By Mike Tedesco, Pro Photo Community

"Magic." That's what Peter Krogh felt when he first walked into a darkroom at the age of 9. "My Dad has always been an avid photographer and my brother had a short-lived passion for photography, so we had a darkroom setup at home." With a common family interest, Peter always had quality cameras around the house for him to use. "I've always loved cameras as machines and would tinker with them all the time." As Peter was growing up, his father had a number of friends who were photographers at National Geographic, and Peter had the fortunate experience of getting to spend time with some of them. "I remember hanging out with a number of the photographers and seeing their work. I wanted to be just like them." Photographers such as Bill Garrett (who would eventually become the editor at National Geographic) and his son Ken were early inspirations to Peter.

Peter decided to be a photographer while in college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he worked on the on the yearbook staff. "We didn't have much of a photography program at UNC so I was all self taught. But the team of photographers working on the yearbook was passionate and we had a very cooperative atmosphere." The sporting scene on campus was extremely exciting which provided a lot of great opportunities. "Michael Jordan was there at the time and that was when we won the NCAA championship. Unfortunately, I lost a coin toss so I didn't get to be in New Orleans for the final game, but I was on campus to cover the celebration." After college, Peter returned home to Maryland and became an assistant to Steve Uzzell, who had previously been at the National Geographic. Steve served as a mentor to Peter and taught him a great deal about photography, problem-solving, communication, and the photo business, and this is where he began to define his style and philosophy as a photographer.

"I love all kinds of photography. I don't do every kind of photography, but I cover a heck of a lot of ground." Peter approach to his imaging depends on the job he's doing. "For commercial, it's about who's looking at the picture and what it needs to communicate. The color, composition, and timing all help to tell a story on behalf of the client." In addition to his commercial work, Peter loves to shoot pictures of people. His goal is to try and capture the essence of the person at that moment. "It's important to have people disregard the camera as much as possible so that they are much more likely to be themselves." Ironically, Peter likes to shoot wide, but believes it's all about your personal attitude towards the people you're shooting and the situation you're in. "How you hold your camera, how you look at the subject; it's all critical. Even when photographing strangers, there's an exchange that takes place where I acknowledge them and their humanness."

Over the years of Peter's career, as with any photographer, he began to amass quite a collection of images. When using film, it wasn't uncommon to have a large collection, but as the industry and his career began making the move to digital, Peter quickly recognized there were going to be issues down the road. "My first foray into digital was a month on the road with the old Nikon E2 which produced an overwhelming number of images. I made a note to myself that when I did eventually fully migrate to digital, I would need to figure out a system to keep these digital images organized or eventually the images wouldn't survive. If you can't find your images, they may as well not exist." This philosophy added an additional piece to Peter's photography career. "When I moved to digital full-time in 2002, I quickly became obsessed with solving the organization and storage puzzle." Peter began trying a number of different software solutions but nothing he was trying was quite working the way he needed it to.

At the same time as his move to digital, Peter became very involved with the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and he soon realized there was no regularized way that photographers were doing business in the digital world. "There were no standards for terms, services, and pricing, and there was a huge amount of confusion among the photographers as well as the clients." The result of Peter's work on digital standards, along with a number of other groups from around the world, became what is known today as UPDIG. At this same time, Peter became an alpha tester for Adobe Photoshop CS2, and while he loved the product, he found that Adobe Bridge wasn't quite the image management solution he was looking for. "What I did find was that the combination of Photoshop and iView Media Pro was a great workflow solution." It was at this point, that Peter decided to sit down and write what is known today as the foremost resource on Digital Asset Management, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers. Released in 2005, this book is being used by photographers around the world to help them organize their images and make photographers' bodies of work easily discoverable. "It's been very gratifying to know the work I've been doing to make the images survivable in my own collection is translating to other photographers' bodies of work."

So what does Peter have to say to the aspiring photographers? "The world of photography is changing fast. While challenging from a business sense, this is the greatest time to be a photographer. You'll have to look at how the market is changing and what the market is looking for." Peter says the appetite for images is greater than it has ever been but it's a different appetite. The aspiring pro needs to look at their work and see how they can put their images together in new and different ways that will make them more marketable. "You have to take advantage of the whole world of digital media. Web sites, slideshows, audio, text, and video; don't just be a photographer in the traditional sense. 'How do you leverage the picture for more than just the picture?' is a question that you must ask."