the Arrow Rock files copied to the new hard drive. We have been carefully transferring the files, double checking each folder to ensure everything has copied. It’s a slow process, but will be worth it when it’s done!

After that, it’s time for the rough edit, weeding out anything that we know for sure we won’t use. Ideally, we would have done the selection process on the server, but that was an impossibility due to the spinning wheel of death we saw anytime we tried to process large amounts of files. Plus, it wouldn’t store caches on the server, which meant that any work we did with tagging, etc. could only be viewed from the computer it was done on. We tried everything we could think of to get it to build the cache in the folder, even dragging and dropping from the centralized location, changing names and extensions, EVERYTHING, but to no avail. And yes, the preference settings were on distributed. But the server wasn’t allowing it.

On Friday, June 15th, I went to Arrow Rock to photograph the FAR black tie event at Prairie Park. I left my house at about 530 and didn’t get home until 1230. I have many mosquito bites as a memento of my attempt to capture the twilight hour.

On Saturday June 16, Abby and I roadtripped it to West Plains for Rita’s exhibit. Of course Arrow Rock came up. We discussed our plans to camp out for three days in the Arrow Rock campground. I think it will be lots of fun, and help us fill some holes.