thomas fitzgerald.net

I am on holidays (Vacation) in New York City for the next few days so updates to the blog will be somewhat less frequent, but I’ll do my best! In the mean time, here’s a cool; shot of NY at night I took from my hotel window last night

From Shawn over at CameraCon:

Our first TimeShoots have been great - the Flickr page received pictures of
moose, housecats, indoors, outdoors, lighthouses, beaches, beer, ice, at
least one person in a bathtub and shots from four different continents!

The pictures come from all kinds of photographers - beginners, intermediates
and pros - using all kinds of cameras. It doesn’t matter what kind of camera
you shoot with or what level of photographer you are. There’s no critiquing
of your photographs or judging you as a photographer.

We’ve got a (new) Flickr site where the pictures will be posted and where
you can see the shots from the previous TimeShoots:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/timeshoot/>

And an email address for you to send your photos to (they will automagically
show up on the TimeShoot Flickr site):

“help14army (AT) photos.flickr.com”

All you have to do is send an email with your photo attached. Use the
email’s Subject Line to put a title to your photo and use the Body area of
the email to send along any other details - where it was shot, what kind of
gear you used, camera information, your name/website URL, etc.

You can send up to a maximum of 3 photos. You retains all rights to your
posted images.

Remember, take photos wherever you happen to be under whatever circumstances
you happen to be in at 12pm ET (actually, you’ve got a 10 minute leeway on
either side of 12pm ET) and send your best shots to “help14army (AT)
photos.flickr.com”.

You can use this web page:
http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

To figure out what time 12pm ET is in your Time Zone.

Seems like a lot to digest all at once but once you get the hang of it, we
hope you’ll be able to participate and join in!

I missed this the first two times it happened but it’s a great idea. I will definitely try and participate this time. Should be about 5pm here in Ireland.

Aperture is a great piece of software for the most part. However, there are a few additions that I would really like to see Apple make that would really round out the feature set. None of these are particularly major, I don’t think (well, one of them is) but | think they could really add the icing on the cake to an already excellent application. So, in no particular order….

1. Add the ability to save the entire adjustments stack as a preset. Basically, this would mimic the “develop module presets” from Lightroom. Yes, I know it’s a Lightroom feature, but it’s one that is badly missing from Aperture. It would also be great if you could also export and import these presets for easy sharing.
2. Open the “bricks” up to third party plug-ins. If you’re not that familiar with Aperture, the individual modules within the adjustments panel are referred to as “bricks”. By default a number are turned on but you can add and remove bricks to the image processing stack. If this were available to plug-in developers this could make Aperture an awesome piece of software, as it could allow truly non destructive filters.
3. Develop an “Apple Camera Raw” plug in for Photoshop. One of the main things that keeps people from using Aperture I believe is the fact that if you want to open a Raw file in Photoshop that you have processed in Aperture, Adobe Camera Raw doesn’t recognize the edits. By writing their own camera raw plug in for Photoshop, one that was basically Apertures raw engine in a plug-in they could solve this problem. Why would you want to do this I hear you ask? Well there are many times when you need to be able to open the raw file directly in Photoshop, especially if you use it in conjunction with CS3’s smart objects. Even if you just want to open a raw file in Photoshop without Aperture creating a version. I think by having their own plug-in it would be really useful for people who use Photoshop a lot.
4. An archive project tool. As I discussed in a previous post, it’s not always ideal or necessary to keep your Raw files online. What would be great is a tool that would let you create an archived project with all the raw files and adjustment information, and replace that project in the Aperture library with a duplicate project containing full resolution Jpegs of the originals. Using the high resolution presets does not work for this task unfortunately as you can’t use them within Aperture once you disconnect the raw files. A simple to use archival mechanism would be a really powerful addition to Aperture’s tool set.
5. A Burn to Disk function. It would be nice if you could burn Images (both versions and masters) to disk, directly within Aperture in the same way as you can in iPhoto.

So there you have it. As I said earlier, I don’t think any of these are too complicated to implement (except the whole Camera Raw thing) but it would really make life easier for Aperture users. Feel free to add your own suggestions to the comment section.

If you have the time please take a moment to check out my Photography Site and especially my recently updated Photoblog.

When Aperture first launched it was touted as being the solution to the workflow problems of modern digital photographers, solving the issues of working with hundreds or thousands of Raw files. Adobe’s Lightroom followed shortly thereafter making a similar claim. Both applications combined a database for organization with raw processing tools for developing digital images. They both seemed like an ideal solution for the problems of dealing with the masses of files that the digital era of photography presented. Yet, a recent survey showed that a large percentage of photographers (over 60%) were still sticking to their existing workflows and applications. So is it just inertia on the part of seasoned Photographers or is there a little more to it? I have been doing a lot of processing of digital photographs recently and I think I have figured out what might be one of the main issues that may be holding back more widespread adoption of both of these programs.

Both Aperture and Lightroom were built with the idea of being able to catalogue and handle large quantities of Raw files. In other words it is like being able to have all your negatives constantly at hand. The irony is that it is the combination of database and raw processing that are these applications strengths that may be putting people off. I’m willing to bet that the majority of photographers like to process their images then put the originals away. With Aperture and Lightroom your Raw files are constantly online. In a way it is like your post processing is never finished. It’s like always viewing your “negatives” instead of dealing with your finished prints. Raw files can take a lot of space, and even with the relatively low cost of hard drives these days you can still run out of space quickly. Yet the space is not really the main issue here, it’s more of an habitual mind set. People want to process their shoot, put the originals away and then just have the finished processed files to keep in their database. Thats the way people workd with film, and how many worked with digital before either of these applications came along. Although there are ways to do this with both Lightroom and Aperture, existing workflows of using bridge and camera raw or some other raw processing application seem to suit this way of working better.

Like I said though, there are ways to make this kind of workflow work with both Aperture and Lightroom. Both can generate high resolution previews which remain in the database if you move the originals. In Aperture you can choose the “relocate masters” command to move the raw files to another location and archive them off. An even better alternative is to export the whole project and save it to another location, thereby keeping your raw edits intact. In Lightroom you can just move the folder where the originals are stored and the previews remain in the library. Both of these options have their problems though. Aperture does not let you work with the previews to the same extent Lightroom does. You can’t export the files out of Aperture (except through the systems media library) or create books, web pages etc without first re-connecting to the masters. Lightroom does let you do more with the previews, but there is nothing equivalent to Apertures project structure so it’s harder to archive individual projects in the first place.

What I’ve ended up doing with older projects is to export the masters as jpegs, archive out the project, delete it then re-import the jpegs into a new project. I’m sure this process can be automated too thanks to Aperture’s scripting and Automator capabilities. What would be ideal though is an “Archive Project” function, which would do something similar. Archive off the Raw files with adjustments intact and replace them with full resolution jpegs, perhaps with the option to keep any edited files (such as PSD files) online. I think this would go a long way to addressing what I personally find to be a shortcoming of the software.

Both of these programs are great tools, both relatively young in their respective life spans, and will take some time to become the mainstream way of working. I don’t want anyone to think I’m railing against either application because I think that they are definitely the way forward, but I also think they should address the mindset of people who like to work this way rather than try and get the photographer to adapt to something that may seem alien to them. A few extra functions should make it easier for those with the edit-process-archive mindset to work with the programs better. Perhaps for version 3? In the mean time I’m off to do some Applescript coding.

Kelby Training.com has just launched a great new series of online classes from acclaimed photographer and photojournalist Joe McNally. If you want to learn more about flash photography and studio lighting check it out. I subscribed to the whole site on the basis of this alone.

After *A LOT* of tinkering I have finally re-launched my Photogaphy web site. I had been trying to cobble together a site using a combination of hand coding, some open source php, flash galleries and Wordpress. It had been going no where fast for quite some time so I stopped for a re-think. After doing some experimenting and following on from my article last week about iWeb Pro, I decided to see If I could do it in iWeb. It worked pretty well.

Although it looks pretty simple I pushed the boundaries of what you would normally do in iWeb. Everything is created in iWeb, and the only other applications I used were text wrangler and css edit in order to get Wordpress to work with it. I will do a complete write up later on just what I did, but while its frustrating at times you can do some cool stuff in Apple’s little web package. The only major problem (apart from its limitations) I encountered is that the code it generates is very bloated and contains a lot of garbage, which made it frustrating when trying to extract portions to work with Wordpress. Anyway, I am happy with it and will try and keep the photoblog going, as well as this one of course.

(I figured diluting this one with too many topics would get a bit irksome)

An amazing gallery of shots taken with the amazing Sigma DP-1 by Jim Radcliffe.

A great video from ProPhotoLife.com on a DIY studio lighting set up. I’ve been working on making similar set ups myself, but I love the wonderful simplicity of his lighting stands, the aptly named “Stick in a can”

Good article from the BBC about the UK Police Force harassing innocent photographers.

Normally, to do something like this you’d have to use a DSLR but I did this easily enough with my Panasonic LX2, mainly because you can set it manually. Anyway, set your aperture to maximum, ISO to minimum, I zoomed all the way in to increase the blur, set the camera on manual focus, then held the shutter down and swung the camera around wildly.

Not exactly rocket science I know but they look cool. This is straight out of the camera with nothing but a tweak to the contrast.

Just trying out this cool wordpress plug in that gives you the nice image overlay pop up box thingey! Click on the image below.

I came across this amazing galley of Photos taken with the equally impressive compact Leica, the D-Lux3 (Also the Panasonic Lumix LX2, of which I am a proud owner!) by Photographer Jim Radcliffe

With the new versions of Aperture and Lightroom both offering enhanced abilities, people seem to be getting confused as to what each program does and does not offer. When Aperture 2.1 was released Apple added a new plug-in SDK which enabled image processing plug-ins to be developed for Aperture. The software also included a sample plug-in from Apple that allows the user to do selective editing on an image using doge, burn and some other tools. The down side to this is that the plug-in works destructively, creating a new tiff version of your raw file and applying the changes to that.

When the Lightroom 2.0 Beta was released earlier this week, the software included a new doge and burn tool that allows localized editing of the image in much the same way as the dodge and burn plug-in does in Aperture, except that, unlike Aperture the adjustments are non-destructive and stored as metadata, not written out as with Aperture. People, on forums everywhere however seem to be getting confused, because I keep reading responses from people saying that Lightroom’s plug-ins are non destructive and Aperture’s are not. But this is an error because Lightroom doesn’t not currently offer any image processing plug-ins. The dodge and burn tool is a new tool in the Lightroom tool set, not a plug-in. While it mimics the functionality of the Aperture plug-in, the Aperture version is just one of what could potentally be a vast array of plug-ins to be released for Aperture. There are already several third party plug-ins already announced: Vivesa from Nik software, Noise Ninja from Picture Code, Power Stroke from Digital Film tools and many more. To get this functionality in Lightroom currently you have to send your image to photoshop and save it back, creating a new version, which is destructive and just the same as in Aperture, except you have to own Photoshop. Rob Galbraith has an excellent break down of the capabilities of the SDK and some of the tools coming.

The non destructive nature of Adobe’s dodge and burn tool is certainly a compelling feature but the people who are confusing this for a non destructive plug in Architecture should try and understand that this currently does not exist. They are Flaming Aperture and its users for lacking something that Lightroom doesn’t actually have. Adobe could choose to add image processing plug-ins to Lightroom in the future, however their willingness to make that decision is somewhat difficult to predict because it potentially reduces the need for Photoshop significantly for a lot of users, and It is unclear if Adobe are willing to make that step.