Do1Thing Blog

More than 100 gigs of .jpg images flowed into Do1Thing from photographers nationwide documenting homeless teens.

Did you wonder how images the photographers shot in Alaska appeared on the Do1Thing website within minutes?

Well, here’s how it worked.

Photographers shot digital images using Canon and Nikon cameras capturing the images to digital compact flash cards. They downloaded from their the images from the cards using fire wire card readers, attached to apple powerbook laptops, using fire wire card readers, pulling the images onto an external hard drive using photo mechanic software. They used fetch ftp to upload the digital images to a server that housed the images. Editors nationwide used fetch ftp software to download the images onto external hard drives.

The ingested the images with Photo Mechanic and selected the best images. They opened the images in Adobe Photoshop, resized them to 1280px at 72dpi and saved them to external hard drives. They used fetch ftp software to upload the image back to the do1thing serves. The images were then ftp’d to the flickr website where they were geotagged to the exact location they were photographed. The images were then dropped into a folder called “main site feed” that immediately fed the images, utilizing a flickr api, into the image stream on the do1thing multimedia page.

Now, back to the faces BEHIND Do1Thing – Here are two of them, Picture Editor Kelli Grant, the U.S. Director for PixPalace; a subscriber based client server solution which enables independent photography agencies to have live feeds. Kelli and many of the photographers on the project go back to her days as a picture editor at Newsweek Magazine.

Along with Kelli is MaryAnn Koopman. MaryAnn is a great photographer, picture editor and all around incredibly talented and committed colleague.

Visit their web sites, drop them a note, thank them for their hours and hours and hours and hours of work to make this all happen. It was a labor of love for them. They did their 1 Thing and continue to do another 999 things to help Do1Thing shine a light on homelessness.

More editor profiles to come. Stay tuned!!!

James K. Colton is currently the photography editor for Sports Illustrated. He began his career in 1972 as the color picture editor for the Associated Press. Five years later he joined Newsweek as a senior photo editor for international news. In 1988, he became executive vice-president and general manager of Sipa Press in New York, before returning to Newsweek in 1992 as the director of photography.

He is on the Board of Directors of the Eddie Adams Workshop, and is a mentor for J Camp, a national program that recruits talented high school students of color, sponsored by the Asian American Journalists Association. He was presented with the “Golden Career Award” at FotoFusion 2004 by the Palm Beach Photographic Centre, received an International Photography Awards “Lucie” for Picture Editor of the Year in 2007, was named Magazine Picture Editor of the Year in 2008 by the National Press Photographers Association, and has been acknowledged as one of the 100 most important people in photography by American Photo.