Seminars

Ken Allen periodically conducts free seminars for museums and photographers. Contact us to find out when our next seminar is scheduled for your area. Our next seminar in Washington DC takes place Aug 9, 2010 as a part of the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists.

If you have a large group and would like a private seminar, please contact Ken Allen for rates and availability.

KenAllen started the first in a series of free seminars in their new studios on April 18, 2008:

THE $5,000 Do It Yourself DIGITIZATION PROJECT

Digitizing a museum’s collection is usually presented as a large and expensive project, entailing the purchasing of expensive equipment and the hiring of appropriate technically-oriented staff. However, much can be accomplished on a smaller scale with a limited budget.

Small digitization projects develop institutional knowledge and provide use cases to promote as well as procure funding for additional projects or expansion of a digital library.

This workshop will demonstrate the capabilities and benefits of the small, low-impact digitization project. Learn about the advantages, limitations, ideal applications, and benefits of the $5,000 digitization project; understand the process of digitization and how to manage your project.

For: Curators, Collections Managers, Rights and Reproduction Staff

What: Photographic collections that contain:

• Daguerreotypes • Collodion Images (e.g., tintypes, ambrotypes) •

• Cartes de Visite • Cabinet Cards • Lantern Slides • Glass Negatives •

• Stereographs • Postcards • Small Prints (8×10 or smaller) •

The seminar will include demonstrations on typical equipment and information on do-it-yourself projects.

The solutions demonstrated in this seminar are NOT ideal for objects larger than 8×10 inches or for preservation quality scans of modern film or large prints, this last will be covered in a future seminar.

Color Management: Achieving Accurate Color

This seminar blends color theory with basic how-to information for faultless digital printing. Participants are walked through the process of scanning or photographing a scene, editing the image in Adobe PhotoShop™, and printing it, while maintaining precise color matching in each step.

Image: Ken Allen

Digital Storage:
“Cramming More Digital Images into Storage (with a small budget)”

This seminar provides insight and advice on one of the most pressing issues for professional digital photographers and commercial studios today: How to manage the dramatic growth of their digital assets.

Images: Richard Jochum

The seminar includes:

Surveying underlying technologies available for online, backup, and archival storage: optical, hard disk, tape, and the new SSD (Solid State Drive).
Actual solutions in the market and a comparison of performance, features, and cost-benefits of each solution.
Important considerations to protect and archive growing digital assets.
A list of “Best Practices.”

A question-and-answer period follows so specific needs and questions can be addressed.