ARNOLD KATZ PHOTOGRAPHY, INC. NEW YORK, N.Y. PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO EMPLOYEES: 5 Arnold Katz opened his first studio in 1959, and since 1970 much of his work has revolved around the publishing industry, shooting brochures, catalogues, and trade exhibits for Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, John Wiley and Sons, McGraw-Hill and others. With his business running smoothly, Katz invested in a digital camera with plenty of reluctance. “If you’d asked me about it a year ago, I would have said it’s no good, I won’t touch it,” says the 61 year old veteran.“Even after I’d committed to the digital camera I was nervous; I thought I’d never learn how to work digitally and was sure the payback would be several years away.” Just listen to him now. “Life gets better and it doesn’t infringe on creativity,” he raves. “We are making a lot of money, have no client resistance and shoot 97 percent of our work digitally. The color is more accurate and the images are sharper. I was sure there would be some things film could do better, but I haven’t found them yet.” Katz backs up his enthusiasm with impressive figures. He estimates that he spent $60,000 on digital equipment, which includes about $25,000 for a Jenoptik digital camera. Katz also uses a 200 MHz Umax Mac clone with 200 mb of RAM, a 21-inch Radius monitor with an accelerator card and Epson 800 and 3000 printers. He notes, “In the first five months since we unpacked the camera, we’ve earned more than $250,000 with it, with no sweat. And we’re not a high-priced studio; no one is paying us $5000 a photo. What inspired him to take the plunge? His son David had just come into the business with him, inspiring new energy as well as thoughts about the future of photography. One of the thoughts the elder Katz had was that in a few years photographers without full digital capability could start to lose jobs to printers, prepress houses and others with electronic studios. By going digital, Katz says his studio can now add retouching services. “It’s not uncommon for us to get dummy copies of books or torn book covers to shoot, but our clients have minimal budgets for retouching,” he explains. Now that Katz and his son are working digitally, cleaning up an imageis easy. “We’re more than happy to do it now, and the clients are willing to pay us.” Katz admits the most important factor in getting a return on his investment is the fact that his studio does so many shots each day. “If you do high volume, you’ll make the money back the money you spend going digitally quickly,” he says. “If you don’t do high-volume, you’ll just have to add $1,000 a month to your overhead for a while.” Katz also says that the digital camera also saves on time and processing costs, and helps deliver customer satisfaction. Katz is used to clients working under tight deadlines, but when a longtime client recently asked him for a special effects shot to be done overnight, he was glad to have a digital camera. “Kensington Zebra, a book publishing company, wanted an image of a derby streaking through the air in front of a cloud background, and they wanted it in a few hours,” he recalls. “With film, I would have had to figure out how to edge-light things and get the right overlapping, and then move the camera or the hat, to get a swish.” Not so with the Jenoptik. “We put the hat up on a pole and made multiple exposures that we overlapped, ran a blur through that and used a Photoshop cloud background. And this was in the beginning, when our Photoshop skills were not so well developed! The client was delighted and I was able to do the job on their schedule and for their price.” If the job had been done in-camera it might have looked almost identical; the big difference is that Photoshop’s unsharp mask gave a slightly crisper edge to the derby. How-ever, Katz says, in his specialty, “with the importance of type, this crispness is a favorable thing.” Since its first plunge into digital image capture, Katz’s studio has added a second computer system for retouching and printing, and he is thinking seriously about buying a second Jenoptik. He says, “Its resolution and optics are superb, and its quick scan times of 15 seconds to a minute for a 50 mb file are major advantages.” Katz also prefers composing shots on a monitor, rather than looking at an upside-down image on a dark groundglass. “It took me two weeks to get used to not looking through a viewfinder and framing through a monitor,” Katz says. “But now when I do high angle shots with the camera raised up by the ceiling, I’m not climbing up and down any ladders and leaning out over the camera to see into the groundglass - which is a great relief at my age!” -ERIC RUDOLPH