Forest McMullin will tell you, “Photography is all I’ve ever wanted to do.” While many people would envy such a clear focus, they may not realize what a circuitous path it takes to realize one’s vision. A 1977 graduate of RIT, McMullin found that his education in photography as fine art brought some early success. He had shows in Idaho, Maine, Rochester, Kentucky, and New York City. However, he found making a living solely as a fine art artist elusive. So in 1980 he set up a studio in Naples, New York planning to do portraiture and quickly found that PR photography for corporations paid better and was a lot of fun. He found himself using his talents to capture images for corporate brochures, annual reports, and advertising campaigns.

Meanwhile, the artist inside him kept growing. Late in the 1980s he produced a series of photos focusing on heavily-tattooed people. Also at that time he began to produce editorial images for magazines. Slowly, he found that he was drawn to documenting the life of fringe social groups, and his work took on new dimensions. Combining photojournalist with documentary and corporate assignments gave him variety and cross-fertilization so precious to the artistic process.

As McMullin describes it, “The variety is fun. It’s great to work on location. I find that my personal projects keep me excited and the commercial work fuels the process, quite literally.”

One of his most memorable projects was “Encounters with the Racist Right” in Pennsylvania where he documented a strange and sinister lifestyle and started thinking about working on video projects. Often, framing the work as “environmental portraits” that speak to the camera made those images that much more shocking, according to McMullin. His latest personal project was shooting the people and landscapes of Tibet, under a project sponsored by the Chinese Photographers’ Association.

Going Digital

McMullin started using iView MediaPro about the same time that he started shooting with a digital camera. He reports that the longer you use software the more comfortable you get. When asked how he’s dealing with all the computerized issues, all the new things that photographers have to learn, he reports that, “You learn what you need to learn to do what you need to do.”

He decided that iView MediaPro would be the easiest to learn and use and would do what he wanted it to do.

Regarding iView MediaPro, McMullin describes it as very full-featured and appreciates that among available programs it allows you to do what you want to do. A colleague of his first recommended the program to him, and he evaluated it along with Canto Cumulus and Extensis Portfolio. He decided that iView MediaPro would be the easiest to learn and use and would do what he wanted it to do.

MediaPro Aids Worfklow

“I shoot either tethered or to cards. In any case, the images end up in folders on my laptop. Then I dump the folders into MediaPro, after which I batch rename files before any editing to make sure my raw and jpeg files are synchronized. Then I go back into jpegs only and edit those files. Sometimes I use the Lightbox function if I need to check for sharpness or details. I really like that function; it’s really useful. Both the Lightbox and magnifier allow me to quickly and easily see what I need to see. It saves time and makes editing more accurate.

MediaPro is extremely versatile in giving me ways to organize my data.

MediaPro is extremely versatile in giving me ways to organize my data. I create six custom fields (job type, subject name, client, buyer, invoice number, whether copyright is registered or not and whether model released or not). I also use three or four defaults plus keywords and captions. The main reason I do that is to simplify searches. Finally, I put the job archive with the job into the job folder. I also put them into a master archive.

I put jpegs into a temporary folder from which I can publish Web galleries. I can simply drag the folder into the Web site and it uploads in a matter of minutes. This provides an optimal way to deal with clients. They access my Web galleries to select the photos they want. They find this process extremely simple, intuitive and easy.

“For me, probably the most important time saving I’ve experienced by using MediaPro is being able to find something that I did takes me seconds via a simple database search. In the old days, it might have taken hours, searching through binders or stacks of unfiled images where the stacks might have been two or three feet tall. Now I can find an image by person, by date – by so many different criteria – virtually in an instant. That’s probably the single biggest advantage to my having gone digital. Digital imposes a kind of built-in discipline. It’s forced me to deal with images the first time I touch them. And with MediaPro it’s easy to put the information in now so they can be found later. They’re automatically filed according to whatever scheme is helpful to me.

It’s all about being able to work the way that works best for me. That’s a value that iView clearly understands.

Another feature of MediaPro that I love is being able to produce slide shows. I lecture frequently, so the ease of assembling images – not to mention how great they look on screen – and the ability to customize them for my audiences is invaluable. It’s all about being able to work the way that works best for me. That’s a value that iView clearly understands.”