The Astral Pilgrim

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, I have been using Aperture for a few days now and thought I would share some of my opinions on it so far.

First off it has to be said that my learning curve is three fold. Firstly I am completely new to Apple computers so I am struggling to get used even the most simple things such as there being no red cross in the right hand corner etc hehe. Secondly, I am new to any form of workflow software so I have been getting to grips with how best to use it, manage it and make it efficient for future use and thirdly, I am new to image editing so all the various features for editing are new to me also.

So, that said – first opinions? Fantastic! Being that this is my first steps into workflow management I have had just shy of 4000 images to catalogue and add to the software and that was made very easy byb the various import features in Aperture. Once that was done it got to work trying to facially recognise everyone and plot the map data it had for them onto its map. Once that process was done (including me manually having to sort a lot of naming out for faces etc) the database was complete. Everything is now easily accessible and I can find a shot based on location, person, date or event within seconds.

For editing I have been experimenting with the various brush tools, light tools and basic photo correction facilities that where available and I like to think I have been having some good results, my most recent uploads being ones done with Aperture. Last of all I love the feature that direct links to my facebook and flickr albums, just drag and drop, synchronise and your done. No more upload tools or third party software.

All in all I think Aperture 3 is a great addition to any photographers collection of tools. My next step I guess from here is when I buy photoshop to allow myself to really open the manipulation side of things, but I wont be going down that route until CS5 is released.

See some of my work done with Aperture 3 on my deviantart or flickr pages – the links are on the right of this page. For those of you reading this on facebook go over to the blog page for the links – and dont forget to comment on them!

Oh dear oh dear

Deary deary me

Yup, what more can you say. I will admit to being a regular follower of some of the more popular RSS feeds of the moment such as mashable and techcrunch and whilst having my daily read of tech info something suddenly dawned on me.

The world of technology has become just as image centric, conceited and flat out pathetic as the fashion world. The geeks of yesteryear are the hot know it alls of today and to be quite frank it is nothing short of tragic. All it would take is for one of these blogs to have its writers start referring to a 6 month old phone as “oh my god that is so yesterday”…oh, wait a minute…..they do….moving on. The fact that the term discombobulated has become trendy…no, just…no….

So, with the geek firmly at the helm of a ship so saturated in a 90’s haze of fashionista humdrum, what is becoming cutting edge these days? What has entered the realm of the elite few? Who knows, but the world of iphones, android handsets and overpriced netbooks reigns supreme as it is.

Personally I think home automation is to have its day within the next 10 years – all the technology we are seeing now are quite clear baby steps towards a bigger utilisation, but for now we must suffer the fashion wannabees in the gadget utopia.

To all those tech blogs out there – what exactly are your goals – really? What are hoping to acheive by constantly repeating each others statements and reiterating each others content. An opinion with a mass readership does not make an opinion any more true or valid, it just makes it more popular – wisdom is in remembering that.