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Case Study: Ken Duncan Images

Featuring: Ken Duncan Group
Speaking with: Paul Taylder
Marketing contact: Kristine Riley
WWW address: www.kenduncan.com

Sections: Background Challenges Solution Benefits Future Technical base

The Background.

Ken Duncan is well known as the pioneer of Limited Edition Photographic Prints in Australia. Ever the trend setter and still the market leader, Ken is deeply committed to researching and developing the latest and best technology to bring photographic art into homes and office right around the world.

The Ken Duncan Group of companies comprises Galleries in Melbourne, Sydney, Matcham and the Hunter Valley, CFL Framing Studio, CFL Print Studio, a publishing company, Panographs Publishing and Ken Duncan Panographs. Paul: "The Galleries are at the leading edge of Limited Edition Print Technology, promoting photography as an art form and showing the beauty of God's creation, bringing art to the people by presenting a range of high quality products, from the finest materials, at affordable prices. Our market broadly covers three sectors:

• the general public
• professional photographers and artists,
• corporate clients."

"The general public are able to purchase limited edition prints, posters, jigsaws, books, placemats and cards all featuring Ken's images. Professional photographers and artists are offered the services of our print studio, framing studio and publishing division. Corporate clients are offered mainly books and calendars, which are customised to include their logo and other information. Of course, corporate clients are able to purchase prints to be used for example in building foyers, hotel rooms etc."

The Challenges.

"Probably our biggest challenge is with selecting images for use in the above products. Currently we have images stored electronically (from scans and digital camera capture), and in the form of transparencies and negatives stored in archival conditions in a fire proof safe. One difficulty arises when a corporate client needs to select an image or images for use in say a calendar. We are setting up Canto Cumulus to help us make this process and image archiving easier and more streamlined.

Our business challenge was how do we organise all of Ken's photographs and have easy access to them? This is a huge job, as there are in excess of 150,000 images in the library in digital form and film form. It will be an ongoing process of many months to completely catalogue every image, especially transparencies that have never been scanned, and are therefore not in digital form.

We are starting by cataloguing new images as they come of the high end digital cameras Ken uses. On a typical week shoot, we can come back with in excess of one thousand digital images. It is imperative that these images are catalogued and stored safely on return. To do this we use Canto Cumulus, and to handle the sheer data volume, with have installed an Apple server and RAID solution at our print lab that is capable of storing over 5TB (terabytes!) of information."

The Cumulus solution.

"We are using Canto Cumulus Single User & Archive Server editions, and Web Publisher Pro on our server at our pre-press and printing studio.

We chose Canto Cumulus as our Digital Asset Management solution because of its useability, cross platform and its huge array of configuration options to best suit the individuals needs. Although these configuration options are daunting at first, it soon becomes obvious this is the heart of Canto Cumulus and why it is so powerful. This is why it is the industry leader."

The Benefits.

"At this stage, we do not have figures of any resulting cost savings, but we can definitely see benefits in this area once the system is fully configured and running. One thing that has come out this exercise is that it is VERY important to think about your needs and set up the program accordingly. Although Cumulus is very flexible about making changes, like any database application, get the setup right or as close as you can at the beginning."

The Future.

"Although, not yet fully implemented, the use of Canto products is going to have a great benefit to the way we offer services to our clients. For example, when a corporate client needs to select images for a calendar, in the past it involved having the client go to our image library of transparencies and spend a lot of time thumbing through folders of images. This was not only a time consuming operation, but it also opens up the real possibility of damaging the original transparencies. With Cumulus, our corporate sales people can have collections of images ready selected based on what they know the clients needs are, and then browse these images from our office or at the client's office. Another example involves the many thousands of images that are now generated with digital cameras."

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Ken Duncan Images

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"Ken is currently involved in educating aboriginal youth about photography in Central Australia. Basically this involves going to remote locations, getting together a bunch of aboriginal kids and giving them digital cameras to take photos with. Ken instructs them on the use of cameras and digital imaging, and hopefully the outcome of all this is to educate the kids to become professional photographers. Ken's view is to give these kids a hand up, not a hand out.

The offshoot to these photographic workshops, is that many thousands of digital images are produced, and to keep track of these images, Canto Cumulus is indispensable. Please note that Ken does these workshops at no cost, and it has been made possible with the generous contributions of companies such as Databasics."

Quote: "If you want to organise digital images - you need Canto Cumulus!"

Technical Platform