Understanding Exposure

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I have just finished reading Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. It was a pretty good book. Nothing earth shattering in it. There are some good tips on how to set aperture and shutter speed for different shooting conditions. It was definately written in the era of film, when DSLR’s were not really an option. He pushes using manual mode, and setting both aperture and shutter speed your self. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like the built in light meters are better now. My D40, and now D90 do a good job in most situations. I prefer to shoot in aperture priority, or shutter priority and have the camera set the other. With digital I can then chimp the screen, and then adjust the exposure override. That just makes sense to me. I suppose that going the manual route would push understanding of exactly what is happening light wise. Maybe.

Anyway, I would recomend this to a beginner especially, and as a good “oh yea, I forgot that” type of read for those that are a little more advanced. It is not very expensive. I picked up mine with a Borders coupon a few days ago.

D90 Movies

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I took a couple of movies the last couple of days with the D90. Since you do it from live view, and focus from there first, I was also trying that out. I must say, it kinda sucked. I was indoors and was using f/2.8, but the focus was the slowest thing ever! I was pretty disappointed. I will have to try it outside sometime to see if it is better with more light, but so far, I am not impressed.

There were several times that I would try to focus and it would miss completely. I would then go out of live view, focus, then pop back in. It would still move around a bit, but would find it eventually. Then when you take a picture, it doesn’t happen right away. The mirror flips back, then the picture happens normally, then the mirror flips up again. Slow. Not a way to take pictures of kids.

The movies turned out OK, when I got the focus right. It would probably be easier with a smaller f-stop, but that is all I could work with indoors. It is nice to have something that takes video though.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Testing a post from Flock

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Thought I would give the flock browser a go. It combines access to social networking sites like facebook and flickr with the firefox browser. This is published from the built in blog editor. I think the real power of the built in editor is when it comes to publishing something based on what you found somewhere else on the web, like this picture I just drag and dropped from my flickr account. Pumpkin Candles in a row

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The R-Strap

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Technically it is the RS-2 Black Rapid strap, and I now have one. It is my birthday today – all online marketers take note for next year and send me lots of 2 for 1/2 price coupons please. Annie picked me up one, and it does seem pretty great. Annie tried asking about it at the local camera stores, and not one person had any idea what she was talking about. Why is it that people who work at brick and mortar stores don’t ever go online? Anyway, the camera just sits at your side, out of the way. I haven’t yet gone on a walk to take pictures, but it seems to wear well. Check out the video on their site to see more.

I have space again.

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I have spent most of my photography time the last two weeks or so recovering from running out of space on my iMac. I got a warning from Aperture during an upload that I was in danger of corrupting my library. Scary.

What I did first was to go through and delete images that were crap. I have been lazy – space is cheap right? I had not ditched pictures that were extremely underexposed, or out of focus, or had people heads chopped off. I went through most of the pictures of the 2007/2008 and got rid of them. That was time consuming.

Next was to migrate my referenced images to external drives. I decided to reformat my two FreeAgent 320G drives to HFS+ and move all my images that are stored as reference over. It took longer than I thought. I couldn’t find a way to do it other than to “Relocate Masters” one project at a time. I couldn’t select more than that.

After a couple of days of doing that, I was able to copy all the images to drive #2. I then created two new vaults, and put the first on drive #1, and the second on drive #2. I now have complete duplicates of my images and my library on two separate drives. Drive #2 is off site at work.

I haven’t done any big uploads since to know if that process will be any slower, now that the images are on a USB connected external drive. We’ll see.

Aperture Links

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I had been asking on a forum about moving projects between two machines, and Ian Wood from the site Aperture-Assistant sent me a bunch of links, so I thought I would post his list here :

Forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1092
http://apertureprofessional.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1
http://www.flickr.com/groups/aperture_users/discuss/
http://forums.dpreview.com/for…forum.asp?forum=1017 – this isn’t Aperture-specific but has quite a lot of Aperture-related threads.

Articles and blogs:
http://apertureprofessional.com/bloghome.php
http://apertureprofessional.com/articleshome.php
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/aperture/

Note – I write for both the AUN and O’Reilly, so may be a bit biased…

http://photo.rwboyer.com/
http://www.bagelturf.com/aparticles/index.php

Video tutorials: http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/
Plug-ins: http://www.aperturepluggedin.com/ & http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/plugins.html
General list of resources: http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/

Scripting:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/aperture/
http://homepage.mac.com/jlarson7/
http://homepage.mac.com/brettg…leScripts/index.html
http://aperture-assistant.com/…ows-and-applescripts – this is my own site.

Lastly, you can find a ‘presets’ Project on my Aperture Assistant site: http://aperture-assistant.com/freebies

Sun rise over St.Paul

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I was at work early last week before the time change from daylight savings, and there was a beautiful sunrise going on. I didn’t do it justice. I wish I had a tripod with me so that I could have made a panorama. As it was, I was on the 6th floor of my building, holding the camera in one hand against the glass, and a manila folder in the other trying to get rid of glare.

St.Paul Rising

Apple Updates Camera Raw

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Apple has updated it’s camera raw compatability to 2.3. The big news here is that it now can handle RAW files from the D90. This means that Aperture will now have the capability. Woo Hoo !!! Time to move back to useing raw. I didn’t want to take a bunch of raw+jpeg for the last month or so I had the D90. I was just shooting jpeg, but now I will switch back to shooting in Raw mode.

This message was greeting me from Apple’s software update:

This update extends RAW file compatibility for Aperture 2 and iPhoto ’08 for the following cameras:

Canon EOS 50D
Nikon D90
Sony DSLR-A900
Nikon Coolpix P6000
It also addresses issues related to specific cameras and overall stability.

Kate voted

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Yesterday Kate went with her mother to the poles, waded through the lines, got a ballot that included pictures of the candidates, and voted in a booth just like her mom. She sounded quite proud of herself. Later at pre-school the whole class voted. She said she voted for Barack twice. Must have been the deal maker. There is a site here for Minnesota. They are supposed to have the results up later today.

A couple of things struck me as interesting. First is that the kids have voted for the president the same as their parents every year that this organization has been doing this. But the real interesting part is that kids do not necessarily vote the same as their parents. This is actually encouraging. I get so tired of the “my father voted for them, my grandfather voted for them, and so I am voting for them” crap. An election is about the candidate. Hopefully kids getting involved early will continue to result in engagement and participation in the future.