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Sunday
Aug222010

Perspective on gear and art

"Some people use $10,000 worth of camera and lenses and computers to shoot HDR snaps of an old barn which they toss on Flickr. (shrunk to 500 pixels across, of course)"

This has got to be one of the coolest photography related quotes I've read in a while. It's from a post in tokyocamerastyle.com showing the old 35mm film Nikon camera used by photographer Michio Yamauchi for his street photography. Amazing work with such a simple kit.

I found this site via RB Design, who also writes about Aperture.

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Saturday
Aug142010

Concert going then. Concert going now.

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to post anything. But I saw this strip on my RSS feed and thought it was really funny. And true. So I'm sharing it here.

Via What The Duck


Monday
Jul192010

A small 32MB Compact Flash card saved me!

A few days ago I was out shooting when my camera suddenly started to behave strangely. After messing with it for a while I finally realised it was the compact flash card that was the problem. For some reason that I still haven't figured out, the camera refused to read or write to the card. After the initial panic caused by the possible loss of the photographs already in there (it's a 4GB card), I got pretty annoyed since I had a great photo opportunity in front of me. All I needed was a couple of shots.

I went through my camera bag searching for another card not expecting to find any. I had left them all at my desk that day because I was downloading another shoot.

Luckily, I found the above card in one of the long forgotten pockets. It's a very old 32 megabyte card that came with an old Canon point & shoot I had (I think it was a G5). For whatever reason I decided to put it in my bag, and I'm happy I did. I chucked it into the camera (a Nikon D70s), formatted it, and took 3 photographs. That little card saved the day.

When I got home I put both cards into the card reader and Aperture was able to read them fine and pull all photographs, so nothing was lost. Not sure what happened to the 4GB card, but after formatting in camera it seems to be working fine.

Lesson learned. Always keep additional cards around. No matter how old or mall they may be. They take little space and could save the day.

By the way, I shot the above photo with my iPhone while holding a bunch of gear in one hand and the iPhone in the other one, so it's a bit blurry. But I just wanted to get a quick shot if it to remember the day. It was processed with the Holga setting in CameraBag for those interested.

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Thursday
Jun172010

My Aperture Presets in Apple's website!

A few days ago I submitted my black & white Aperture presets to the Apple site for inclusion in their downloads page. It's my first time sending anything to Apple and I honestly expected it to take a while, but a friend found them today! I'm excited to see them there and really impressed that they were approved and published so quickly.

Link to them in the Apple website here.

The presets have been downloaded a few hundred times from my site already and I'm sure the Apple site will give them more exposure. It's great to see other photographers finding them useful. I even found a website in a language I don't know linking to them. I still find this whole Internet thing amazing.

Anyway, I've been considering sharing other Aperture presets I've made and this has certainly given me new energy to do so. I'll put another pack together in the next few weeks and post it here for download... and of course, submit to Apple.

I have another set of black & white presets that I use often for photographs taken at night with flash. Not sure how useful they'll be for others as they do a very specific job for me. I also have a couple of colour ones that I think are interesting.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions please leave them in the comments.

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Monday
Jun142010

How to install Apple Aperture 3 presets

I've been asked this question many times since Aperture 3 shipped and I published my black & white presets, so I thought I'd write a quick blog post with instructions to have somewhere to point people. It's a really simple process that takes only a few minutes once you know what to do. Here's how I do it:

Step 1: Open the Edit Presets Window

To access the presets menu you need to have the Adjustments tab selected. Click on the Presets button, then Edit Presets... at the bottom of the drop down menu. This will open up the Edit Presets window where you can manage your presets.

This is an important window as it'll allow you to organise your presets into folders, rename them (both folders and the actual presets), delete them, and even view which adjustments each one is made up. In the image above you can see on the right column what adjustments my B&W Preserve Shadows preset is made of.

Believe me, this window will be your friend once you start accumulating a serious number of presets. It's easy to get carried away and end up with way too many of them and completely disorganised.

Step 2: Install the preset

From the Edit Presets window, click on the gearbox icon in the lower left. A new menu will appear with a few options. Click on Import, find the preset you want to install and click OK.

That's it. Your new preset(s) is(are) now installed and ready to use.

By the way, if you want to Export your own presets to share with others, just click on Export from this same window.

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Sunday
Jun062010

Espresso coffee with iPhone

This is just a test post, so please bear with me. I'm doing some minor changes to my blog and I just want to see if I haven't broken anything. I may delete this later but I didn't want to just publish a random post with nothing in it. Or something that didn't make sense

So, the above is a photograph of a very nice espresso I had a while ago taken with my iPhone.


Saturday
May292010

New gallery for People of the Globe

I haven't posted anything in a while. Work just got really hectic and I haven't had time or energy for anything else. However, today I decided to update the gallery for the People of the Globe project while playing with the new BorderFX plugin, which if you're using Aperture 3 I definitely recommend. The new version is amazing.

These photographs are straight out of Aperture 3. I added the borders (thin black line, then white, then slightly thicker black line), and the text (project name, title, copyright) all from BorderFX.

Anyway, here are some photographs from the People of the Globe project. These didn't make it into the new gallery, but I might've posted them on peopleoftheglobe.com but without the borders.

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