Building a Photo Library for CNU
We’re working with Christopher Newport University on a web site redesign. One of the additional services we’re helping them with is building a photo library in Adobe Bridge that they’ll be able to use to tag and track images. To kick off the new library with solid images, we did a week long shoot with photographer Chris Crisman, myself, and our client contacts: Bruce Bronstein, Maggie Vaughan, and Stephen Murphy.
The strategy in the week-long shoot, besides getting as much footage as we possibly could, was to get several types of photograph to help tell the full story of the CNU experience in an emotional way.
Group photos: communities you can belong to
Because CNU transitioned from a commuter institution to a four-year liberal arts university in the early 90s, there’s still a lingering perception that there’s not much to do on campus. To help dispel this myth, we tried to get groups that people could identify with—classrooms, people gathering socially, students walking around campus, performing or practicing everything from ballroom dancing to basketball.
Portraits that speak to (and about) high performance
Part of the CNU long-term admission strategy is to go for higher ability students. The university’s statistics and rankings have improved across the board over the last decade, and they want to continue the trend. Our client picked out students who are true leaders in different areas… from service to undergraduate research to athletics. We captured great images of them and will be conducting interviews to deliver the stories of these students.
Mentorship photos
What’s the best way to speak to the idea of faculty attention in a competitive market where many institutions talk about small classroom sizes? One way is to create feature content with specific examples of individual students with mentors. We captured images of some students with the mentor of their choice – the faculty member or advisor who has had made the biggest difference for them at CNU.
Hi-fi facilities
CNU has been able to raise an astonishing amount of capital funds since the arrival of their president, Paul Trible, and many of their buildings—from the student union to the library to some of the residence halls—are less than 10 years old. With so many of the facilities new, and in great shape, we wanted to make sure prospectives get a sense of exactly how nice everything is on campus.
Nice work, but how will they sustain it?
An additional follow up to the shoot is some training for a student photographer who already owns some of the same equipment as the professional we used—so that they can continue to sustain a high level of quality in their images for the next few years.
Adobe Bridge eh? I’m curious about how it works with multiple users. As in one person’s tagging/categorizing being visible to a “group”? Or are we talking single-user here?
I’ve been looking for some kind of cost-effective group solution.
Posted on May 4, 2009 by drew
Adobe Bridge is ideal for multiple users, and is cost effective as long as you consider the CS4 package affordable.
Bridge is really a browsing program that allows you to add multiple tags to images, perform advanced searches, etc. It also offers you more ways of viewing images than the standard OS provides, which is key for managing a lot of photography. There is zero load time on previews compared to a web-based service.
As long as somone has access to the server where the images are, they will be able to see and edit the tags. You could even set up a VPN connection for your server so you could access the images (and tags, collections, etc.) from a laptop.
Bridge has some fancier functions like creating workspaces or collections without creating multiple copies of the same image. It can also be used in conjunction with Version Cue to track multiple versions, if you have a use for that.
For affordable web-based photo management, we have a client who is currently using smugmug (http://smugmug.com/), an affordable web-based service, to manage and sort photo files. They had good things to say about this system. I haven’t spent a lot of time investigating how well this service works versus flickr, but at a glance the paid account seems to have some protection options and automatic sizing.
Posted on May 5, 2009 by Doug Gapinski
Thanks for the info Doug! I will look into this.
Posted on May 5, 2009 by drew
Photos turned out awesome! Ecspecially with the guy and the emergency truck… I know him!! So hot
Posted on May 22, 2009 by J. M.