O'Reilly Digital Media

I am very pleased to announce Aperture Plugged In, a new website dedicated to, you guessed it, Aperture plugins! This new site is what I hope will become a meeting place for all those interested in using, developing and thinking up new ways to leverage Aperture’s extensible architecture.

After receiving a large number of email requests, I decided to take it upon myself to try and get this project going. I would really like to thank all those who have contributed their thoughts on this project, especially Derrick Story and Richard Kerris.

The project is still largely under development, so please excuse, for the time being, the random spelling mistake, bad font choices and minor bugs in the forums section. Oh, and that logo is still under critical review too!

Please feel free to peruse the site, send me your feedback, jump in and post a new topic in the forums section, or point me in the direction of a new, undiscovered plugin that you are working with.

Thanks again to all those who contributed their thoughts to this project. Enjoy!

In my recent article, Photo Workflow on the Road - A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Aperture, I talked about a few online storage options including PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad. A few days after posting the article a reader mentioned Jungle Disk as an alternative and I thought I would check it out.

Jungle Disk, it turns out, is an application built on Amazon.com’s S3 technology. Up until now I had only heard about S3 (Simple Storage Service). I had read a few short articles about it, and had seen it mentioned in a few of the blogs I read, but I had never really investigated it as a possible storage option for my work. So, yesterday I did a little hunting, and here is what I found.

Amazon’s S3 is a web service which was started to try and provide unlimited, redundant, online storage for small companies and enterprise clients. The idea was to make the same infrastructure that is used to power Amazon’s global e-commerce website available to others as an inexpensive and scalable alternative to the huge overhead associated with owning a system of web servers. For our purposes S3, coupled with an application like Jungle Disk, could make this same server space a viable solution for storing photos (or anything else we can think of).

Amazon’s S3 system provides a number of benefits. First of all, it’s cheap. Compared to Apple’s .Mac, and many of the leading competitors in the online server space market, S3 is the bargain basement. The current pricing structure is a pay-as-you-go at $0.15 per gig, per month, plus an additional $0.20 per gig of transfer bandwidth. This flexible system means that if you upload 10 gigs one time and left it on the server for a year you would only end up paying around $20 total. While I’m not a big fan of having to pay for bandwidth, you really can’t beat that price.

So, I decided to give it a go. I jumped over to the Jungle Disk website and read all about the application. Jungle Disk uses webDAV to create what looks like a network-attached server in your Finder menu. Much like the .Mac iDisk, with Jungle Disk you can see all your folders, copy, and paste and move files around.

All of the sudden, the wheels started to turn. It got me thinking. How can I use this to backup my Aperture library? Well first of all, I can certainly just copy my Aperture library (and all of its managed files) to S3 just by dragging onto my Jungle Disk in the finder window. But, what I really wanted was to get Aperture’s Vault to work. I already knew that Vaults, according to the Aperture manual, are not meant to be stored on network drives. But I did a little research and found a nice article by Bagelturf on the subject. In his article, Bagelturf points out an easy workaround for storing and updating Aperture Vaults on a networked +HFS file system.

I sort of wondered if this would work with Jungle Disk. I followed his steps and, voila–it worked. So far I have a Vault sitting on my S3 disk, somewhere out in cyberspace. It is redundantly backed up all over the world. I have no idea how it all works, but there it is, in my finder. I am curious to see how the Vault behaves. I still want to try and do a restore from the Vault and make sure that everything gets properly restored before deciding to use this as a real option in the future. For now I just have my small Aperture library, which sits on my laptop, vaulted to the Jungle Disk. Obviously it would take a really long time to upload my entire archive, but for backup of important masters, client project files, or just about anything else I need to have safe somewhere outside of my apartment, Jungle Disk seems to be a great option. So far my bill is up to ten cents, an expense I can certainly live with.

If you have had more experiences with S3 and Jungle Disk, by all means, leave a comment or shoot me an email. I would love to hear your stories and ideas.

Looping! looping audio, looping midi, loop the loop, i’m tellin’ ya, it’s makin’ me loopy! looping is one of those little industry tricks that seems so elegant and simple and useful, and yet has the almost overwhelming tendency to jump up and bite you in the ass! looping, in some regards, has been the freakin’ bane of my existence!

there’s this jazz musician’s joke: charlie parker dies and goes to hell, and the devil greets him at the gate saying, ‘hey, man, hell’s been getting a bad rap, it ain’t so bad, check this out!” he gives bird a solid gold sax, and brings him to a session where all the best players who ever lived are burning through a smokin’ chart … and the first chair is empty. bird sits down to play, thinkin’ “hmm, ya know, this shit ain’t so bad after all!” they read through the chart, go back to the top, read through the chart again, go back to the top, bird turns to the guy sitting next to him and says “hey man, where’s the coda?”

and the guy says mournfully “no coda, man” …

certainly there have been nights on stage i felt like that, but this old joke aptly describes my relationship with loops in the multimedia world. they seem really great until you realize you’re in hell!

If you want the image that comes from your printer to match what you see on your screen, you’ll need to do some basic color management.

To do that, you’ll need to calibrate your monitor. Without a good monitor calibration, there can simply be no color management. The monitor calibration is the starting point for every good-looking print.

There are several different hardware/software products available to you for monitor calibration. They all essentially work the same way. You attach a colorimeter to your monitor, then you run some software that takes your monitor through a series of tasks, recording the results.

Since Aperture will rely on the monitor calibration to tell it how the colors on the screen should print, it has to know how those colors are recorded. That’s why calibration is so important.

Starting last evening, and continuing into today, word about the official upcoming release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 has criss-crossed the Internet. Even though this is a blog for and about Aperture, I think it’s important to acknowledge and discuss what Lightroom means for us as photographers and as users of Aperture. A few years ago, we were stuck with tools that weren’t really appropriate for the job of dealing with tens of thousands of images. Tools that didn’t really match the way we photographers think. Enormous tomes were written about Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Photoshop and we all muddled our way through. But, for the most part, the tools for digital photography sucked.

This has changed in the last few years. It’s almost as if those hardy early adopters who bought into the first few generations of Digital SLRs had their dreams answered. I know that they have been for me. It’s not just Apple and Adobe pushing the boundaries here, either. There is Nikon with Capture NX. There is PhaseOne with CaptureOne. And there are some other tools out there as well. In fact, there’s not a single thing that I moaned about in 2000—when I first hit the problems of RAW workflow—that hasn’t been addressed by the current set of tools. Any shortcomings in today’s tools are only apparent because they take care of so many of the problems that we used to have. And those big old DAM books? Well, thankfully we’ve now got tools good enough to make them in need a rewrite.

One of the most visionary products I saw at the NAMM musical-instrument show was DigiTech’s Vocalist Live, a footpedal that listens to your guitar playing and automatically generates vocal harmonies. To me, it’s a great example of using computer power to make things simpler. (Indeed, one of the most tedious demos I saw at the show was when a demonstrator sat down behind a keyboard, fired up PowerPoint, and marched through page after page of specs and functions.)

The Vocalist Live 2; click to enlarge.

I posted a quickie recording of a Vocalist Live demo in my NAMM report, but just found a video that gives you a better feel for the box. The first 80 percent of the video is a sales spiel, but then you get to hear Marc Cooper, the same cool demonstrator I recorded. As a keyboardist, I was especially excited to hear that DigiTech seems to be planning a keyboard version as well. Presumably it will derive notes via MIDI.

Incidentally, when the DigiTech salesman mentions MAP, he means Minimum Advertised Price, the lowest number manufacturers allow dealers to publish. Like cars, musical instruments and pro audio gear are sold on a haggle system, which means you can often negotiate a better price than MAP.

Adobe engineers have been very busy during the final phases of Lightroom’s development. In addition to many performance and UI refinements, the 1.0 version that ships on Feb. 19, 2007 includes some great new features that I want to introduce you to today.

People thought it was pretty cool when I worked at one of the major record labels (EMI America) in the late 80s. And actually I can think of worse jobs to be honest; I did enjoy myself for awhile. But actually, the reason I left was owing to mass label consolidation (at the time there were five big major labels & a tier of labels that were disributed by one of the ‘Big Five’). I worked for EMI America which merged with Manhattan Records in ‘87 — and at that point I left to start my ten year run at Apple. A few years later, we started to see the major labels consolidate on a grander scale, starting with the merger of Universal and Polygram (aka Unigram as we referred to it), and more recently the Sony BMG merger. Now we have four major label groups — they are: Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and EMI. Warner and EMI have had several close brushes with uniting (with a lot of noise and fanfare in ‘06), and EMI has been dancing with suitors throughout much of ‘06. Many believe we’ll see three labels in 2007.

As of this past week, EMI has consolidated its Capitol and Virgin labels in the US under the newly created Capital Music Group umbrella. The labels came together purportedly as a leaner unified entity in an attempt to eliminate redundancies and to streamline efficiencies in promoting and nurturing artists (ahem). Of course in the background of this consolidation, several top EMI execs have departed in the past couple of weeks. Given the labels as a whole are losing money in steadily declining CD sales (with a corresponding spike on the digital side, where rapid growth is projected in the coming years), it’s hardly surprising that they need to trim the fat — and reduce their overhead, especially with regard to the types of salaries label execs have been used to during the past couple of decades.

CD sales are declining as a whole, and sales are shifiting towards increasing digital profits owing to the fact that we’re in a different world — where you no longer need to purchase a whole CD; in the digital age of course it’s a singles world. Today’s youth like the freedom and flexibility of buying just the songs they want. Which leads to another point. You know there’s trouble when the biggest act on EMI is The Beatles, who broke up nearly four decades ago. If the labels really focused on developing artists (’nurturing talent’), we might well wind up with a better cross-section of music that today’s audience is looking for.

Here is a cool little tip if you have taken a bunch of photos in a time zone other than your camera’s “home” time zone.

Select all the images that are showing up with the wrong time data in the EXIF “Image Date” field then select the “Metadata” menu and then the “Batch Change” option (or Shift+Command+B). Click the “Adjust Time Zone” radio button and then select your camera’s time zone from the top drop-down and then select the actual time zone where the photos were taken in the second drop-down.

Then just press the OK button. That’s it, all the selected images will have their date and time data modified to reflect the actual date/time the photo was taken … rather than what time it was “back home”.

It should be noted that this “time warp” can be performed during the import process by selecting the time zone drop-downs on the right hand side of the screen. The above tip is for those of us that forget to check that option on import.

Until next time,

Keep shooting.

Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography

When I was growing up, learning photography was pretty much an exclusively black and white exercise. A color darkroom was prohibitively expensive - and complex - and black and white film was much cheaper than color. Nowadays, for the price of a $100 photo printer, you can have a high-quality color lab on your desk, which outputs at a far lower per-print cost than a color darkroom, and with none of the hazardous waste disposal troubles. The downside to this is that most photographers now start learning in color.

I say “downside” because there are great advantages to being forced to shoot in black and white, from the biological to the aesthetic. Your eyes, with their preponderance of luminance-sensitive rods, are much more responsive to changes in brightness than they are to changes in hue. Your eyes separate the color and luminance information they receive into separate signals and transmit each of these to the brain via the optic nerve. The luminance signal contains all of the fine spatial detail that you perceive, and this signal contains much more information than the lower-resolution color signal. Consequently, black and white prints actually contain most of the information that the brain uses to construct a scene. This is one reason that black and white prints can be so satisfying - they have all of the essential information that the brain depends on, with no distracting color data.

All photographs begin with light, of course, and learning to recognize and use lighting is an essential photographic skill. Because black and white prints are composed entirely of luminance - changes in lightness - shooting in black and white helps develop your sensitivity to lighting and form, light and shadow.

Very often, a scene that is boring or cluttered in color will be compelling in black and white. Because the real world is in color, learning to visualize in black and white can be difficult for the inexperienced black and white shooter. That is, it can be difficult to recognize that a potential image might work in black and white.

For example, in the figure below, the image on the left - which is roughly how it appeared while standing on the street - is not especially interesting. When presented as a black and white image, though, it’s much more evocative and compelling.

Your Aperture library can be a great way to practice black and white visualization. Pick a project of color images and try to visualize those images as grayscale. If you find any that you think are particularly good black and white candidates, create a new version (select the image and press Option-V) and then apply Aperture’s Monochrome Mixer. Don’t worry about adjusting any of the parameters, just take a look at the image in grayscale and how you like it.

As a form of practice, this process can get you “thinking” in black and white, in much the same way that you will when you go out in the field. What’s more, because the images in your library are, presumably, images that you’re pleased with, you’ll know you’re already working with images with good composition. Of course, what you’re not necessarily getting are the images that you didn’t shoot in the first place, because you weren’t thinking in black and white while shooting. Hopefully, this practice will help you better-recognize potential grayscale scenes the next time you’re out shooting.

Yeah, yeah. The Zune may be a miserable failure according to some, but there are definitely some positive points about the Zune that Apple should take note of and consider emulating. Here is my list of six lessons Apple might consider learning from the Zune and implementing in their iPod line.

1. Be fingerprint resistant. The soft feel of the scratch-resistant Zune casing is far more comfortable to hold texture-wise than the iPod. Also, it doesn’t make your hands sweat. It doesn’t show fingerprints. It doesn’t show scratches. It might not look as shiny, but it’s really nice to use. A soft-textured iPod would totally rock.

2. Offer menus with video out. The iPod does not export its menus out when you set it for TV display. The Zune does. This actually makes it easier to Zunecast over iChat than to iPodcast (you lose the video connection with iChat AV whenever you switch out of a playing video), and provides a far better experience when selecting and displaying videos while connected to a TV, which is the more obvious and typical task for video output display.

3. Consider two-dimensional browsing a la Twist menus. The Zune’s “twist menus” allow you to scroll up and down between individual items and scroll left-right to select categories. Sure, the Apple designers would make it look a lot better, but isn’t it nice to be able to get to where you want to be quickly without having to go up and down and up and down through menu trees?

4. Add context menus. I don’t know about you, but I kind of get annoyed with the whole “set the volume”/Click OK/”set the playhead”/Click OK/”set the song rating” sequence of mid-play interaction. I rather like the Zune’s overlay menu that offers context-sensitive operations, depending on whether you’re listening to music, watching video, playing the radio, and so forth. Apple should definitely take a navigation hint from this presentation.

5. Think about a built-in FM radio. The built-in FM radio is actually kind of cool, especially to a person who hasn’t listened to much FM radio for years. The display of the station, song, and artist (for stations that broadcast that information) is particularly nice for a included/free feature. No, Apple shouldn’t add a tuner if it would jack up the price, but for a low-cost no-brainer add-in? Very nice. (Update: Yes, I do use the FM tuner on the Zune a lot, and no, I never expected to!)

6. Give us a bigger screen. No, the Zune doesn’t have more pixels. (It’s still 320×240.) And yes, the overall form factor of the iPod is hand-friendlier. But the screen is big which is pleasant for watching, particularly on planes. Now, we just have to wait for Apple to introduce a pixelicious widescreen iPod without all that iPhone stuff cluttering up the device. A Superbowl or early-February special event announcement of this would be acceptable.

Welcome to another week’s edition of Friday Napster Freebies. These free downloads are in un-DRM’3d MP3 format and can be accessed from around the globe. So load ‘em up on your iPod or other portable music player and enjoy!

“Weekend Warriors” by A Change of Pace
These Peoria, Arizona high-school buddies share a love for pop-edged alternative rock that has led them to the Warped Tour and touring stints with groups like Senses Fail. This track is from their recently released sophomore album, Prepare the Masses.

“Senorita Mia” by Louie Cruz Beltran
“I was born to play congas. I am a rumbero,” declares this Bakersfield, California percussionist. His love for Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican rhythms has led him to perform with heavyweights such as Santana and Coke Escovedo, his mentor. Today’s free download is from his album It’s My Time.

“Elephant Gun” by Beirut
Led by high-school dropout/musical prodigy Zach Condon, Beirut combines musical styles ranging from indie-folk and lo-fi rock to Eastern Euro gypsy. This track from their new EP, Lon Gisland, offers more of what made them one of 2006’s surprise success stories.

“If You Could Read Your Mind” by Clinic
This quartet from Liverpool has been winning over shoegazers and critics alike since 1997, creatively flavoring their indie rock with a strange, sour beauty (they’ve even toured with Radiohead). This track is from their latest effort, Visitations.

“Keep on Lovin’ Me” by Bleu Collar
This Los Angeles-based hip-hop group comprises MCs Reese One and Basik, and as their collective name suggests, they’re not afraid of working hard to build a following. When not rocking sold-out shows, they’re recording tracks like this one from their forthcoming EP.

“Kiss Your Soul” by Jon Quesnel
Jon Quesnel (pronounced Ka-Nell), a 22-year-old from suburban Minnesota, has a passion for soulful melodies and plies them with a disarmingly powerful voice. Today’s download is from his debut album, Packin’ Up My Bags.

“Told You So” by The Guggenheim Grotto
Already a hit in Ireland, this track from the Grotto’s critically acclaimed debut album, …Waltzing Alone, demonstrates their deft blending of contemporary folk and pop styles.

While sifting through photos for tomorrow’s NAMM show report, I saw this head-scratcher of a phrase near a pair of headphones:

The Real Virtual Reality.

The ’phones come from Beyerdynamic, a German company, and are designed to simulate surround sound. What makes them more real, I suppose, is that they rotate the simulated environment as you turn your head, thanks to a propeller-shaped sensor on the top. The demo did sound realistic, but I’m still wondering about the nomenclature. If “virtual” means fake, is a real fake any better?

Coincidentally, a rep from another German company, Native Instruments, uttered my favorite line of the show. In describing his company’s software emulations of old hardware synthesizers, he said they used “true virtual analog synthesis.”

Well, it’s official, I have now been named (by more than a couple of people), “The Plug-in Guy.” I never meant for this to happen, but I guess I just get way too excited when I see digital photography applications holding hands.

So, to continue the theme, I am proud to bring your attention to, yes, you guessed it, another plug in for Aperture. This time it’s for the web service, YouSendit. Now I will admit, I have never tried YouSendit, but Derrick tells me it’s a great way to send large files across the internet via email.

With the Aperture plug-in for YouSendit, available for free download on their site, you can easily export images directly from within Aperture. You select the image you want to send, enter the recipients email address, add a brief note, and YouSendit takes care of the rest. If you have ever tried emailing someone a really large sized file, you will know that it doesn’t always work, and can in fact tie up their inbox, which isn’t the nicest thing to experience.

There are many other plug-ins coming out for Aperture, left and right. So many that I can hardly keep up with it all. Okay, here’s an idea for all you plug-in developers. Try this one on for size. I want a plug-in that, when I click “ExportMicah’sShoot” it takes all my selected images, exports them into a zip file, adds to that zip file a text file with instructions, and a standard license agreement. Then it opens Quickbooks, automatically generates an invoice, and adds that invoice as a PDF attachment in an email to my client. The plug-in then uses YouSendit to send my package of images to my client, sends the notice via email to the client, along with the PDF invoice, and when it’s done with all that, it uploads the images to my Digital Railroad and PhotoShelter archives and asks me if I want to send anything to flickr for my blog. If it could also write a blog post detailing everything it just did, that would be great.

Next week, I promise, I will do my best to talk about something other than plug-ins!

Further to my post about editing last week, I have been thinking about it and have looked around and found some interesting posts about deciding which digital images to keep and which delete. From Derrick Story’s website, The Digital Story, Carl Weese wrote about how as time goes by, we evolve and grow as a people and photographers, so the editing choices made today might be different in the future. That is so true. I’ve heard it many times, when photographers go back to re-edit work–they see things differently when they’ve had some time to think or not think about the work. The whole idea of the innocence of vision is something I strive for when I shoot, and it involves unlearning the formulary patterns I repeat while shooting on a regular basis. It’s interesting to go back and look at some of your early work, which may not represent the technical competence you now have as a photographer–but to see what it was you were drawn to and your approach to photography when you were just getting started.

Another good point: when you edit your stuff, you are bound to make mistakes, you are human–all the more reason to be careful of throwing stuff out. I do believe that deleting in the field is a no-no. There’s just no good reason for it with the abundance of cheap, big CF or SD cards–I don’t even like to look at the screen while shooting, never mind deleting. I prefer to concentrate on the photographic scene in front of me.

My friend Andy Freeberg went back through his archive along with a person whose talent for editing he trusted and came up with an entirely new portfolio of work. It was there all along, but he didn’t see it at the time.

That being said, things are different now. Editing with a tool like Aperture, is far different from the old system of looking at negs, slides or contact sheets through a glass or plastic loupe. It was far easier to miss stuff then, particularly with contact sheets and negatives, where you’re looking at a very small area of real estate for each image. And if the contact sheet was not perfect with blown out highlights or too dark shadows–you can miss the subtleties that vault an ordinary image into the extraordinary category. I never believed that you could do a good job editing with just negs in the first place–particularly with people pictures, where a person’s eyes say so much.

Today however, with the incredible tools we now have at our disposal for editing like Aperture, it’s a lot harder to miss the good stuff. Not to say that it can’t happen, but in Aperture, you can see the entire image, blow it up big, see small details really big; it’s really quite incredible how accurate you can be with your edit. So in some ways, I don’t feel that by keeping everything, it’s going to mean saving the gems that you might have missed with the old, analog system. I still agree that as time goes by, images often gain new importance and we might see our work differently in the future. But if you’re smart enough to determine a system of what stays and what goes, I don’t think you will have too many regrets in your photographic future, and you can keep a bit of a handle on a soon to be gigantic, always growing archive.

I am lucky to have all my raw final selects from The Republican Convention shoot in 2004, but I lost hundreds of others. To this day, I’m not sure how I deleted them. I now do everything in my back-up power to prevent anything similar from happening again.

The one thing I do know for sure is the old adage: There are two types of digital photographers, those that have lost image files, and those that will someday lose image files. Fellow blogger Ben Long put me at ease as I struggled to find the best possible drives to store my precious and irreplaceable work. All mechanism’s can fail he reminded me, even the best and most expensive–so it’s less about brand names and more about redundant back up. I therefore feel it’s better to have three duplicate archives on cheaper drives, than two on more expensive ones. A managed Aperture library with vaults alleviates much of the stress. What do you think?

One of our readers clued us into an Aperture plug-in which streamlines exporting and uploading images to “Gallery.” For those of you who have never heard of Gallery before, it is a web based, open source, photo album application available for free download at http://gallery.menalto.com. You can get the plug-in here.

Gallery is one of those applications that has fallen under my radar. I know a few people who use it and love it, but I checked it out once and never pursued any experimentation. That is not to say that I think Gallery isn’t a fine app. It seems to be very well thought out and easy to use, and as an open source program it certainly is appealing for people looking for ultimate customizability.

I guess I have just always been a big fan of SlideshowPro. SlideshowPro generates Flash based galleries and has a pretty nice Ajax based web application for managing things. Yes, you do need Flash, and yes, it does cost a few bucks, but it is definitely worth checking out. I just hope the developer comes out with an Aperture plug-in!

At first glance the plug-in for Gallery seems pretty straight forward. In its latest release it allows for uploading to multiple galleries and is compatible with both versions of Gallery.

It certainly is exciting to see developers creating plug-ins for Aperture. However, I do see a need for some type of community website where Aperture plug-in developers can keep us all up to date with their latest news. The Aperture section of Apple’s site has a partial listing of their “partners” with available plug-ins on their Extensibility page, but there is definitely a need for a non-Apple website where developers can promote their plug-ins and join in conversation. Okay, who out there wants to start one? Anyone?

Well, in other news I just received a new 500-gig Lacie USB drive–ah, breathing room! I can’t help but to think back to the computers we had at the lab and their 32K 8-inch floppy disks. Man, we have come a long way. I now have a terabyte of external hard drive space sitting on my desk. This may seem like small potatoes to those of you out there with permanent desktop systems, but the fact that I can easily pack all this harddrive space into an overhead luggage compartment on most puddle jumpers down here in the Caribbean, still astounds me. I guess I am easily impressed.

I spent a few hours last night transferring master images to the new drive. I sort of regret not getting another Firewire drive, as they are so much easier to connect together in a chain, but the new drive will certainly keep me in free space for a little while longer. It was pretty easy–I just copied my Aperture Master Library to the new drive (I have a Master Library living on an external and a sort of temp library on my laptop) and opened it.

Once opened, I selected the entire library, clicked Relocate Masters and after a short period of time all of my master image files were transfered to the new drive. The one issue I see with transferring files in this manner is that the operation is a “move” and not a “copy,” meaning, you need to make sure to make a backup before doing such an operation–for safekeeping. There is also the matter of Aperture’s ability to keep tabs on your referenced masters when they are stored on external drives. More on that to come.

Sometimes less complicated is good. A reader sent me this quote and inspired this post.

ECONOMY IN ART IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OF EFFORT AND EFFECT.
–JOSEF ALBERS

I recently purchased a Canon Powershot A710IS digicam. It only shoots in JPEG mode. As someone who’s spent the last several years shooting exclusively in RAW, this was a shock to my system.

But then, I realized, it was also a bit freeing. It meant images would not have to be decoded by Aperture. It meant that images would pop up on the screen more quickly and be easier to work with. It meant that even if I worked in the highest quality JPEG mode, I’d no longer worry about spinning beach balls.

This week’s podcast episode (#22) of the iLifeZone features a live taping from Macworld earlier this month, wherein Scott Bourne, Derrick Story, Chris Breen and the “token girl” discussed the fact that January came early this year and none of the cool stuff was ready to be taken home. Here are a few of my observations:

• With a recently deceased Treo to replace, I was hoping that the iPhone would be cool (it was, it so was), priced with in my budget (it wasn’t really, and me being the notorious mobile phone destroyer), and ready for sale (it wasn’t).
• AppleTV, well, they’ll tell you you can order it today, but it isn’t shipping until February. And I’m not sure it solves pain most people feel (yet). I realized today if I brought home a $299 item that plugged into the TV and didn’t have a game controller (preferably a certain oblong white game controller with a wrist strap) my 11-year-old would be totally confused. Then annoyed.
• The ModBook was fun to play with, but it’s not ready until April. And it’s basically a bit of a Frankenstein job on a MacBook. And it voids your warranty. If you’re looking for sleek Apple design, maybe better to wait for a real iTablet (or is it AppleTablet?) (And you know how hard sleek Apple design is to resist, she says, watching her imaginary iPhone as it twirls in its plexiglass case, safe from harm.)
• Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom from Adobe are cool, and they’re free to play with now, but you still don’t know quite which aspects of either program you can really bond with emotionally. (OK, I know you can make a pretty good guess. My point is that even Adobe was showing things you really can’t buy yet.)
• Even the guy who had the pink plastic compact that holds your iPod on one side and a mirror on the other pointed out that the hinge didn’t work quite right in the “prototype” he had at the show. (And given my destructive tendencies noted above, I try to keep my electronic devices and cosmetic-related items in distinctly separate sections of my bag anyway.) It was the perfect silly token girl item though.

Sitting in on the podcast was fun though. Give it a listen here, no waiting.

For a long time, I was perfectly happy with the managed library structure introduced with Aperture 1.0. The simplicity of having the application manage all those pesky RAW files outweighed the fact that they were packaged in an opaque structure. And the ease of use of Aperture Vaults to back data up was the frosting on the cake. Of course, this wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I was happy for those people to see the introduction of support for externally referenced masters in Aperture 1.5, released last September. I thought, however, that I would ignore that feature and stick with the managed library. I really did.

But then, in October and November, I had a change of heart. For the first time in a bit over a year, I started printing large format prints again. While the RAW converter in Aperture gives good results in many cases, I much preferred the prints I could make of many of my photographs with different tools, such as Photoshop with ACR or Lightroom. With the RAW files tucked away in the managed library, however, it was a bit of a hassle to use external converters. I was exporting the RAW files out, opening them up in those other tools, and wading through the resulting duplication of files—something that I was glad to get away from when I started using Aperture.

A question I’m constantly asked is: “How can I set my favorite image adjustments as the defaults when I open the Heads Up Display?” For a while, I didn’t know the answer myself until I found this post by Jacob Lauemøller in the Aperture Discussion Forums. The answer is a simple edit to the AdjustmentDefaults.plist file.

The procedure is simple. Close Aperture. Go to your Home Folder > Library > Application Support > Aperture. Make a copy of the AdjustmentDefaults.plist file and stash it in a safe place. Open your original version in the Property List Editor or any good text editor such as TextWrangler.

The control that most people want to add as the default is Edge Sharpen. To do so, add a new sibling after the last string and type RKProSharpenOperation (in the Property List Editor), or if you’re using a text editor, just add a new string tag and type in RKProSharpenOperation after the last string in the list. You can refer to the examples below. The top example is using the Property List Editor and the bottom example is with a text editor.

Restart Aperture, find an image to edit, open the HUD, and you will see Edge Sharpen as part of the default list. Jacob lists other strings you can add too:

• RKRedEyeOperation (Red Eye)
• RKStraightenCropOperation (Straighten)
• RKCropOperation (Crop)
• RKDustRemovalOperation (Spot and Patch)
• RKChannelMixerOperation (Monochrome Mixer)
• RKNoiseReductionOperation (Noise Reduction)
RKSharpenOperation (Sharpen)

As with any other hack, back up your original data, proceed with care, and experiment at your own risk. (Have fun too!).

This week I’m going to show you how you can create an online image gallery in only a few minutes. Aperture makes this so easy that you can probably create a gallery in less time than it takes to upload it to your server.

Last week while on my way to the MacWorld Expo I made a side trip to a place that is world famous in the geeky world of railroad fanatics (RailFans). The Tehachapi Loop is located (not too surprisingly) in Tehachapi California and it is a section of railroad that climbs through the mountains and at one point makes a fairly tight loop and crosses over itself (also known as a helix) as a means gaining altitude over a short distance. Railfans come from all over to see this place and take train pictures. About 23 years ago my good friend Carlos and I rented a Cessna 172 and I made the pilgrimage to train mecca and spent the day taking pictures … so I thought after 23 years maybe it was time to revisit the site.

Now that I’ve made the return trip to Tehachapi and I’m back home I want to share the photo with my old friend Carlos. So, what better way than to create a web gallery and just send him a link to it.

After blogging during the experience of my recent Macworld 2007 assignment, I think I can safely say that it was a really good way to think in detail about my workflow and my use of Aperture. As well, some really great questions and comments were raised by readers that focused right in on some great topics. To put a solid finish on this experience, here’s a look back at the posts and some follow on thoughts that came out of each.

The Day 0 post (apologies for the geek reference) focused on the process of preparing for the shoot and gathering the equipment necessary. Everything worked without a hitch during the shoot. In particular, I’m really happy with the way that the LaCie Rugged triple interface drive worked out. During the shoot, I found there’s another reason to use an external drive: it was very easy to slip into my pocket when I needed to leave the bulk of my equipment, including my laptop, somewhere. Whether I left my laptop in a staff office or in my hotel room, the little Rugged drive went into my jacket pocket and gave me a warm sense of security.

One item that wasn’t on my equipment checklist that I may add soon is a cable lock. This was suggested by Andrew Wooster in the comments, and even though I’ve not had a problem so far, a bit more peace of mind is always welcome.

Welcome to another week of Friday Napster Freebies. Once again, here’s a week’s worth of free music you can download and enjoy on your favorite media player.

“Time2hitdaclub (EXPLICIT)” by 8Ball
Representing half of legendary Memphis rap duo 8Ball & MJG, this solo outing does the legend proud: all downtempo boom, hairy synths, and lyrics devoted to everyone’s favorite activity after a long week.

“That’s My Way” by Samantha Jo
Already the recipient of numerous awards for her songwriting, expect this country up-and-comer to make a lot of noise this year. Check her out on this track from her new, self-titled album.

“I’m Not Worthy” by Andre Williams
This multi-talented singer, songwriter, and producer has written with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, and Edwin Starr and has worked with Parliament, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Spinners. Enough said.

“In the Morning” by Junior Boys
This dance-floor cut from the Canadian synth duo is sure to get the party started. Taken from their newest collection of electro niceness, So This Is Goodbye.

“Soul Traveler (featuring J2 & Prince A)” by Destruments
Few groups have what it takes to combine classic hip-hop and soul and still make it sound original, but these San Franciscans’ pure, organic approach gets the job done.

“Reel” by Jawbox
Jawbox is one of a few groups to successfully make the switch from credible indie label to a major. Today’s download is taken from their reissued major label release, For Your Own Special Sweetheart, which many fans doubted at first but later embraced.

“A Little More Time” by The Early November
Armed with a solid demo and a huge internet buzz, this New Jersey–based quintet strengthened their fanbase with their performances on the Warped Tour. Today’s download is taken from their ambitious triple-disc album, The Mother, the Mechanic, and the Path.

With the ability to import referenced files, Aperture 1.5 makes it much easier to manage a large archive of images than it was under version 1. However, depending upon your storage strategy, you’re probably also using the internal, managed library for some images. This library still has the same size limitation as the 1.0 Aperture library. That is, it’s limited by the size of the volume it’s stored on.

You can, of course, change the location of the library using Aperture’s Preferences. In the Preferences dialog, click the Choose button beneath the Library location field.

If there’s no library at the new location that you choose, Aperture will create a new empty one. If you want to move your existing library to another volume, you need to move it to the new location using the Finder, and then change the preferences to point to that new location.

You must restart Aperture to view the new library. If you moved your library and changed the preferences to point to it, Aperture won’t look any different. If you pointed it to a new location that didn’t already have a library in it, then when you re-launch, you’ll be looking at an empty library.

Using this mechanism you can, of course, keep different libraries on multiple drives, whicih can ease your organizational headaches and afford you more space. However, you won’t be able to look at imags from multiple libraries side-by-side.

Another option is to use my Aperture Library Spanner, which lets you span your Aperture library across multiple drives.

Note: What you are about to read is NOT officially sanctioned by Apple. It’s an admitted hack, but it seems to work without complications. I have yet to have anyone report any type of problem. Nevertheless, back up your library before trying this.

You can download the Aperture Library Spanner here. The zipped archive includes a simple application that allows you to configure your spanned library, as well as a full set of documentation.

Note too that once you’ve spanned your library, you can easily UN-span it, so you don’t have to worry about committing to this scheme.

Over the last month, I’ve taken a look at a few of Aperture’s comparison features (such as compare mode and stack mode). These features allow you to easily compare images within a project to determine which images you want to tag as your “picks.”

These modes, however, only allow you to compare images contained within a single project. As Scott Bourne discusses here, the project is fundamental Aperture structure that you really need to understand to be able to organize and manage your Aperture library.

Aperture provides no mechanism for comparing images contained in separate projects, and there’s really no need for one. If related images have ended up in different projects, then you might need to re-think how you’ve organized your library. However, there are a few simple workarounds if you want a side-by-side view of images from different projects.

First, you can create an album or smart album at the Library level, rather than in a project. Click on Library at the top of the Library pane, and then create your new album. The album will be created at the Library level, rather than inside any specific project. You can drag and drop images to the album just as you normally would, and because the album sits at the Library level, you can add images from multiple projects.

If you now select your new album, you’ll see that you can easily view images side-by-side. Any rating or stack pick changes that you make in this album will be reflected in your original project because, like an album inside a project, a Library-level album still contains pointers to images kept elsewhere.

If you create a Smart Album at the Library level, it will be populated with images from any project inside your library. This is a great way to create smart porfolios that mine your entire library for highly-rated images.

Finally, one of Aperture’s lesser-known features is the ability to open multiple projects simultaneously. This feature still doesn’t let you view images side by side, but it does make it simpler to easily switch from one project to another. To open multiple projects, click on the project in the Library pane. It will display in the Browser pane, as normal. Next, Command-click to open additional projects. They will appear as tabs in the Browser pane. You can easily switch from project to project by clicking on the relevant tab.

The art of editing has always been one of the most challenging tasks for me. It’s a crucial part of our work that is almost as important as the shoot itself. If we select the wrong photographs, no one gets to see how good we really are. Good editing means squeezing your best images out of each and every shoot. There have been a lot of great postings about the specific Aperture features for editing–one of the strongest reasons to use Aperture. This week I’ll give you my big picture philosophy with regards to editing.

For me, the first edit is similar to the shooting process itself, I don’t want to think, I want to react. I approach the first look with reverence, because it only happens once. I try and make sure I have enough uninterrupted, quiet time to concentrate and react by instinct as when taking the photographs.

After ingest, I hit the V key, to see the grid view of all images in the window, and I bring the thumbnail slider to the right to maximize their size.

My thumb and middle finger then do all the work: Right Arrow Key advances to the next frame; the number 9 key on the numbers pad to reject the ones that I know I will never use. It is a time when I get rid of the really bad stuff, and keep the rest. So as I go through the work, one by one, it’s a question of yes or no. I tend to shoot on impulse and feel my way through, which is how I like to edit. With my shooting style, I shoot a lot, so this first look let’s me edit down to free up space.

There are many photographers I know that come back from a shoot and immediately copy their raw files to a DVD or hard drive maintaining the integrity of their complete shoot. I think this is generally a good idea. I opt to trim things down, losing roughly 15-30 per cent of the total number of frames shot.

In the old days of film, you could go back to the negatives and find gems missed in the first edit. This is something I keep in mind when I do the first edit, I really just want to rid myself of the frames I will never use. With thirty years experience, I’m confident I can do it.

But I also remember the story of Dirck Halstead, who, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal took place in 1997, went back through his archive and found a very good frame of President Clinton and Lewinsky together. It was a frame that might have been deleted if shot digitally, since it was a very ordinary image and there was much better from that shoot. But because it was filed with all his slides, that image ended up being very lucrative for Mr. Halstead and was widely published, earning him a Time Magazine cover and many awards. So keep the “Monica Factor” in mind.

During that first edit, I do notice the really good ones, but I try not to get too excited yet–that’s for round two.

Like many photographers, I have great expectations, setting high standards wanting to hit a grand slam on every shoot, but reality means not every hit is out of the park, and I understand this. Most of the work falls somewhere in the middle, but they key in editing is squeezing the very best frames from every shoot.

The second look is when I look for the diamonds, the jewels that come around once in a while, but never often enough. They are the images you remember from the shoot, the magic moments that are easy to find and ones you can’t wait to download and see on your big monitor. For the second go round, I hit the F key to go full screen, also advancing to the next image with the right arrow key, hitting the “2″ key to rate the good ones, saving the “4″ for the very best, ones that are in contention for my portfolio and contest entries, that will automatically go into my 4-star Smart Album. (I reserve 5-Stars for Portfolio Images, edited from the 4-Star Smart Album)

I give a 2-Star rating to anything that works; that has a chance at being used for something, a book, slideshow, maybe as a stock image or workshop or blog example.

Round three is when I really get to business, creating stacks and comparing similar frames, looking through aperture’s Loupe to check sharpness and getting down to a group of main selects that may not be five-star lightening, but are the best from the shoot. These get my 3-Star rating as selects. Post edit, I make a mental note if for some reason I’m disappointed or if I noticed something I neglected to get; in other words, I try and learn from each and every shooting experience.

Macworld 2007 was busier than I’ve seen in years, but it didn’t feel like a computer show. Indeed, as I squeezed past everything from iPod toilet-paper holders to all manner of cases, bags, and enveloping speakers, I was struck by how many of the products were simply designed to dress up your toy. The ubiquitous music player has become a Barbie doll.

Nothing wrong with that. From an audio perspective, it was interesting to see Belkin take the concept to another extreme with its TuneStudio mixer. Plug in a video iPod and you have a multi-input recording studio. Of course, even the most basic standalone competitors are much more practical, offering overdubbing, effects, and other muso features, but the Belkin demonstrators were sure having fun.

Over the weekend I made a couple of quick posts pointing out updates to the handful of plug-ins that are now available for Aperture 1.5. Aperture’s extensible architecture was really one of the best additions that came with the update last year, and third party software developers are jumping on board.

One of those new plug-ins that just became available is an export plug-in designed to allow easy one-step uploading of images from within your Aperture library to Digital Railroad, an online digital storage and image marketing platform. So, I thought I would do a little comparison between the new plug-in for Digital Railroad users, and the previously released plug-in for PhotoShelter, DRR’s obvious rival.

There has been quite a bit of talk on the blogs and photo websites comparing the two services. Both seem to perform essentially the same function, but as competitiveness would dictate, they each do things in their own unique way, making the task of deciding between the two a difficult one.

So for the purposes of this site, which is meant to be all about Aperture, I am going to try and keep myself from comparing the two services, and focus on the plug-ins. I have been a long-time user of both platforms, and have never really been able to decide which one is better or worse. At some point I sort of decided that having both might be a good option. I mean, why not have my pictures in as many places as possible?

So, I will begin with a synopsis of the Digital Railroad Export Plug-in for Aperture. After hearing the news of the plug-in’s release I quickly jumped on the Digital Railroad site and downloaded the install file. The install seemed to go smoothly and before I knew it I had re-launched Aperture and could now see the plug-in available along side the rest of my export options.

I then selected an image; right-clicked and selected the Digital Railroad option from the Export area. This opened the plug-in window where I was able to log in to my Digital Railroad account and, after a few seconds, I was able to see all of my gallery folders I had previously made on the DRR site.

The plug-in gives you the option of selecting one of your existing galleries, or creating a new one. You can also select the Incoming folder, which is DRR’s default folder for newly uploaded images. Being able to create a new folder from within the plug-in is a great timesaver, and means one less step I will have to do online.

The DRR plug-in also gives me the option of uploading a JPEG or TIFF version of my file. Although this makes sense with the DRR way of doing things (they only support JPEG and TIFF) I would have liked to see the ability to select from my JPEG and TIFF presets within Aperture. Without these presets I have no way of controlling what happens with my color profile, black point compensation, or even my output resolution. These seem like obvious necessities to me. The DRR plug-in also allows you to rename your file on export by selecting from one of Aperture’s presets.

On the Photoshelter side of things, the plug-in is very similar, with a few minor additions. For example, you have a preference pane for setting some options, including the ability to make images publicly searchable on upload. This is an option that I think is really important. Without this option, you would have to log in to your Photoshelter site and go through the process of exposing the newly uploaded images to the public. To me, this is just one more step I have to do, and when I am in situations where bandwidth and time are both limited, it could really make my life much easier. Kudos to Photoshelter for this option.

The other Photshelter preferences are helpful but sort of obvious. You can have it save your password (DRR does this automatically) and you can set it to ignore already uploaded files.

The Photoshelter plug-in allows you to chose to upload a version, or a master. This is in keeping with the fact that Photoshelter supports over 400 file formats, so an NEF or PSD master will work. You can also select from any of your Aperture export presets if you choose to upload a version. Renaming options are the same with DRR, using the Aperture presets.

One major workflow issue I see with both sites is that they both lack the ability to stack images. Stacks are one of my favorite features of Aperture. With stacks I can keep all of my versions of an image together with it’s corresponding master. If I use the Edit In An External Editor feature to send a PSD to Photoshop, the PSD gets added to the stack. Even if I create the PSD outside of Aperture, I can always import it later and add it to its master’s stack.

By stacking related images I can find them down the road in a snap. If I search for an image, I not only get the search result, but I get all the related, stacked images, neatly organized together. It would really be great if Photoshelter and DRR supported some type of mechanism like this. This way I could upload my RAW or PSD files which I will never make available to the public, but that do need safe storage online, and I could stack with them, their corresponding, for sale, JPEG or TIFF versions.

I also think both services should have a look at the FlickrExport plug-in for Aperture. The ability to store the images new URL and add keywords such as “DRR,” or “Photoshelter” on upload would be a great add-on.

Personally I think online storage is going to be a serious part of any digital photographer’s workflow in the future. It makes perfect sense to me. With the increasing speed of Internet connections, and the decreasing cost of hard drive space, why wouldn’t we move to online storage? I mean, who wants to store their archive at home?

I’m thinking back to the time I overflowed the bathtub in our house when I was a kid. The water quickly leaked down to the basement and into a file cabinet full of my dad’s negatives. A good chunk of the negatives were ruined, stuck together in a heap of sticky gelatin—yet another reason why I really love digital photography. Get your images online, secure, and safe, as soon as you possibly can!

Derrick Story and I just had a blast teaching a two-day class in Aperture at Macworld. We had about 60 students, and they all appeared to enjoy the class.

But during the breaks, I kept getting one question over and over from the Aperture newbies in the room. “What’s a project?”

The entire Aperture approach to image organization hinges on the photographer’s ability to understand the project concept.

After wrapping up my last day of shooting at MacWorld on Friday, it was time to sit down and sift through photographs. And, boy, there were quite a few to go through. I shot 943 frames for my assignment. During the first cut, I flat out rejected 290 as unusable for any purpose and left 478 unrated. The unrated images are the ones that won’t make it to the client for this assignment, but which might have other uses at some point in the future. Or maybe they won’t. But they won’t get unceremoniously erased off the hard drive at this point like the rejects will. On the other hand, 175 images got one star or better, which means that there’s a possibility of them being used.

The next step that I usually take after the first cut is a second detailed pass. It’s on this pass that I do critical examination of photographs to rank them against each other. It’s at this point that I’ll start figuring out what some of the best images of the shoot are, especially for the immediate purpose of fulfilling my assignment. It’s at this point that my photographs will end up with their final star ranking for a while.

As many of you are no doubt aware, Second Life is a successful online 3D virtual world (developed by Linden Labs) which is built and owned by its ‘residents’. Fellow ‘residents’ retain the rights to their works which they can then buy, sell, and trade with other ‘residents’ in a thriving e-commerce marketplace.

Several notable musical acts (including Suzanne Vega, Duran Duran, and Chamillionaire) have already purchased ‘islands’ (land) within the Second Life world where, as avatars, they can stream their live music concerts to their fans in real-time. Playing a show in Second Life is done by sending a live music stream from the artist’s computer to a Shoutcast server, and mapping the server’s stream URL to a parcel of land in Second Life. People who visit the parcel in Second Life will immediately hear the live music stream. Musicians are also typically logged into Second Life at the same time as they are performing, so they can chat with the audience between songs and even take requests.

I think this represents a really creative opportunity for performing artists that leverages enabling technologies — and further engages the relationship between artists and their loyal fans. Stay tuned as more artists take the plunge with a Second Life (no telling when the band The Residents will join ;), but of all artists it seems a perfect fit for their unique approach!).

One of the things I like to do on this blog is to discuss features in Aperture that I’ve recently discovered or perhaps just started using. And with the hundreds or thousands of features in this program it looks like I’ll have plenty to write about for a long time.

Normally when I’m on the road I take my MacbookPro and an external 500GB firewire hard drive (I recently outgrew and replaced my 250GB USB drive). I have a copy of my main Aperture library on the firewire drive for two reasons; 1. It’s a backup copy that goes with me wherever I go, just in case my home burns to the ground or a satellite drops out of the sky and crushes it. 2. I have my entire library with me in case I need an image for any reason.

A friendly commenter noted in my last post that the guys over at Digital Railroad have also just released an export plug-in for Aperture.

You can read about it and download the plug-in for free here.

Thanks to Eberhard for pointing this out. Next week I am planning to spend some time comparing the plug-ins for both PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad. I have used both services in the past, and I am still having a tough time deciding which one is better. Perhaps a little plug-in shootout will help me see the light.

The developers at iStockPhoto have released an update to the plug-in for uploading images to iStockPhoto from within Aperture. The new version adds built in disambiguation, which is a part of the iStock uploading workflow.

To download the latest version click here.

Welcome to the week of January 6 - January 12 edition of Friday Napster Freebies. As always, these freebies can be downloaded from around the world. So if you’ve got an iPod, a Zune, iRiver, Creative Zen, or whatever, get ready to enjoy another bunch of DRM-free MP3 files to feed your player. Here are this week’s selections:

“Buddy Bye” by Johnny Osbourne
This “Godfather of Dancehall” has built a 25-year-long career with his warm voice and soulful singing style. Download one of reggae’s all-time classics, “Buddy Bye,” taken from King Jammy’s Selector’s Choice Vol. 1.
[Jan 12]

“Better That Way” by Janell Marie
This folk rockin’ Oregon native knew she was born to sing since experimenting with a mini microphone and a cassette recorder at an early age. Growing up on a steady diet of classic rock and the Beatles, she’s grown to appreciate all styles of music. Today’s download is from her upcoming EP, Better That Way. [Jan 11]

“Time” by DJ Drez
With his numerous independently released mixtapes and full-length albums, this DJ has become a staple of the Los Angeles underground hip-hop scene. Check out his more worldly forays into Indian and North African music from his latest offering, Jahta Beat. [Jan 10]

“When I Wake” by The Changes
Chicago’s very own indie rockers were the only unsigned band to be invited to perform on the 2005 Lollapalooza tour. Since then, they have toured with the likes of Ted Leo, the Walkmen, and Kaiser Chiefs. Check out today’s track from their current album, Today Is Tonight. [Jan 9]

“Dart for My Sweetheart” by Archie Bronson Outfit
This UK trio have come a long way since being discovered in a local pub by the president of their label, Domino Records. Download this song from their current album, Derdang Derdang, and see why they were nominated for Best New Act on the 2006 MOJO Honours List.
[Jan 8]

“Murderer” by Barrington Levy
One of reggae’s most respected performers, Levy has enjoyed unusual career longevity. Since releasing his first single in 1974, he has gone on to record with many of today’s biggest artists. This track is one of his classic dancehall smashes taken from the collection Original Ragga Muffin, Part One. [Jan 7]

“The Apothecary” by Enter the Haggis
Since their inception in 1996, ETH have built an international touring and recording career on their high-energy performances and unique approach to Celtic-based music. Today’s download is from their latest album, Soapbox Heroes. [Jan 6]

As I write this, it’s Thursday evening and the end of MacWorld is in sight. It’s a good thing too. I’ve lugged my camera gear all over the place and had my camera tugging at my neck for too many days. One of the hard things about this shoot is that I haven’t had a good on-location work area. Instead, I’ve been schlepping everything to and from the hotel every day and doing my best to keep it close. That, however, is what the gig requires and so I should stop whining. Besides, we’re not here to talk about those parts of this shoot. Instead, let’s talk a bit about the workflow side of the equation.

After shooting 2 1/2 days, I’ve shot 910 RAW+JPEG frames which stack up 1820 files taking up 14.5GB of disk space. Following the import workflow I mentioned yesterday, that data is safely tucked away onto two separate drive. One drive’s structure is managed by Aperture as a project and referenced files. The other, however, is organized in a more rudimentary fashion that makes sense given the workflow. Instead of a complicated deep structure, I have a simple folder/subfolder structure to organize the files by the import session. This let’s me see at a glance that I have my files accounted for.

If you’re an Aperture blogger on this site, you’re either on a beautiful tropical island, or at the Mac paradise of MacWorld. I might choose the island if given a choice, but I’m happy to be one among the sea of Apple-obsessed here in San Francisco. It was my great fortune to sit in on the dynamic duo of Scott Bourne and Derrick Story as they gave out everything they knew about Aperture to the lucky crowd who soaked it all up in their two-day session.

Here are a just a few of many nuggets they provided:

Don’t Think Like A Photoshopper:

The Photoshop mentality doesn’t work with Aperture. It is a different and new way of doing things, and once you embrace the Aperture way, everything becomes easier. You can work in any order with Aperture, go ahead and sharpen first–Aperture will do everything in the right order come time to spit out that final version. No need to “Save As”, Aperture is always saving for you and every version takes up about 24kb of space–huge storage savings. So go ahead and make as many versions as you want.

Get It Right In The Camera: Film photographers are used to getting it right, particularly with unforgiving slide film. Aperture provides incentive for us all to nail that exposure. If you get it right in the camera you get a reward in Aperture: drastically reduced post-processing times and fewer round trips to Photoshop. No more dealing with ten different versions of 50mg files either. Message: Do exposure right and you will tear through Aperture. Average post-processing time: one minute per image. Priceless.

Hardware Choices Dream Scenario:

Desktops: Unlike Photoshop, Aperture wants you for your Graphics Card more than anything; CPU speed: not so much. The boys say when buying a new desktop computer to get the baddest Graphics Card you can afford, usually one down from the maximum price model will make you very speedy and happy. Of course, as much Ram as you can and fast hard drives, 7200 rpm’s is preferred.

Laptop:MacBook Pro’s work a little faster than MacBooks with Aperture. In a perfect world we would all max out our Ram at 3GB , with 120GB or 160GB - 5400rpm drives. Maybe compromise on the processor speed, but not the Ram, graphics card and hard drive.

Library

It was interesting to me to learn that both Derrick and Scott like managed libraries to take advantage of the security that Vaults offer in Aperture, and that they both have an archive made up of multiple libraries. I’m still working out my long term archiving strategies, but the idea of having many different libraries is in my future, I just need to figure out how to divide them up.

If you have several libraries, you can keep them all in one folder and just double-click on a specific library to launch that library in Aperture.

I recently listed my podcast at the iTunes Store and wanted a shorter way to give out the URL. The standard link you get by right-clicking the tile is this monstrosity:

• http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=207870198

Note that the important part is the last nine characters, the iTunes numeric ID. Apple’s Scott Simpson clued me in to this little-known shorter version of the URL:

• http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=207870198

That’s much better, but still not very memorable. If you register at SnipURL.com, you can make even shorter links. Here’s the one I came up with for the show:

• http://snipurl.com/dmitunes

And, of course, if you own your own domain, you could simply set up a page with a meta refresh, name it index.html, and place it in an appropriate subdirectory like myshow. Then your link would be http://www.yoursite.com/myshow. Here’s the tag for the index.html page (substitute your ID for mine):

<META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=207870198">

If you have server access, usability experts recommend using an HTTP redirect instead of a refresh.

MacWorld continues to buzz on. The Keynote yesterday was incredible and, along with many of the other Inside Aperture bloggers, I was lucky enough to have a great seat right up front. Both the AppleTV and the iPhone look great and it looks like i’ll be picking up one of each as soon as they ship. The amount of activity on the show floor started high right after the keynote and picked on up from there. I thought it might be a little quieter today, but that wasn’t the case. If anything, there was more buzz today than yesterday on the show floor—at least where I was spending all of my time.

Since it’s Wednesday, it means that I’m at the half way point of my job here. This part of shooting an event centers all around capture. It’s a circular process of shooting, importing cards of data into Aperture (and making backup copies), and then shooting some more. For the particular job I’m on, I have the luxury of not needing to make final picks at this point. There’s no pressing need for immediate picture delivery. This lets me focus on capture. So, at this point, my use of Aperture is constrained to uploading my files and then browsing them to get a sense of how the shoot is going.

One of my favorite things to talk about having to do with Aperture is how easy it is to use. Really, Aperture is marketed to professional photographers, but I believe it is a program that could appeal to many more. Once you get past the somewhat sparse landscape of the user interface, and tackle what I think is a fairly shallow learning curve, Aperture can really be a powerful tool for just about anyone who likes to take pictures.

Kendra, my girlfriend, better known on the web as the Island Med Student, is a great example. When I first adopted Aperture, Kendra was making the “switch” to Apple. We bought a new MacBook Pro to replace my G4 Powerbook, and the plan was to get another laptop for Kendra in the near future. So for a while, we shared the MacBook Pro and the old G4. Kendra had been using a Dell desktop PC and had her collection of snapshots dating back to her Nikon Coolpix 775, organized in folders on her hard drive. There was no backup, and the only way to find images was via her system of folders and filenames. Albeit, Kendra is a very organized person, and she had come up with a decent system of filing away her pictures, but once she saw what I was doing with Aperture, she quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

At first I suggested she look into iPhoto, but after she had me explain to her what non-destructive image processing really meant, it was Aperture all the way.

A lot has changed since then. Kendra now uses Aperture on her own MacBook as her sole imaging application. Once in a while she will drag a photo into Photoshop CS2, but it’s a pretty rare occurrence.  She has also upgraded her camera, and now shoots with a Canon Powershot S80. Though it doesn’t shoot in RAW format, the S80 is a great little camera that she brings with her everywhere she goes. It has a few advanced features, such as the ability to work in Program, Aperture and Shutter Priority, and even Manual modes, and she was really sold by the slightly wider than average 28mm equivalent lens.

Recently, Kendra and I decided to revamp her website, Island Med Student. Kendra and I started the site back in July of last year as a way for her to blog about her upcoming experience of going through the arduous process of becoming a medical doctor. All along the way, one of her favorite things about her site had been her pictures, and so we really wanted the new site to showcase her shots, and more importantly, we wanted the process of getting her pictures up to the site and published into galleries, to be a piece of cake. After all, as a med student, she has little time to deal with details like FTP and HTML.

Enter the FlickrExport plug-in for Aperture. A while back one of the Inside Aperture contributors, James Duncan Davidson, wrote a post about the latest version of the FlickrExport plug-in for Aperture. Davidson pointed out how this release offered better streamlining and a more thoughtful mapping of metadata. Kendra and I read the post and quickly downloaded the plug-in.

Well, he was absolutely right. The new version really does do a better job of handling the task of uploading pictures to flickr. Why was this so important to us? Well, for the new release of Island Med Student, Kendra and I had decided to move from Movable Type, to WordPress as our content manager. One of the many reasons for this switch had to do with a really slick WordPress plug-in called Flickr Photo Album.

Flickr Photo Album allows a blogger to automatically generate very nice looking photo galleries simply by uploading images to flickr and adding them to a “set.” You can manage all of your blog’s galleries via flickr’s management system, and the galleries show up seamlessly on your site.

With the old site, Kendra had to produce her galleries via Aperture’s web gallery function. While this worked pretty well, and allowed her to display captions for each image, it was really difficult to make the galleries fit the format of the site. She also had to spend a bit of extra time uploading the galleries, and making the proper links in the HTML of her blog so that a reader could see an index of all the previous photo galleries. Needless to say, the topic of updating her photos page was one that seemed to never fall off our to-do list.

With the new setup, Kendra can do everything by herself, and the time commitment is minimal. She simply hooks up her camera via its USB cable and Aperture automatically begins the process of importing her photos.

Kendra then adds basic caption info and metadata including keywords and pertinent IPTC data. One of the great features of flickr is that you can sort images via “tags,” and now that the new FlickrExport plug-in maps keywords to tags, well, Kendra is in metadata heaven.

After importing her photos, Kendra goes through them one by one and adds a star to each photo that she thinks has potential for the gallery. She then usually makes a second pass, filtering for images with one star or greater, and adds a second star to the shots she will ultimately use.  

Once she has edited the shoot down to her favorite shots, she makes adjustments for exposure and contrast, applies cropping, and then goes through them one by one adding a caption to each image. She really likes to use the captions to help her tell the story she is trying to convey in her pictures.

Once she has all the captions finalized, she uses the FlickrExport plug-in to upload the photos to her site.

At this point I think it would be pertinent to go into a few of the details, which really make the process sing. First of all, we set up an export preset in Aperture, which sizes the images to match the format of her blog. The preset sets all the pictures to fit inside a 500-pixel box and converts each image to the sRGB color space for use on the web.

In Davidson’s original post, he made mention of the fact that the plug-in defaults to the first export preset in the list. We noticed this right away, and though Kendra was ready to pay special attention to this option each time she uploaded images, it just wasn’t good enough. Then it occurred to me that we could just move the blog preset up to the top slot. I opened the export preset dialog box and low and behold, it worked. Now each time she goes to upload pictures to flickr, the 500-pixel export preset is selected by default.

After playing around a little with the plug-in we also noticed some very cool features that we thought might help us out in the future. In the FlickrExport plug-in preferences box you can set up the plug-in to add a keyword to pictures once they are uploaded. We set the preference to add the keyword “flickr” to each uploaded image. We thought this might make things easier in the future to search Aperture for Kendra’s flickr images.

We also took advantage of the option to add the flickr URL to the image’s IPTC in Aperture. This, we thought, might make referencing her past flickr pictures in future posts even easier.

So Kendra’s upload workflow is now basically a one-step process. In the FlickrExport plug-in window, she can add the images to her photostream, select an existing set, or create a new one. The images get sent to flickr, and any images added to a set are automatically added to a corresponding album on her website. With WordPress she can also browse her flickr images while she writes, plugging in the appropriate HTML code with a single click.

Kendra loves using Aperture. She was a little resistant at first, but once she caught on, there was really no looking back. She now has a permanent archive of every picture she has taken, and with the new FlickrExport plug-in she is leveraging the power of Aperture to make her life as a blogger and med student easier than ever. Sure it can only help that she has a professional photographer hanging around with her 24/7, but it just goes to show you how Aperture is really an application for anyone who likes to take pictures, and not just the pros.

An interesting Aperture question showed up in my email box last week from a user with a curious problem: several people use his computer, which means that if any of them launch Aperture, they stand a good chance of finding pictures of his girlfriend (which, he assures, are quite tasteful, but intimate nonetheless). Because these are images that he didn’t want just anyone to have access to, he wondered if there was any way to hide images in Aperture.

He could, of course, create a separate user account on his Mac using the Accounts System Preferences. This would create a completely separate, password-protected environment with its own Aperture library. This is the easiest, most secure solution, but it can be a little bit of a hassle if you don’t want to divide up all of your data, and it only works if other users understand that they need to switch to their own account before they launch Aperture. It also requires you to log out of your account when you’re not at the computer, which is easy to forget.

He could also try to hide the girlfriend images somewhere in his library. He could hide them in a project that has lots of other images, or stack them together in a stack with a particularly boring or ugly “decoy” image as the pick.

The best option, though, for the user who doesn’t want to hassle with multiple user accounts is to create multiple libraries. Aperture allows you to create as many libraries as you have room for, and multiple libraries are often a good way to organize your entire archive. For example, you can have a library for your personal images, a library for your work and, perhaps, a library for your girlfriend pictures.

To create an additional library:

1. Export the project that contains the images that you’ll want to place in the new library.
2. Delete the project from your current library.
3. In Aperture’s preferences, click the Choose button beneath the Library Location. In the resulting Open dialog box, navigate to the location where you’d like your new library to be. Aperture will create a new library at that location. However, the new library will not be active in Aperture until you restart the program.
4. Quit Aperture.
5. Launch Aperture again and you should see your new, empty library.
6. Import the project that you exported from your old library.

At any time, you can change back to your other library by selecting it from the Preferences dialog. However, with Aperture 1.5 you can now open Aperture with a specific library by simply double-clicking on that library in the Finder. Aperture will launch and will automatically use the library you double-clicked on. Note, though, that Aperture will also change your preferences to use that library until you select another. So, before you quit Aperture, you’ll want to change your library prefs to point to your more “public” library.

Finally, you can hide your new library somewhere, or store it on a password protected volume or disk image.

While Aperture won’t let you change libraries without restarting, the ability to double-click on a library document to utilize it makes it much easier to quickly change libraries.

Keep those interesting problems coming…

I just watched what seemed like the combination of a worship service and a rock concert. Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone and let me tell you, everything is about to change.

Digital photography will never be the same. All those portable media players that you’ve seen floating around for the last few years have just been rendered obsolete.

The new iPhone treats digital photography as an important component of the system and there’s a really bright future for Aperture users in this mix.

People ask some revealing questions when they hear that I review music technology gear.

• “Do you get to keep it?”
• “Don’t advertisers get better reviews?”
• “Do manufacturers ever tuck a $100 bill in the box to influence you?”

Canadian music journalist Kyle David Paul wondered about these issues and more after reading my article “The Secret Life of a Product Reviewer” and sent me some inspired follow-up questions. You can read my answers in his column for Inside Pulse, Let’s Rave On: Testing Products with David Battino, or on his blog.

Kyle relates some of my review philosophies to his own experience grappling with a high-tech audio product, concluding that publishing his thoughts on it would be “slander,” because he hadn’t invested the time I do. But I don’t agree. What better time to have the beginner’s mind I mentioned than during the first few hours with a product? That’s part of the reason Harmony Central’s community reviews work. (They’re actually called Pro Reviews, oddly.) A recent study claimed that Americans mess with new gear for only 20 minutes on average before giving up. And after all, Kyle did note that his impressions of the product were his initial ones.

(Magnifying glass image from Open Clip Art.org.)

The buzz level is very high at MacWorld. As the ever-insightful John Gruber noted over coffee, tomorrow will either bring what everyone thinks will come—namely the ever-rumored iPhone—or we’ll see something else that’s so good that we won’t care that the iPhone didn’t materialize. Of course, there’s always a chance that neither of these two things will happen and all the rumor mongers will be let down, but I’m going to be an optimist and expect great things from the keynote tomorrow. One thing is for sure, we’ll know shortly.

Since I’m working this week and not just attending the show, I could only spent just a bit of time chatting about the rumors. After that, it was time to focus in on the job at hand. Today’s Monday, which means that the conference has started, but the Exhibit Hall isn’t yet open. Since most of my assignment’s work centers around the images that will be taken in the Exhibit Hall, today was another day of preparation. This time, instead of prepping equipment, I was prepping for the shots that I want to try to take. And, as it turns out, Aperture can play a key role in this kind of prep work.

Dolby Labs “is unveiling a sound-leveling technology called Dolby Volume today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that its executives say will finally eliminate the jagged audio discrepancies that exist between shows and commercials and even between scenes within the same movie or program.” (San Fancisco Chronicle, Jan 8, 2007)

Please, God, let it work! And I say that as someone who is about as guilty of loudness crimes as anyone else…

Last night, four of our photographer-authors met at bay area bookstore Book Passage to discuss the joys and pains of the digital photographic experience. (Can’t say enough what a cool bookstore that is!) A lively, engaged, and intelligent audience of close to 100 people (many more than the store expected, they kept adding chairs, but many were still standing wherever they could) kept our esteemed panel jumping with questions on B&W shooting, getting the best printing results, shooting RAW vs. JPEG, and more. I think the audience found it interesting, and reassuring to some extent, that the four didn’t always agree, but they discussed their differences with passion and humor. Speakers Ken Milburn, Mikkel Aaland, Stephen Johnson, and our own Derrick Story also signed books and met readers one-on-one after the formal (formal-ish, they are all pro photographers, after all) presentation.

It was a terrific event that served as a kick off to the geek-fest (and increasingly, the photo-geek fest) that is Macworld San Francisco. And the best part is that this same group will reconvene this week at the at the SF Apple Store (Wednesday, Jan 10 at 4:30). If you’re in town this week, I highly recommend it. If you’re a Macworld attendee, you can also catch all four of them, as well as many other O’Reilly Digital Imaging Luminaries, sharing more of their tips and techniques at the O’Reilly booth (#2112) and the Digital Photography Experience. Stop by and introduce yourself; hearing what readers think (and what you want to know) first hand is one of the best parts of the festive week.

I’m a geek. So I spent the morning googling through YouTube to see what was new over at CES 2007. Along the way, I came across this video for the Quik Pod, which is a gadget that allows you to hold your digital camera at arms length and then trigger a snapshot. It’s an almost 4-minute video that takes forever because it’s all marketing hype that comes down to one thing: are you willing to hand your camera to a stranger so you can be in the shot or do you want to spend $25 or $30 for a gadget so you don’t have to? Personally, I’m pathologically adverse to stepping in front of the lens. But for those few times that the family insists on group shots, it doesn’t particularly bother me to chat a stranger up. Most people are delighted to help out and I’ve met many lovely people that way. What do you think? Would you pay for one of these gadgets?

I’m revved with anticipation about MacWorld. But it’s not for the same reason that most of you might be. Sure, I’m looking forward to the iTV, some sneak peeks into Leopard, some new hardware, and maybe a new phone. But, what’s really fueling my excitement is that I’ve got a`n awesome photo gig lined up to shoot some material for a client at MacWorld. I simply can’t wait to get on with it.

For this shoot, I’ll be using Aperture as an essential part of my workflow. And, I’ve decided to take you behind the scenes as I work this gig and provide day-by-day postings throughout MacWorld. My hope is to offer you a glimpse into what it’s like using Aperture in such an environment and document some of the ways in which I move through the mountain of data that comes off of my camera while working such a gig. And maybe, since this is the first time I’ll be writing about workflow publicly while in the heat of a shoot, I’ll identify some areas in which my own workflow can stand a bit of improvement.

Today, being the Sunday before MacWorld, my thoughts are all about preparation. Of course, I’m thinking about the camera equipment I need to have, as well making sure that it’s all clean and ready to go. Just as important, however, is the computing part of the equation. I used to show up with just my laptop and a card reader, but experience has taught me well to have a few more things with me.

Here are some of my hopes for what we’ll experience in the digital media world during 2007:

*Resolution regarding copy protection issues between technology companies and content owners
*Fresh, dynamic new companies that have the impact MySpace, YouTube, and Skype have had (with or without the wild valuations) — just looking for creative, innovative solutions with impact & longevity.
*An elegant, workable, easy-to-use digital home solution that allows for seamless (legal) transfer of content a consumer has purchased & can easily share among all his/her devices (at home and on the road).
*An internet TV solution that allows you to pull deep catalog, long-tail content (a true on-demand solution) for viewing on your laptop or other portable devices when you’re on the road (along with a broad slate of cleared current network programming).
*The remaining music holdouts (including The Beatles & Led Zeppelin) go digital and join the party.
*A fair music licensing solution is instituted that allows for an easier, more turnkey licensing system (by both record labels and film studios) of a much greater suite of material to the digital world; and we see an end to the arduous process that exists today among all the constituents. Of course this would need to be something that would work for everyone — publishers and authors (all media types) included.

Bert Freudenberg found a great video on the One Laptop Per Child initiative. A very informative video created by eSchool news showing the strengths of the laptop and footage of the founder and director Nicholas Negroponte. Bert has more about OLPC on his blog. Thanks Bert!

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If you haven’t already, check out TamTam’s development site: a music application on the OLPC laptop.
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Technorati: olpc etoys

A big howdy to everyone stopping by to pick up their weekly dose of Napster freebies. These freebies can help you fill up your iPod or Zune or Zen or whatever with fun new artists. The links provided here appear to work without limitations in many countries around the world. As always, if you have any feedback drop me an email or leave a comment below.

“For You” by Raul Malo
Influenced by Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, this Miami-born Cuban led The Mavericks to Grammy and Country Music Association awards success. While his recent solo work has seen him return to his Cuban roots, it’s still infused with his love for American country. [Jan 5]

“Glassbottom Lights (Remix)” by The Tyde
Half the members of this So-Cal rock group are also members of Beechwood Sparks. Download this track and get into the synthy dance remix courtesy of James Figurine (aka Jimmy Tamborello, of Postal Service fame). [Jan 4]

“Lady Don’t Tek No (Live Version - EXPLICIT)” by Lyrics Born
This S.F. Bay-area rapper was the first to put out an album on the influential Solesides label (also home to Lateef and DJ Shadow). The label may be gone, but the music is still strong. Check out this track from the live album Overnite Enco [Jan 3]

“Step Out of the Shade” by Amy Speace
This talented songstress fuses folk, country and pop styles in her music. Check out this breezy number from her latest album, Songs for Bright Street. [Jan 2]

“There’ll Be Some Changes Made” by Tess Williams
This hard-stomping take comes from Williams’ live album Totally Tess. Though she’s a relative unknown, her bluesy delivery and this jazz standard’s subject matter are just the thing to start the New Year off on the right foot. [Jan 1]

“Lost in Boston” by The Walkmen
These guys hustle. Not only have they done world tours and appeared in the TV series The O.C., but they also run their own rehearsal space and recording studio in New York City, where they make music like this rocker from A Hundred Miles Off. [Dec 31]

“Untitled Pt. 1″ by The Punks
This noise-rock outfit from Olympia, Washington creates experimental, improvised soundscapes that may be baffling to some, but have kept the quartet recording and playing for fans for three years running. Download this “song” and draw your own conclusions. [Dec 30]

The Inside Aperture blog has been online for about 2 months now and I’ve made several blog posts that are of a technical nature or about specific techniques. Today I wanted to do something kind of fun with the blog that will involve you the readers.

I’m going to throw out a bunch of rumors that I’ve heard about what products or software will be announced at MacWorld next week either on the show floor or during the keynote (Stevenote) speech. After I reveal the rumors that I’ve head I would love it if the readers would post responses to the rumors I mentioned or maybe add your own rumors (it doesn’t matter if they are credible or not, this post should be fun).

First of all is the Apple cel phone which will certainly not be called the iPhone as Linksys has already taken that name. Rumors are flying as to if it will be a GSM or a CDMA phone and what carrier will be the launch carrier.

At WWDC we heard about iTV. Will it be shipping next Tuesday? What will the price be?

Will OSX 10.5 Leopard be released? Probably not, it looks like 10.4.9 will come out before 10.5 (it’s already in the hands of developers) and it hasn’t hit Software Update yet.

How about iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07? Amazon.com already lists both packages but without a release date or pricing. Are they getting ready for next week?

Mac Pros with quad core Intel (Clovertown) processors? That would mean you can order a Mac Pro with the equivalent of 8 processors. Note to existing MacPro owners, the new quad core processors will be a direct replacement for the existing dual core Xeon chips, meaning you can buy the new chips and plug them in your Mac Pro and go right back to work … but a lot faster :)

Aperture 2.0 coming next week? Probably not … it just feels too early for that. Maybe at PMA?

So, there are a few wild rumors. What do you think? Do you have any to add to the list?

Until next time,

Keep shooting.

Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography

With the deadlines for a wide variety of photo contests looming, if you want to try your luck against the best of the best photos taken in 2006 you need to get moving. It’s important for me to reflect on work created during the past year. I see how productive and successful I was, learning from mistakes and setting photograhic goals for the coming year. It also allows me to pick my best stuff for contests and to update my portfolio and website.

Aperture lets me find my best work quickly and easily by creating a Smart Album. Since I know I will perform this ritual at the end of each year, I have chosen an editing scheme that allows Aperture to add to this album throught the year, automatically.

I am still tweaking my system of keywording and other metadata entry, but to separate my best work from the rest, I rate with four stars–any image I deem has potential to make the final cut at the end of the year. So when the year is up and I want to review my best stuff, it’s all in my smart album.

Under File>New Smart> select Album, which I title “Contest Selects 2006″. I set the criteria for the smart album in the Query Hud.

I match “All” of the following in the Query Hud. I make sure the rating box is checked, and I drag the slider to the right until I’m at four stars. I then make sure the Calendar is checked, and I choose Jan 1, 2006, advancing the calendar to Dec 2006 and, with the shift key pressed, I click on Dec 31, 2006, so the whole year’s 4-star images will be included in the album.

I now have a collection of my best 2006 images to edit from. My Smart Album for the coming year is alreay set-up, so Aperture will automatically collect the 4-star work into this album, so I’m ready to go same time next year.

It might be helpful to hear different users long term editing and archiving schemes; so feel free to share your editng and workflow ideas here.

If you’re looking for contests to enter, here are some good resources:

Photo District News List

Photojournalism Related List

Frank Niemeir’s Photography List

Library Default

In my last post I went over the differences between “managed” and “referenced” photos in Aperture Libraries. Here are a couple of important points to keep in mind.

If you want to have a managed library/vault system, but you don’t want to use your main operating system drive to contain it, that’s fine. To choose a different location than the default for your Aperture Library (which is in the Pictures file of your main drive), go to Aperture>Preferences>Choose (under library location) and navigate to the hard drive you want your default library to live. You then have to quit out of Aperture and reopen it for the new library location to be recognized.

Know that if the external drive where your library lives is not online, you won’t see it, since Aperture creates a default library in the pictures folder on your operating drive as mentioned earlier. Therefore, if your main managed library is on a separate drive like mine, make sure that drive is turned on and shows up in the finder before you launch Aperture; for it to be recognized. Otherwise, you need to go to preferences each time and make the fix.

For new users in particular, determining how to manage libraries and grow an archive is a top priority. Feel free to share your ideas and strategies on long term archiving with Aperture Libraries.

In my last entry, I extolled the virtues of Aperture’s Compare feature, which makes it simple to compare a group of images in a project to find the one you like best. As I stated then, I’ve been very surprised to find that many people don’t know about this great feature. A few people posted comments saying that the feature was news to them, which made me start thinking that maybe I’ve also been incorrectly assuming that people are wantonly using Aperture’s Stack Mode, a similar tool for comparing images in a stack.

The first image in a stack is, of course, the pick of the stack. Usually after you create a stack, you want to compare all of the images to find the best one. You can do this manually by shuffling the images in the stack around with the mouse, or by using the Promote and Demote commands (Command-] and Command-[) or by using the Pick command (Command-\).

But, Aperture provides a special Stack mode that offers features very similar to the Compare mode that we looked at before. To enter stack mode, select any image in a stack and press Option-T, or choose Stack from the Viewer Mode popup menu on the left side of the Control Bar.

The current Pick image in your stack will shift to the left in the Viewer, and will be bordered by an orange rectangle. The next image in your stack will appear in the compare position, to the right. This is just like the Compare mode that we looked at earlier.

If you like the right-hand image more than the current pick, press Command-\ to make that image the new pick. The old pick image will fall into second position in the stack, and the next image after the one you just selected iwll move intot he compare position.

If you don’t like the current selection more than the current pick, press the right arrow key to go to the next image.

When you get to the end of the stack, pressing right arrow won’t do anything, because there’re no more images to select. But, if you press the Down arrow, Aperture will automatically close the stack, open the next stack in your project, and throw it into compare mode. In this way, you can quickly navigate through all the stacks in your project, comparing and selecting, and all without ever touching the mouse.

Another handy side effect of Stack mode is that, as you continue to select picks until you find the one you want, the images in your stack will automatically fall into order from pick to second best, to third best, and so on, meaning your choicest alternates will automatically filter to the front of the stack.

When you’re ready to leave Stack mode, press Option-U or choose Multi from the Viewer Mode popup menu on the Control Bar. Note that the shortcuts for changing the viewer mode are simply option plus the second letter of the name of the mode.

Finally, two other Stack shortcuts: Option-; will close all currently opened stacks, while Option-’ will open all of the stacks in your project.

I gave the Logitech Z-10 interactive speakers high marks for audio quality, but was disappointed with their lack of Mac compatibility. An independent developer, Marc Liyanage, has fixed the problem with his terrific LogitechLCDTool.

Marc’s story is an interesting one, and if you’d like to know more about his process for figuring out how to write this app, take a look at my interview on Mac DevCenter.

I’ve tested the LogitechLCDTool, and it works great. Thanks Marc!

I just received my first royalty payment of the New Year. This one came as a small surprise from one of my wire service clients who pay me residual royalties each quarter. It wasn’t much, enough to pay for some of the fun I had over the holidays I suppose, but in this business every penny counts.

Every month I receive a royalty check (if I’m lucky) from my stock agency. The amounts range from the all too common "goose egg", to what I have come to call “a big fat check.” Many photographers look at their stock collection as a retirement plan. While I do believe that having an actual retirement plan is a good thing, royalties can really add up if you position your image collections with a bit of smarts.

By now you are probably wondering, “what has this got to do with Aperture?” Well, quite a bit in fact. My new royalty check got me thinking about how disorganized my stock collections are, and how I really have little idea as to what images I have at my handful of agencies. After years of submitting stock and working for clients who pay residuals, it can get pretty ugly.

Once again, I find myself mouthing the words, “how can I use Aperture to get a grip on all this stuff?” Well, I thought about it for a bit and came up with a little plan. But to make things even more interesting I thought it would be cool to use iStockPhoto as an example.

As I am sure many of you know by now, iStockPhoto, a micro-payment, royalty-free, image warehouse owned by Getty Images, has really come to life in the past year. All of the sudden we are back to that situation where just about anyone with a camera can take pictures and get paid for them. Though the amount you actually receive may be as little as twenty cents, iStockPhoto has amateurs and pro-sumers, snapping picks at an alarming rate!

A while back I spent some time looking over the details of becoming an “iStocker.” The whole process took me about an hour. I made my way through their online application, picked a few sample images, and within a day or two, I was a bonafide iStock Photographer. 

I have to say here, that after a few months of being an iStock photog, I really haven’t made any money. I think I have sold about fifteen images from the fifteen or so I have online, and from that I have made less than ten bucks. Not too impressive when I compare it to the monthly royalty checks I get from my “non-micro-payment” agencies.

However, the one thing I learned was that the trick to being an iStocker is in the workflow. For the amount of work involved to justify the end result, you really need to streamline things. Not only did I want to come up with a simple solution for uploading to iStock, but I also wanted to use this same system for my work with other agencies.

Step one was to figure out how I would keep tabs on everything. I needed some info in my Metadata that would clue me into which images I had uploaded, and to where, which images had been approved or rejected, and which images were still awaiting approval.

To keep a record of this information I turned to a couple of fields in the IPTC section of my Metadata: Edit Status and Source. I simply created a new Metadata view, and added these fields from the list in IPTC. The Source field is commonly used by photo agencies to keep track of the images’ originating source. For instance, I work with Corbis, and so when I send images to Corbis I fill the Source field with “Corbis NY.” This way they know I didn’t submit the images to an editor in Europe.

So I decided to use the Source field as a way to search my own stock library. I added “iStockPhoto” to the source field of each of the images I had uploaded. I then used the “Edit Status” field to indicate the stage of the editing process for each image. I just picked a few easy to remember words like, approved, queued, and rejected.

This query shows me all the photos I have downloaded from iStockPhoto.

Once I had added this info to my iStockPhoto images, I got smart. Well, not really, I just made a few Smart Albums so I could keep tabs on everything. I started by making a top-level folder called iStockPhoto. In this folder I made the following Smart Albums:

• My Approved iStock – To display all the images I had uploaded to iStock, had made it through the editing process, and had finally been approved by iStock for sale.
• My Downloads – I made this album to display any images by other iStockers that I had downloaded for my own use.
• My iStockPhotos – This is just a display of all of my iStock related images.
• My Rejected iStock – Since iStock allows you to resubmit images, I thought it would be nice to keep track of those images too.

Once I had the metadata fields set up and the Smart Albums in place, I started using the iStockPhoto Aperture plug-in to send up my images. The plugin is very similar to the flickr plug-in and makes uploading images, correctly captioned and key-worded, a snap.

All this organizing has helped my workflow immensely. I’m not sure that I will continue to upload images to iStockPhoto–please don’t get me started on what I think micro-payment sites are doing to the industry. However, I now have a system that seems to work for my entire collection of agency-related images. I can make additional Smart Albums and use them as a way of tracking my inventory and keeping a to-do list. I just need to go through all my agency images, submitted in the past four years, and add the metadata. Maybe I’ll get it all done in time for my next New Years post!

Aperture makes it very easy to convert a color photograph into a black & white image. Open the Adjustments Inspector and choose the Monochrome Mixer (Control-M). Open the disclosure triangle. You can use the presets or make and mix your own adjustments.

The presets offer you the choice between traditional B&W photo filters such as red, orange, yellow, green or blue. If you want to make a custom filter, here’s the trick. Make sure that the total of the sum of all three sliders (Red, Green, Blue) don’t exceed 100. If you exceed 100, this will probably result in an unnatural or overexposed image. Likewise, a number well below 100 will probably result in a severely underexposed image. Stick close to 100 for the most pleasing results.

NOTE: There is one exception to this rule. If you want to achieve a simulated infrared look to your image, exceed 100.

In a comment to my blog post from last week, Set Up Your Metadata View, a self-described N00b asked the question: What’s an IPTC? Well, it’s a good question with two primary answers. The first is that IPTC stands for the International Press Telecommunications Council which is based in the UK and which develops standards for the news industry. The second is that the IPTC acronym is used by photographers and photo editors in the news industry to refer to the standard set of metadata attributes defined by the IPTC that can be applied to images.

This set of attributes, first defined in the 70’s and significantly updated in the 90’s, encompasses pretty much any bit of metadata that you can think of attaching to an image that might be useful for the news organizations with distribute and process vast numbers of images. There are dozens of defined attribute names, many of which are useful only in a news-based workflow. However, there are a number of these attributes that are useful in any context, such as a headline for an image, a caption, the location of the image, a byline indicating who took the image, and a copyright declaration.

With just these bits of information embedded into an image in a standard format and using standard attribute names, a photograph becomes immediately more valuable and useful to anybody that happens to get their hands on it.

We’re all familiar with pointless Flash animations that serve only as barriers to getting to useful web content. But I recently stumbled across an instructive exampe of a “pointless” Flash animation that works:

It’s on the web site of the musician Adem:

http://www.adem.tv/site/

Why does it work? I see a few reasons, none of them mysterious and yet all of them frequently ignored:

• The animation is not an obstacle - it’s on the same page as the main content.
• But it’s designed to support, not compete with, that content.
• It’s light weight - Firefox’s Web Developer extension tells me the whole page is just 107 KB.
• It’s relevant to the site, expressing a sense of the artist’s identity.
• It’s delightful in its own right. I just like watching it go.

Achieving this kind of deceptively simple design balance makes all the difference - the same difference that distinguishes an iPod from an iPlod.

The Adem site is designed by worklesshard.