Category: Photography

Farewell Aperture, for now.

At least this houseguest cleans up after itself!

My 30-day Apple Aperture trial expired. I ended up deciding not to buy the software though. Why?

$199 seems steep for an application that runs like molasses on my fairly well-spec’ed machine; a MacBook Pro 2.53GHz with 4 GB of RAM. I like Aperture’s RAW editing features. Once I got the hang of them that is. But… damn this application is slow. This was with a library of less than 100 photos. I note that iPhoto bogs down once its library exceeds 5000 images. Aperture was dog slow right from the very first image.

Every once in a while I would see some moment of brilliance, and think I was falling in love with the software. Then it would smack me with a spinning cursor and drive me away. I would hope that a trial period would show you all the reasons to love a new product, but in this case it just drove me back to using iPhoto + Photoshop.

I’m open to being convinced otherwise, so feel free to chime in if you have a differing opinion.

The Virtual Storefront for My Automotive Photography

Now you too can buy this image.

After years of consideration I’ve finally decided to take the advice of many friends and fans and offer some of my automotive photographs for sale. I have no illusions of this being a means to making a living, but if all goes well I’ll be able to buy a lens or two.

I’m using a service called SmugMug, that allows you to order prints, mounted prints, and framed prints which will be shipped to an address of your choosing. You can pay online securely using a credit card, and select shipping methods and whatnot. Given that print sizes may not match the file size you are also given the option to crop the photo to fit. There are also a few bits of merchandise for sale with images on them, as well as digital downloads for use on screen and print

I’m still working behind the scenes to get the store ready, so the shelves are not stocked properly, and some items my not remain in the inventory for long. I suspect I’ll be thinning the herd soon. Captions and keywords need to be edited too, but feel free to wander the aisles and check out the merchandise.

Having purchased a few prints myself for office decor, I think the sweet spot for size is between 14″ and 24″ on the larger side of the photo. This will become larger as I populate the galleries with newer photos from my G1 camera. I enabled the “camera info” tagging on the photos so if you see “Panasonic DMC-G1” in the info area the images should scale quite large. My older Olympus cameras made images that will likely start falling apart quality-wise at anything larger than 20″. Eventually I’ll remove all but the best images from the older cameras.

Prices are largely determined by the costs, but I’m open to feedback, especially from my core followers here on my website. For you guys I’ve arranged a “Grand Opening Discount” of 33% off anything and everything (except shipping), just use the coupon code “CheapChuckPics” at checkout.

The URL for the store is: http://photos.goolsbee.org.

Let me know what you think.

Early Spring

A Bloomin' Early Spring

We’ve had an exceptionally mild winter this year. Very little rain, even less snow, and since the new year, very warm temperatures. This tree usually blooms in late March, or early April. Here it is February 28th and it has burst out with color.

This is a shot from the G1, captured in camera raw format, with mild edits made in Aperture, then saved to JPEG using Photoshop’s “save for web” feature.

Photo: E-type Tach

Speaking of photography… Here is a shot I just snapped off with the G1, right here on my desk. This is raw, and unedited, exported out of Aperture 3, just to show how nice this camera & lens combo is (14-45, at 45mm here, manual focus.)

The tach is out of the 65E for a refurb and upgrade. It has been inaccurate for a while and that will be fixed soon. It took me several hours of work to get the bezel removed!

Life on the Bleeding Edge, sometimes you get cut.

When I finally jumped to a new camera last year I took a chance on the new and emerging format of Micro Four-Thirds. This is a sort of compromise between the consumer-grade point & shoot and the bulky DSLR. It has all the benefits of a DSLR: Interchangeable lenses, large sensor, significant exposure, aperture, and shutter speed controls… but without the immense weight and bulk of a traditional SLR camera body. I chose a Panasonic Lumix G1. It is remarkably light weight and compact compared to a DSLR. This is mostly due to the lack of a mirror and the attendant mechanisms required to use a mirror. Instead it has a viewfinder which is essentially a video screen off the actual sensor.

The lenses for this camera are built by Leica and are amazing. I have two so far; a 14-45, and a 45-200. They were the only two available (beyond a fixed 20mm “pancake” lens) when I bought the camera last year. I waited for over six months to buy the camera as the price dropped so far that the telephoto was essentially “free” compared to if I had purchased it when it first came out.

My preferred lens for shooting close ups of cars is a very wide angle lens, which did not become available for the M4/3 format until very recently. Unfortunately it is very expensive, so I’ve been making do with an old .7 lens adapter that makes my 14-45 into a 9.8-31.5 lens. However it vignettes badly at the shortest focal lengths. I live with it for now, and either don’t shoot at the shortest or just keep the corners of the frame in mind when composing in-lens.

I have an RSS feed for a few M4/3 websites and I noted recently that one proclaimed a price drop on this wide-angle I really want. Whoo hoo! I rushed off to Amazon to see how far the price had dropped, with memories of the several-hundred dollar drops seen for the other lenses over time… only to find this:

Ninety Five Cents!

A whopping .95¢! Sigh. I guess I’ll be waiting a while.

Yeah, it is not a very fast lens, but it is right in my focal-length sweet spot, and the sort of shots that I want to do with it don’t have to have a real huge aperture.

Literally a few months after I acquired the G1, Panasonic produced the GH1, which adds HD Video to the feature list. Oh well. My “cut” from being out on the bleeding edge isn’t very deep or losing much blood, it just stings a bit now and then. I know the native lens choices will only keep getting better, so patience is key.

BTW I haven’t shared much of my output from this camera here on my website yet, beyond my father/son road trip last summer and a few random shots. I promise I’ll rectify that deficiency soon! In fact I’d love to see if you car-spotters can also spot a G1-produced image, so expect bonus points if you add “which camera” to your “name that car” comments!

Apple releases Camera Raw for Panasonic Lumix G1

I noted last week that Apple finally released compatibility in Aperture & iPhoto for RAW files from the Panasonic Lumix G1 series cameras. I haven’t used the RAW features of my G1 much yet, as there has been no way to handle them in my workflow. Now that I can, I think I will.

I attended every user conference session I could that featured Aperture workflows and RAW format work at Macworld last week (when I wasn’t teaching MacIT sessions that is!) I REALLY want to start handling all my images in RAW to avoid the destructive nature of the JPEG format work I’ve been doing since I went digital back in the day. Until now I really couldn’t. I’ve installed the new update, and have requested a 30-day trial of Aperture 3.0. I’ll let you know how it goes!