The Astral Pilgrim

I think it is safe to say that today was my first dose of awkward street photography. We decided to visit the local park seeing as the weather was nice and I of course thought photo shoot time! The park just around the corner form my house is nicely nestled in amongst a small wooded area and I thought I would put my new macro lens to work on some potential small wildlife, plus get some nice portraits of the kids and the my wife.

It never dawned on me until we got there – lots more kids, onlooking parents and a dude with a camera walking around…hmm as you can imagine it got awkward pretty quick. My immediate solution was to stick very close to my family making it very clear to onlookers that “I am with these guys!” but as you can imagine this was going to make wandering into the trees for some nature shots damn tricky. After a good 10 minutes of picking my camera up only to put it back down as other peoples kids came anywhere close I decided enough was enough.

From there on in I just kept camera in hand, took shots of everything and anything I wanted on the simple basis that no one else’s child was in frame. If a parent has a problem I knew that I would simply have to be willing to show them the photos I have taken to reassure them that there was nothing to worry about. I guess the lesson I learnt today was that as a photographer you need to be able to be confident in what you are doing around people who may not necessarily like the fact you are there. To be understanding yet at the same time getting the job done.

Well, having used Aperture for some months now I must say that I can’t find fault with it. It is managing my large library very well, making quick edits is very easy and it has allowed me a variety of very useful exporting options such as drag and drop to flickr and facebook. Recently though I have wanted to take this further and have found that the plugins offered by Ubermind where very much up to the job.

I have wanted to be able to make use of the FTP feature found on deviantART to try and seriously cut down on time spent adding files one by one and although I could use a simple FTP manager like filezilla to do this I still needed to manually export images out of the aperture library to do this, keep track of which I was adding and then delete the erroneous files afterwards – not very useful and still time consuming. Uberupload has made life a lot easier now in that I can export to the deviantART ftp, and in fact any ftp I like including my own website and this blog, all in the aperture export options – winner!

The next tool was along similar lines, an export tool that again works within aperture to send my images straight to Googles Picasa service – again avoiding taking the images out of the library. Anything that achieves this is always going to massively reduce workflow times which works for me

The last plugin I got was Maperture Pro – taking Apertures Places feature and giving it steroids, this tool lets you reverse GPS ( I mean come on lets be honest – what camera has GPS built in other than on your smartphone hmm? ). This is a great way to catalog and keep track of just where you was when you took the photos. A handy way to start off is by taking a quick shot at the beginning of a shoot with your phone – this will log the time and GPS data that you can then use to apply to the rest of the shoot using aperture – just make sure the time on your phone and the time on your camera are in sync heh!

So, if you want some very handy tools for your aperture workflow head on over to http://www.ubermind.com/index.php and take a peek – all of the software is available to trial right now.

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted and it has been a couple of weeks filled with nothing but photography. I certainly feel I have found a hobby I can really sink my teeth into, something I felt I would like to do for along time and now I am finally on the way to doing it. It has been proving bloody expensive so far but they are one off investments that wont need repeating as long as I buy sensibly (buying a decent lens rather than a crap one that will need replacing in a year or two). Whilst I have been busy learning all I can on photography I have also been listening to a lot of podcasts on the subject and have quickly come to realise that many tutorials on the web and podcasts catered for the beginner really fall short in appreciating just how new someone can be. With that in mind I am working on material to start my own podcast aimed at the absolute beginner such as myself. What I hope to achieve with it is to appeal to the new photographers out there with info that is useful as learn it – to podcast as I go along. Hopefully it will be useful to someone as I am sure it will be useful to me. As they say the best way to learn is to teach as do.

In other news myself and the missus have been busy getting prepared for some upcoming work for our Druid order, the Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids. We have both been members of the order now for 6 years and in that time have covered a lot of ground that we will be reflecting and progressing with over the coming months. Druidry is not something I have really blogged about much and so I will be posting more info on this side of my life and what it is all about in the coming months. If you would like to know more about the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids then pop on over to http://www.druidry.org where there is plenty of introductory info to read through.

That is all for now folks!