Chuqui 3.0

Photos for a friend..

So I've been working with the HP9180 again, printing out a few photos as a "thanks" for a friend. It's interesting what choices you make when you're trying to find some shots you think someone will appreciate.

Here are the photos I printed:

Half Dome and the Merced River after a winter storm. This is increasingly one of my favorite shots of Yosemite. The more I work with it and the more I look at it, the more I like it. Half dome is a truly iconic figure, so even people who've never been to Yosemite recognize it and can relate to it. (my other most-favorite shot of Yosemite is here)

I printed this out in 11x17 portrait on hahnemuhle photo rag, a nice, textured matte surface, which really gives it a different, more painterly feel than glossy. This photo's a real challenge, because you need to keep the snow white, but you can't cause the trees to go dark and lose texture, and at the same time, you need to keep the sky from blowing out and going white, or the snow on top of half dome disappears and the photo goes bad. It was all in all a real stretch for me at the time in processing it, but taught me a lot about how to get Photoshop to behave (and in the worth of subtlety in processing).

Cliff Swallow leaving the nest. At Shoreline Lake, I spent about half an hour watching and shooting the Cliff Swallows entering and leaving their nests trying to get a good flight/action shot. Emphasis on trying: about 150 images taken, most of blank walls. Six kept, one of a bird actually flying. And frankly, it's a hell of a shot. Patience, preparation, timing, and a huge dose of luck...

Sandhill Cranes at Sunset. Shot at Los Consumnes River Preserve near Galt on a truly stunning evening. This has supplanted this shot as my favorite sunset shot in my library. They both have similar styles, though -- strong silhouettes, but (especially printed out and in larger sizes) there's still detail in the darkness giving them a nice texture. And the color rendering of the sunset in the shots that day are NOT photoshopped; it really was that intense and colorful...

Great Egret in Breeding Plumage. Taken at the Palo Alto Rookery, I love the classic portraiture aspect of it, as well as the feature detail, especially at larger sizes. That photo is my favorite egret shot and one of my favorite bird shots in my library, and one of the images I chose to stick on my wall so I have to see it every time I walk in my office -- both as a reminder of how far I've come and a challenge to continually improve my photography.

Some of these photos just don't show themselves well on Flickr, or as well as when printed out. I've found as I've gotten better at photography and looked at what really excites me about the craft that it's creating photos that really work well and create interest at larger sizes when printed out -- effectively, fine art photography. these days, I tend to start at 8x10 and go from there, and really print my best work at 11x14 or 11x17, and I tend to create my photos for that format, not for tiny on-browser graphics where detail tends to get lost. Some photos work great in both places:

which is one of my favorites, period. Lots of photos, though, lose something in online sharing, and if I have to choose between what makes a good online photo and what looks good on my wall, I'll pick my wall...

Three Brothers and Bridalveil Falls in Winter.

Three Brothers and Bridalveil Falls in Winter.
Originally uploaded by chuqui (View Larger)

Here's a nice view of Three Brothers and Bridalveil, shortly after a winter storm.

One neat thing about this shot is that it's almost exactly the same shot (by design) as one of my favorite and most popular photos, which was the same subject taken in spring:


(View Larger)

The Bill of Rights for Photographers

Pro-Imaging | The Bill of Rights for Photographers | Rights,:

Pro Imaging have set out conditions for photographic competition organisers and sponsors to be guided by when constructing terms and conditions for their competitions. We call this set of conditions The Bill of Rights for photographers. Pro Imaging believes The Bill of Rights represents best practice to the photographic competition industry and our intent is that it should be adopted as a standard code of practice.

This is a great idea. Unfortunately, their listings of good and bad contests has no RSS feed, so there's no way to track them other than manually pinging the site. Which means for most of us, this information will go unseen. too bad.

settling in with CS3 and my new photo workflow.

I'm finally comfortable enough with my new CS3 workflow that I'm reprocessing older photos. Spent the weekend having a pitched battle with the B9180 printer and muddy prints which turned out to be problems with the .icc calibrations from Hahnemuhle (hint: don't use Hahnemuhle's, use HP's). That alone is making me consider switching to a different paper stock, so I'm curious what people are using for paper beyond the standard photo glossy/satin stuff? I've been using and like Hahnemuhle White Pearl and experimenting with a couple of others.

I was able to push out good photo prints, but it took a while (and a chunk of paper and ink) to get the art prints into decent shape. With the exception of geo-location, which I'm still doing on Flickr and not directly onto the photos in Bridge, that pretty much finishes my workflow setup. Still working on automation, as I figure out which pieces make sense to automate.

The differences are (to me) stunning in terms of the technical quality. Here's a photo I did two years ago:

and here's the redo I did last night:

If you look at them side by side, it's amazing how much better the new one looks (at least to me). The big issue is one of sharpness; partly I never really got comfortable with sharpening in aperture, partly Aperture 1.x simply didn't sharpen nearly as well as CS3 does (Aperture 2.0 is much improved here, from what I've seen). A slight change in color balance (away from my "everything looks better if you tone it warmer" phase), also. It may actually have a bit of a green under-tint from the foliage now, but I think the skin tones are much more natural.

I'm happy with the improvements. Probably further improvements down the road, of course, but if this is how far I've come in two years, that makes me happy.

The photo I've been using to test printing is a bastard (by design):

And here's the version of the yosemite shot I did in Aperture. ugh.

If you don't get it JUST right, either the sky washes out, the snow goes grey, or the trees become a dark black blob. This photo is useless unless you keep some detail in the sky to separate it out from the snow on top of half dome. After a weekend fighting with it, I'm much better with curves... (grin). Honestly, this is a good candidate for a split and merge, where you do the sky separately and then mask it off and patch it back in, but I'm still of the feeling that this is a big dishonest, that it stops being "what you saw". I don't like masking out a boring sky and replacing it with a good one, either; I'm still trying to get the best photo I can take, not a photoshopped image...

(not a criticism of those who do, either: personal preference, nothing more).

Aperture 2.0: it's here.

Now, is it too late? Grumpity grump. But yeah, it was waiting for 10.5.2, just as somebody suggested...

Hmm. At first glance:. No sign of any plug-in architecture, no sign of better ACR or photoshop integration, no sign of keyword improvements. Aperture 2? sigh. Looks like they've made some nice improvments. Looks like they haven't improved some key areas for me. Do you really want to depend on JUST Apple to be able to build the tools to process your photos? Third party plug-in market for photoshop exists for a reason, there's more expertise needed than any one organization can handle.

American Robin -- another CS3 workflow test

found my meta-data. Don't use "Save for Web" (duh), use "Save as". This is now a photoshop album. Need to make sure I have descriptions in the meta data and a real title, and experiment with sharpening for flickr.

Almost there. Next up -- output for print to various sizes. And then setting up SmugMug for the portfolio (and using Flickr for the social side of the photography...)

Still working out niggling details on naming and etc... And next few nights I won't be around much in the evening... So by the weekend, maybe this'll be done.

Western Bluebird: another CS3 workflow test.

Another try on my CS3 workflow. I think I like this way of handling the copyright and framing better. And the photo istelf ain't bad. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing my keywords, so I"m doing something wrong with the metadata.. Of to explore...

first photo from CS3 workflow.

Okay, I've gone through the whole kubla-ross thing moving from Aperture to CS3, and I think I'm finally getting a handle on the new workflow. Still have some work to do on details and formats and automating things, but Laurie and I went off to Ed Levin today to bird (it's spring, it's spring, and the blackbirds and robins are trying to out-yell each other!), and was able to import, clean up, and export something onto flickr.

It just happens to be a red-breasted sapsucker. For some reason, I'm chasing a lot of woodpeckers right now -- we had a hairy woodpecker in the back yard yesterday -- another sign of spring, since we get woodpeckers wandering through in the spring and sometimes in the fall, and rarely see one the rest of the time.

More once I get the processing and uploading a bit more automated. I'm finally happy with the import, camera raw, rating/editing/cropping and keywording. Getting there...

So far, at least, one of the big grumps I had with Aperture, the way it handled keywords, seems nicely done in Camera Raw. actually, the three big grumps are much improved: sharpening, noise reduction and keywords. No new significant grumps, either.

photo bag geeking...

Went out and bought my new bags yesterday. ended up getting a Pelican PCS183 as my big storage box and a Tamrac Pro 8.

The Pelican is a carry-on sized roller with a zip on computer bag that counts as your second carry on. That way, if I fly, I can haul everything with me if I want, but mostly, it stays in one bag now and when I drive on a photo trip, I'm not carrying zillions of bags with parts (and yes, I have ended up somwehere without my battery charger, which is no fun)

The Tamrac is a mid-sized shoulder bag; it'll let me pack for a day trip and to walk around with more than one lens, and a 2nd body if I want.

I still have my Tamrac zoom bag (shoulder, fits a body and 100-400) if I'm giong somewhere with a single body and one or two lenses, and my CompuTrekker backpack (lowepro) if I'm headed somewhere on an extended hike.

If I travel, I can carry a day bag, probably compact them in space bags if I want to in checked luggage.

(yes, I'm a gadget/bag geek.) My problem with the computrekker as the primary bag was two-fold: first, I had two much "stuff" for it, so my gear was really spread out across 3 bags and my desk. Too easy to forget something or misplace it. Second, it was just too damn heavy and there's no reason to carry it all around all of the time. Now the too-damn-heavy bag is even heavier, but wheeled, and for trips, I'm actually combining up four bags into one (including the computer backpack) and then carrying a day bag. Should work much better.

It also forces me to think about what I'm expecting to do and pack appropriately; I found I was doing a huge percentage of my shooting with the D30 and the 100-400. That's not bad, per se, but I felt I'd let myself choose my shots based on what was easy and handy (the 100-400 in the zoom bag) rather than unsling the backpack and change setups. By picking my parts and carrying them on the shoulder, I should make it easier and be more willing to be more flexible.

Because of that, I've also decided to "retire" the 100-400 for a bit. When I went to Palo Alto yesterday to try out the knee (answer: time to see the doctor, it got sore and stiff again), I walked with the 17-70 on the Rebel on my shoulder and the 300/F4 + 1.4x on the D30; I've been seeing too many shots with camera shake (another side effect of the 100-400, you start thinking you can hand-shoot everything), so I'm also committing to going back to shooting on a monopod. I haven't downloaded the photos from that yesterday, so we'll see...

I may see if Laurie wants to head out today, maybe to Ed Levin, for a bit. Or maybe Shoreline, see if I can find the pelagic cormorant and the loons...

musings on the missing aperture...

I spent friday night working through Scott Kelby's book on CS3. I'm also starting to really understand the number of man-hours it's going to take to migrate to a new workflow and get the old system moved. It certainly should cause someone to sit back adn think long and hard before committing to a tool or a system that it's going to be there and work for you long term.

On the plus side even my early fumbling with Adobe Camera Raw is showing some interesting results.

But it got me thinking about what might have happened to Aperture 2.0. This is pure speculation, but when has that stopped me?

Things seemed on track for a PMA release of SOMETHING. there were clear signs of it even last fall, and Apple seemed to be gearing up to a fairly hefty presence at the show.

And then a fade to black; to the point where Apple handed back its booth and evidently didn't even have any presence at PMA. And a lot of unhappy Aperture users, if you follow the blogs and the forums. Enough so that Joe Schorr had to make a public comment and tell people that yes, they were actually alive and breathing (but not much more than that).

And then yesterday, AppleInsider noted the latest 10.5.2 seed was released for testing.

Made me wonder.

It wouldn't surprise me that (a) Aperture 2.0 requires Leopard, and probably requires 10.5.2. It looked to me that Apple was planning to release 10.5.2 at Macworld, and the release slipped. That would cause everything that depends on 10.5.2 to slip. And that would cause Aperture to slip if these assumptions are true.

What it does NOT answer is why they didn't announce anyway with a future release date. PMA was really THE appropriate place and time to make a splash. That could be answered by Apple simply not wanting to announce anything until it's ready to ship, but to me, it implies there are features in 10.5.2 that Aperture uses that haven't been announced yet, so you can't announce Aperture until you announce 10.5.2 and announce those new features. The rumored "fixed" stacks mechanism comes to mind as a definite possibility.

So, if all of that is true -- we may see a resolution to this soon; once 10.5.2 ships, you ought to see a number of things tied to it break free, including hopefully Aperture.

But one thing Apple misjudged was user attitude here. The semi-emergency "we're working on it!" from Schorr indicates they know this, too. In retrospect, they probably should have had a "here's what's coming later this spring" briefing, even if it left out some unannounced details. Or something. Because what they've done is left their user base hanging, and it's not happy (or as in my case, it's leaving for greener pastures).

This minor fiasco shows up some weaknesses in Apple's strategies. The big one is that while putting RAW support into the OS is a great idea (available to all apps -- very nice), tying it to dot releases means the release schedule is out of the control of the camera guys. Treating it like they do security releases makes sense, because it can roll back into the next dot release as needed, but support for cameras can come out in a timely manner. I get the feeling Schorr understands this; can he convince people to let them do it? Unclear. But if they do, they need to make that commitment public. Apple's tried to spin this as a "unlike ACR, we ship a RAW processor once, when it's right" thing, which is nice, but I'd rather get good support really soon and see it improved than what we have now, which is, well, nutting.

And this is a clear case where Apple's secrecy is biting them. It makes sense for a while, but if you don't say anything for TOO LONG, then your users start feeling abandoned, and when that happens, they start getting worried, then considering options, then... leaving. And once you cause a user to abandon you, good luck getting them back.

Honestly? I might still come back to Aperture. I could see using it instead of Bridge, but unless they really support tight integration with photoshop and ACR, or (not expecting this!) create a processing system as good as CS3 and ACR, it's going to be hard to justify. I'll keep an open eye to this, once they actually announce something.

But for now, I have to admit I'm starting to lean towards Lightroom for workflow (because I like the Lightroom/Åperture model) and Photoshop/ACR for processing. And Apple has a sell job to convince me otherwise, and hasn't done ANY job of selling that, much less a good one.

I guess maybe I should go download the Lightroom demo and check it out...