Q&A with Nick Didlick

Photo Mechanic is his workflow hub and his “Shhhh… Don’t tell… Best (worst) kept secret” and competitive advantage: a quick Q&A with Nick Didlick

Profile:  Nick Didlick is an award-winning photojournalist, photographer, digital consultant, Web designer, Photo Services Manager for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, fly fishing guide and an all-round jack of all trades.

He has covered Royal Tours, Olympics, Super Bowls, Super-Power Summits, manmade and natural disasters, riots, other conflicts and much, much more.

Didlick’s photos have appeared in many of the world’s major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Times of London, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone.

Q: You have said that Camera Bits is your trusted friend and partner? How did that come to be? Can you explain, please?

Well, let me take you back to the beginning. To the “Wild Wild West” of digital photography.” In August of 1994 the Vancouver Sun published its first all digital photograph using the Associated Press’s NC 2000 (News Camera 2000). The front page picture, that I shot, showed Queen Elizabeth arriving for the XV Commonwealth Games. That year marked a major change in photojournalism as newspapers and print news organizations looked at integrating still digital cameras into their work flows to meet deadlines with breaking news. At the time I used to say to competing news photographers “If it ain’t digital, it ain’t news" referring to the speed our new digital camera could deliver images to the Vancouver Sun.

Though, at the time, digital cameras, at 1.3 megapixels, weren’t producing high-quality images and had poor workflow in that photojournalists couldn’t really browse a series of images, instead they had to look at little thumbnails and open them up in Photoshop. Many in the industry were wondering aloud why these two (crazy) Canadian newspapers had converted to digital photography? At what cost? With what results? And how many headaches?

Now, fast forward one year ahead to 1995 and a trade show in Dallas, Texas, where I had bumped into an old friend who was selling product and sharing a booth with a gentleman named Dennis Walker, whom he’d never met and didn’t know. Me and my friend, Rob Galbraith, sat down when we had 10 minutes of down time to talk with Dennis who had a product called Photo Mechanic which was just in its infancy. I learned that Dennis had a background in digital imaging and after our talk thought that there could be real need for his product so that photographers could browse their images efficiently and effectively.

Shortly after the show me and Dennis started a lengthy dialog that resulted, ultimately, in us deciding to integrate Photo Mechanic at the newspapers to bridge the workflow – from the camera to output, to open a file, browse, work in Photoshop, save the files back, and add metadata in images, etc. – to do all of the difference pieces of the puzzle in the digital workflow production. That was 1995. So, looking back over all these years, now, I’d have to say that Dennis Walker is truly a photographer’s best and trusted friend. He has always put the photographers’ interests’ first and has stuck with his core client group through thick and thin and always produced a product with the photographer top of mind.

Q: So that was back in the beginning. Can we fast forward, say, 10 years from then and get a glimpse of Camera Bits?

OK. Fast forward 10 years (to 2005, or so) and we see that Dennis has produced a great number of product firsts. When people were simply thinking of things, or hadn’t even thought about thinking about certain things, Dennis has been doing demos.

As an example, specifically, I remember Dennis’ development of the Exposure Throttle – the ability to change exposure in a RAW file. Me and Rob Galbraith were just sitting around, again, and asking Dennis if they could do this or they could that, and Dennis said “What if we changed the exposure by 1 or 2 stops?” Stunned, me and Rob, with jaws-dropped, said “Yes!” It was a natural idea because with NC 2000 digital cameras you could go about 1/3 stop over or under. The innovations continued -- camera RAW applications, to advanced meta data, code replacements, FTP and all sorts of stuff.

When a photographer buys Photo Mechanic software, I’m guessing he only knows about 10% of product’s potential. It’s the other 90% of the software that saves you a pile of time. Photo Mechanic is my best (worst) kept secret. My competitive advantage. Say I’m shooting a Stanley Cup playoff game all by myself. With Photo Mechanic, I can move 5-7 pictures while my competitors at the ice hockey game can only move one in the same amount of time, with one doing the ingest and the other doing the edit and transmit. So I save a bunch of time with Photo Mechanic. And, time is money. It’s either money, or it’s time away from family. Time is an important thing for everybody, and the time savings Photo Mechanic produces is one of the primary reasons why I just can’t speak highly-enough of the software.

Q: Some other strengths of Photo Mechanic?

Sure. I’ll give you some specific examples. Wedding photographers. Wedding photographers can put their whole shoot in a folder, pull the images up on a large screen and sit with a client to review the whole shoot in comfortable atmosphere. The bride and groom can say “Oh! I like that one.” Then you tag it or color code it as a keeper. Let’s say you shoot 1,000 pictures and your client(s) picks 100. You can then have the pictures printed, emailed, burned to a DVD or create a slide show in just a few keystrokes. This has been in product for a loooooong time. But I’ve generally found that Dennis develops something and then all of the other products pick up on that ability after Camera Bits.

Another example is IPTC and XMP metadata. The ability to add that to your images is a strong point of software, that, again, has been in it for a long time. But it’s very important to people thinking about cataloging and archiving their images and absolutely critical to the way news photographers work -- adding metadata. As an example, “red car.” If you search “red car” in database of 28,000 images, you’ll only get those few images stamped “red car.” The time savings is unbelievable. The beauty of Photo Mechanic is that you don’t have to go back and do it, you do it when you download. Stick your card into the reader, make an IPTC template and it’ll metadata stamp all your files. Just make a little append here and there, such as “Johnny Left” and “Jimmy Right” and it’ll do it automatically on download and, again, that’s a HUGE time saver. The ability to download to two different locations at the same time is another feature you’ll start to see implemented in other products and another “Dennis first.” And, I guess last of the top three is code replacement. Lots of news photographers have the need to put complicated names into their images. As an example, from an ice hockey game, again. Half of the people that play ice hockey you can’t spell their names right, so you download a text file called code replacement. You look up a jersey number, say player number 33. Type in “/33/” and it’ll paste in the player’s name in the caption. When I show other photographers this, it knocks them off their feet. One: they have a hard time understanding it. Or two: they can see instantly see that it’s a big time saver. In the old days you’d have to open a file, crop, save type in a caption manually, etc. Photo Mechanic is the bridge between all other apps. All these 15 years after meeting Dennis in Dallas, I still use Photo Mechanic as the anchor point of my workflow. It doesn’t matter what application I’m using – Nikon Capture, Digital Photo Professional from Cannon, Photoshop, Capture One – I still download and meta stamp all my data from Photo Mechanic. It is the heart of my workflow. It has the most versatility when managing many, many files across a network.

Quite simply, to sum it up, I’m really looking forward to what’s coming next from Camera Bits.

Q: Any final thoughts, Nick?

Two things.

First, the company. Camera Bits.

Camera Bits really is a small, tight homegrown business. When you buy software from a vendor you are really investing in that company. You trust that company to look after your valuable images. I can’t think of one company I trust more with the management of my photos. It always amazes me that Camera Bits can offer the kind of customer service it does. When you call them after a couple of times, you’re on first name basis with the person who answers the phone there.

They have amazing software, but the support is unmatched. It’s amazing that I simply purchased software from them so many years ago, and I’ve called them every once a while, see them every couple of years, but I really feel they’re my friends.

So, last, I guess, is my advice.

My advice to other photographers is to update to the latest version of Photo Mechanic because they’re missing out! What they have in the product today, they developed it because they know you’ll want to use it – 3 or 4 years out – that’s how far ahead they are!

Q: Great talk, Nick. Thank you very much. Is there a way we can contact you? Or learn more about your work?

Sure. Visit my Web site at www.nickdidlick.com.

Thank you.