New in my archive: From Rice to Gosen to Mangin

Posted on February 1, 2013

Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers poses in a rocking chair during training camp at Sierra College in Rocklin, California in 1988. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

Being a freelance photographer in 2013 means there is always office work to do. I always need to update my website, update my blog, edit a shoot, caption old images, and entertain my cats. You get the idea. The other day I finally finished captioning my newest batch of 336 scans from old negs and chromes so I could update my online searchable archive powered by PhotoShelter. What a huge pain-in-the-ass it was spending several days captioning stuff from the 1980’s and 1990’s, but I am done! I now have 61, 269 images in my archive!

I have been working on my archive for many years. I add thousands of pictures a year from new assignments and have also been adding thousands of images from the old days by having old slides and negatives scanned. I have a great friend named Dave Bonilla who I pay to scan my stuff into 50meg TIFFS, but when he does his job it means I have to do my dreaded job- caption the damn stuff.

I try and write the most complete captions possible by using specific dates in the captions when available. This takes extra time and research. At the very worst I always have the year that the image was shot included.

It is always a fun trip down memory lane when I go through the scans and see some of these images big for the first time. Besides archiving images of stars and cult heroes of the sports world I am also scanning and captioning fun old images of friends and family so they are easily found in my searchable database, like my dad Al Mangin above.

Over the past few years I have gone through all my binders and boxes of slides and negs numerous times looking for nuggets of gold to have scanned by Bonilla. As of today I have had 5,874 images from 1986-2002 scanned, captioned, and uploaded to my archive. Since I am not shooting film anymore I am almost done with this massive project.

I still believe in the importance of freelancers like myself taking advantage of today’s technology to curate and manage their own personal archives of images that cover their entire careers- if they own them. Sitting on piles of old chromes in the garage that will never see the light of day is real shame. Unfortunately there are many shooters out there who will never get their stuff together and it saddens me. I feel bad for the photographers who will never make money on their stuff and I feel bad for the lovers of great photography who will never see some of these historic images.

Now that I have added these 336 images to my archive I am almost ready to begin covering spring training in a few weeks. First I have to get some of my tax stuff in order, then I will be ready to head down to Arizona to begin creating new content for my clients and my archive.

To all of you freelancers out there who own your images- what are you waiting for? The power is in your archive. Take control of your life and your business by doing all you can to monetize your pictures. Sure doing all this work is a huge pain, but it is so rewarding. I am doing this for myself. Not for the man. I hate the man. He can kiss my ass. This is for me. Do it for YOU!