First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Micah Walter and I am a freelance photojournalist, writer and teacher. I’ll share a bit more about my background in just a few minutes. But first that iPod tip I promised…

With the release of Aperture 1.5, you can now easily put images on your iPod directly from your Aperture library. Just make an album in Aperture with all the images you want to have on your iPod. You can make as many albums as you like. Attach your iPod and open iTunes to the Photos pane. You will see a drop-down box where you can now select photos from your Aperture library.

If you click the option for including full resolution photos, iTunes will store the jpeg preview file of your images on your iPod. This is a great feature if you like to carry your portfolio around with you everywhere you go. You just never know when you might run into a prospective client!

Now back to my introduction.

As the son of a newspaper photographer, I was surrounded with Nikons and Leicas at an early age. I took my first picture with one of my father’s cameras at age 4. It was a pretty nice portrait of my parents and my baby sister sitting in a field in Rochester, New York. It still hangs, in glorious black and white, in my parent’s kitchen today. I guess you could say I was “born with a camera in my hand.”   

My parents eventually moved to Washington D.C. where they opened a commercial print lab. I can recall countless days helping my dad mop up chemicals, and fix the pipes that fed the Kreonite print processor. Working in a commercial darkroom taught me two things: how to make a good print, and what it was probably like to be a plumber.

Later I went back to Rochester (my birthplace) to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. I started out in the sciences, tried Imaging Science, and eventually migrated back to photography.  I finished with a B.S. in Imaging and Photographic Technology and quickly got a job down the road at the University of Rochester where I worked for a few years as an imaging specialist in their Lab for Laser Energetics.

But, photography kept calling me. Before I knew it, I was spending my days at work perusing the photo agency websites, and watching images unfold over the Internet as events like the Florida recount, and 911 took place. Issues of TIME Magazine began to pile up on my coffee table–I was hooked on the news.

Those images of what would eventually become historic events reminded me of my father’s library. He had all the great photo books form the 60’s and 70’s: Time-Life’s encyclopedia set of books on photography, Ansel Adams’s “The Negative,” and W. Eugene Smith’s stunning essay on the poisoning of Minamata, Japan, to name a few.

I realized I needed to get out of the lab and follow my calling. So, I quit my job at the laser lab.  I moved out of my apartment, sold my car and used my savings to buy my first digital camera, a Nikon D100. I spent the rest on a Titanium Powerbook and a plane ticket. Eventually I made my way to Israel where I lived for over a year. I took pictures of everything I could think of, and spent that year learning how to be a photojournalist.

After Israel I moved back to Washington, D.C., where I started working for wire services, newspapers and magazines. I covered the 2004 Presidential race, and the politics of our Nation’s Capital. I spent Election Day in Crawford, Texas and watched Martha Stewart emerge from a prison in West Virginia. Photojournalism for me has been, and continues to be an amazing journey.

So that’s me, in a nutshell. I adopted Aperture as my main imaging application as soon as it came out. I have been using it extensively with my current work, and have been working with it to gradually organize and archive my entire image library.  It’s a great program that seems to just get better and better.

So, now you know who I am. I am very excited to join the Inside Aperture community, and happy to share any information I come up with about Aperture, digital media, and whatever else pops in my head.