scanning tips

With good quality scanners available for a few hundred dollars and services advertising pennies per scan, it seems like this is a commodity service. But to get from a faded photograph to a handsome photo printed in a book involves both aesthetic judgment and technical expertise. Here are some tips for making your scanning process […]

bringing order to digital photo collections

In the 170+ years since Louis Daguerre announced the invention of the daguerreotype process for fixing an image on a silver plate, people around the world have developed a workable system of storing their photographic prints and developed film. That system might involve placing the photos in an album or tossing them in a drawer, […]

time tracking: what are the numbers telling you

Last week I wrote about the importance of keeping track of all the time you spend on a project: billable and not billable, productive and spinning-your-wheels, brilliantly executed and fatally flawed. This week I want to show you the next step in my process: categorizing and analyzing the time. I used to have much finer […]

time tracking: are you doin’ it?

I just spent most of a gorgeous Sunday afternoon figuring out how much time a project actually took compared to the proposal estimate. That part was easy: twice as long. Gulp! Now the more difficult question: how much of this was “beyond scope” and can be billed, how much was attributable to poor estimating on […]

what is workflow? and who cares, anyway?

When you are designing and laying out a 350 page book with 150+ photos [or even a 120 page book with 40 photos], you can easily become confused and be more prone to making errors unless you can go into what I call “factory mode”, where you need only concentrate on execution, not on solving […]