Q&A with Michael Schwarz
Whether It’s a Wedding or the Superbowl, Photo Mechanic Helps this Pro Set the Pace – One Step Ahead of the Rest: A Quick Q&A with Michael Schwarz
Industry: Photojournalism / Professional Photography
Interviewee: Michael Schwarz
Web Site: http://www.michaelschwarz.com/
Interviewee Profile: Michael A. Schwarz is an independent editorial, and corporate photojournalist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Over a 25-year career, Schwarz has completed more than 6,000 assignments for publications like USA Today, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, LIFE, National Geographic, and many others. Schwarz is a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, has received numerous awards from the Pictures of the Year competition and was a winner of the Dag Hammarskjöld Award for Human Rights Advocacy Journalism. For the last 10 years, discerning clients have sought out Schwarz to document their wedding day using the same level of creativity and professionalism that he applies when photographing for the world's most prestigious publications.
Application: Photo Mechanic™ from Camera Bits
Web Site: http://www.camerabits.com
Application Summary: Photo Mechanic is a photo browser and workflow accelerator that has set the standards in its field for more than a decade. Users of the program can speed through the import, captioning, and editing process at a rate that goes unmatched, thanks to Photo Mechanic’s straightforward design and wide range of customizable workflow tools. The program's powerful Ingest command reads images from memory cards, flattens directory structures, applies IPTC metadata, creates backups on separate disks and renames files – all in a single step. Photo Mechanic speeds through the editing of large numbers of photos to select keepers, rename, classify, and organize, and its many output options allow photographers to easily create Web galleries and slideshows, print contact sheets, transfer photos to an FTP server or upload them to an online archive, share photos via email, store favorites and much more.
Q: When did you start using Photo Mechanic, and why?
A: I’ve been using Photo Mechanic for so long, I can’t even remember when exactly I began. It was before it was even called “Photo Mechanic.” I come out of journalism background, and I still work for various papers and USA Today. I learned about the program for the first time from other photographers at USA in 1996 or 1997, when I started to cover large events like the Superbowl. I watched other photographers and editors using it (I believe it was called AP Viewer at the time) with great success, and felt I needed to give it a try. It’s been the hub of my workflow ever since.
Q: Is there a particular project where your use of Photo Mechanic stands out?
A: There was a period in the late 90’s when the Major League Baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, were perennial division champions. USA Today would often hire me to work a playoff game. I was working as an editor with a couple of other photographers. I had to edit lots and lots of photos, from lots of different photographers, very quickly. Photo Mechanic was really the only way to do it quickly. There was – and is – no comparable product. Our photo workroom would have a dozen photographers sitting at their computers and working with Photo Mechanic to get all of the photos edited and sorted. It was just a life saver, and, like I said, still is – just recently I worked with a team of three photographers covering a two-day Karate tournament. Our goal was to photograph the hundreds of different competitions going on throughout the tournament and post the photos to SmugMug quickly so that participants and parents could view and purchase images.
We simply could not have done the tournament without Photo Mechanic. We shot more than 20,000 photographs and uploaded approximately 4,000. The event began around noon on Friday and ended around 11:00 p.m. Saturday night. We had everything edited and uploaded by 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Photo Mechanic was key in enabling us to sort through the images quickly and upload directly into SmugMug. We especially liked the program features that showed us when a particular image upload failed, and also marked the successfully uploaded images with a green box in the contact sheet.
Q: How do you use Photo Mechanic on an average day? What features do you enjoy the most?
A: Well, I’ve been shooting in digital since the beginning. I was a very early adopter. Other programs have come and gone, but Photo Mechanic has always been a constant, and the centre of my workflow. I also use Photoshop, Lightroom and Capture NX2, though Photo Mechanic is the best program in its class. It does what it does so well – it interfaces flawlessly with other editing programs – it’s just a perfect fit.
As for specific features, one of the things that makes my life easier is the input of metadata during ingest. I love to utilize the broad range of variables, and I love that I can ingest to two different locations. Another major core for my success with the program is its speed in rendering the images. I can review and make decisions so quickly – so much faster than any other program I’ve ever seen. Even when I’m shooting RAW, Photo Mechanic is lightning fast. As an example, I do all of my wedding editing in Photo Mechanic, and then import the images into Lightroom for corrections. For weddings I shoot up to 3,000 images, and have to pick maybe 1,000 or 1,500 of the best so I can present clients with a well-rounded pool of images. The dual ingest feature is really important here for creating a primary and backup set.
Dennis Walker and his team at Camera Bits are always moving Photo Mechanic forward. The upgrades are always exciting, and it’s obvious that they really listen to photographers, because the new features are always so useful.