A three day chick is the 10.000th image added into my Digital Archive. It might sound nothing special but actually this milestone represent for me a nice achievement result of several years of hard work.

As many of you might be already aware I have been shooting film some thirty years ago in my early adolescence. That where times of negative film shoots with a completely manual Minolta SR-T 101 and the twin lens reflex Yashica MAT 124 G. Both of my early cameras had metering system but my father prohibited me to use as his philosophy was to "read the light with you brain". Therefore, after several dozens of burned and washed rolls something started to be barely acceptable. When ambient lights brain metering was pretty much understood I started turning attention to the prints. Yes, the prints of the negative that I did no liked very much ... so I started playing with several color slide films all from Kodak since they where the only available at the local photo store. I remember good red and yellow but where not very satisfied with blue and greens. Once I had then the opportunity to play a bit with some Fuji color reversal film and I did liked so much the blue hues of the skyes and the greens of the leafs and other naturals details that I did not turned back anymore.

With the growth of the shooting materials I realized that the shoe boxes system was not really suitable. So I started to buy the popular Panodia sheets for negative (kind of translucent papers) and positive mounted slide (made of transparent plastic material) and to archive all the materials I had. But soon after I realised that something had to be changed. In fact, to keep everything organized keeping shooting at a pace of several dozens of rolls per months, it would be resulted in an unsustainable cost of storage supplies. After some tinkering I made the decision to keep only the good material and started to trow it away the old one. It wasn't easy but necessary.

The Panodia system for 35mm mounted slide was ok but with some drawback:

• Search of the slides time consuming since the back-lighting required removal of the whole sheet from the binder
• Adding or removal of slides in the middle of a sheet required painful shifting of all others slides
• After a while the plastic sheets started to deforming themselves in the area of the binding (holes)
• Organising in binders was sometime not consistent with flexibility of a growing archive

So I started to look around but, at that time I did not find anything suitable for me. At the same time I trowed away almost ten years of film negative that did not matched my improved quality standards. So only a very limited quantity of that materials survived trough this recent years.

Times moved-on and many things happened to my life including the opportunity to relocate in China for some years. It was a great opportunity to squeeze my Nikon FM2n and the large format Chinese made Shen Hao camera. Sold most of my old lenses and gear and I got a brand new range of primes, from the AI 20mm f/2,8, AI 35mm f/1,4, AI 50mm f/1,4, AI 55mm f/2,8, AI 85mm F/1,4 up to the 180mm f/2,8. For the Large Format I choose the Germans Schneider lenses. The good things about that times was the very good exchange rate Italian Lira vs Chinese Rembimbi and the already good prices of pro photography items in China. I remember that prices of my mainstream film, the Fujichrome Velvia 50 and Provia 100F cost me about 40% less than the best price in Italy. I used to purchase bulk pack of 25 rolls so to achieve even additional saving.

During my stay in China my production started to grow in a significant way and I had again to re-think on how to optimize the archive. At that time I had no number nor notes written on the slide plastic frame, they where only organised in plastic sheets by subjects or locations. But that system didn't worked anymore. With the increase of the subjects and places I had real need of implementing a serious and flexible archival system that could grow together with my needs.

It took me about six months to run in parallel several different cataloging and naming strategies until the best one where finalised. During this six months I also found a small pro photo shop in Wu Si specialised in large format and studio equipment having a clearance sale. Among the many items I went through some gray plastic boxes containing some strange transparent slide holders made by rigid plastic. I bought one for 24x36 and one for 6x6 and returned back home to study them.

The Journal 24 cassette featuring space for 24 24x36 slide.

The items purchased where made by the German company Kunze and they claimed to belong to the archival system called "Journal". The same day I filled-up the whole box made of 6 rigid slide cassettes and where happy to find out that that system could really help me to improve my archive, having many nice features:

• Quicker slide fill, just lay in, no need to push, therefore less risk to leave fingerprint on the slide itself
• Quicker retrival because the whole cassette can be laid directly on a light-table for a 24 slides-at-once overview
• Rigid and durable cassette
• Simple and reliable closing mechanism by mean of a simple plastic strip
• Coloured labels for cassette content identification
• External rigid plastic box protect by light and further groups 5 cassettes at once
• Available in many formats (24x36, 6x4,5, 6x6 and 6x7).

The Kunze Box hold 6 slide cassette and protect them from light.

Happy for the products I went back to the shop and purchased the whole available stock. My slide archive finally started to take shape...
During the same span of time I bought a 24x36 Minolta slide scanner and therefore the archival process were run in parallel between the physical color slides and on my custom built PC.

Each slide had then to be properly labeled and that label, I decided, must be the unique identifier in both slide and digital Archive. The naming convention I decided to use was based on a simple assumption: only number and no textual information in it. Textual information are nice to us since are immediately understandable for our mind, think a slide named "Yellow Flower" and you immediately know what is the content but what's about a slide whose subject can be in both Conceptual and Representative domains? The same example of "Yellow Flower" might be also meant as "Nature" or "Natural" and so on. So, no way to use text...

The decision was then taken, only number in the slides identification. So the archive numbering started to be build up using the slides I had to archive:

So a slide named 01.01.02.0001 is the first slide of Summer Palace, Beijing, China. While an image labeled 02.01.01.01.0004 would be an image taken in Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Easy, right?
During the build up of the Archive, each slide labeled where also scanned and saved as TIFF in my Digital Archive. The image files where saved with same identical naming in folders organised with numbers + labels.

After few hundreds images archived I soon realised that something else where missing: how I can find a picture of a temple? Do I need to look into the cassette boxes or browse the PC hard disk folder by folder. No, it was not feasible... Another study then started this time assisted by some nice colleagues in the USA and UK who had already approached the issue. The solution was a DAM software, meaning Digital Asset Management. I installed some trials and again run few of them in parallel. After one week I decided that Extensis Portfolio was the best for my needs: programmable, flexible, simple yet powerful.

All 400 Tif files where then keyworded and properly filled of the relevant fields (Description, Author Name, Copyright) and a catalog where created in Extensis Portfolio. Portfolio Sync Folder where pointed to the hard disk where I had the folder structure and the tool nicely pulled automatically all the info into his own database. The Digital Archive started to took shape!

As I used to keep in the Digital Archive the 16bit version of the TIFs soon the hard disk was filled and with a bit of calculation I realized that too much disk space would be necessary to keep all the images in digital format. With a bit of regret I decided to be more selective on the images archived: some hundreds slides had their way in the rubbish bin and few others nice for me but not marketable where left in cassette boxes with a red round sticker on them (meaning no-archive). Few more days where dedicated to re-naming and re-archive of the new selections and that was the final makeover of the archive. Since them I have developed the habit to keep only the very best of my work. Mediocre images are not needed either for me nor my clients...

Few years later, during a trip into Taklamakan Desert I fall in love with digital photography (Lilian is your fault, you know that...) and started seriously to made the upgrade. Few hundreds Fuji Velvia later I landed in Singapore at Cathay Photo escorted by my bodyguard Giovanni and handed over more than 20.000 Singapore Dollars to the cashier in change of few golden boxes. The switch was almost immediate and I started producing digital imagery with my Nikon D2x and a nice set of pro primes lenses.

The archival of those image poses a new dilemma: how to label and how to manage the RAW files produced? Simple! The files names where following the same identical numbering of the already existing system, with the file beginning with the letter D (stands for Digital). For the RAW files I simply created a mirror folders structure where to store them in. The initial strategy proved this time to be flexible and powerful enough to withstand changes and expansions.

With the introduction of a complete digital archive workflow I further enforced the selection of the shoot materials, in some case end keeping less than 10% of the total shoots. I tough this was the only way to build up a quality archive of stock and commercial imagery. Since than I have been kept shooting in digital in quite many places building up a solid 10K Digital Archive.

I still keep the best of my film times collected in a dedicated room kept dark all-times, with a dehumidifier pumping out the problematic humid we have in this area of South Italy.

Next milestone is now set to 20K: how long it will take to reach it?

My Slide Archive as of July 2009. All the best material is keept in the Kunze Journal cassettes while personal and family stuff is kept in tray slides or within Kunze Report 24 slide holders.

Images of Slide Storage System used under authorization of Archivtechnik KUNZE GmbH & Co. KG.