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.