One answer to the highlight problem is shooting with an exposure offset. I'm experimenting with -0.3ev. The photos I get don't suffer such a problem with the highlights, but are dark of course. Here is one:

I have found by trial and error that the best way to get the image back that I remember is to adjust the Exposure up just enough to get the highlights I want and then use the Shadows control for the darker areas. That's it. The other controls mess with the image in a way that makes it worse. Here is the adjusted version:

You can click it to see it full-size.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments

Hummingbird on a wire: 1/640s f/11.0 ISO400 195mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, adjusted

Brett Gross has a sizable collection of very useful Applescripts for Aperture on his site. They include functions for helping with hierarchical keywords, backing up to DVD, managing multiple external editors, syncing folders and projects, and many more.

Tags: Aperture, Applescript

Another reason for going DSLR is sharpness. Although I could get sharp images with the S3, such as this teddy bear (click for original):

Teddy bear: 1/160s f/4.5 16.8mm, Canon S3 IS, unadjusted

I could not get them all the time and not across the whole image. And I had to exchange sharpness for something else all the time because of the inconsistency.

This one is taken with the Canon 30D. It uses the camera's saturation set to +2 but is otherwise unmodified and unsharpened:

Embassy Suites: 1/1000s f/8 ISO 400 -0.3ev, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS, unadjusted

It's very sharp, at least to my eyes. And testing this lens I find it sharp all the way to f2.8. The 70-200 f2.8L IS lens I have is even sharper, and sharpest at f2.8. I reckoned that my chances of getting a bad lens from Canon were small. Reports I see say that these are consistently good lenses, and my experience bears that out.

Tags: DSLR, Sharpness

In more than a few years, but in certainly less than a decade, Apple is going to pull a switcheroo on the record industry. Apple will force the record companies to pay hard cash to sell their catalog of music through iTunes. It's their worst nightmare come true.

That probably sounds far-fetched, but it's not. Back in the dark days of the internet everyone wanted to be a portal because that is all there was: fledgling companies able to provide access, growing out of BBSs and mom and pop ISPs. Get bigger and get more customers at any cost so you can keep replacing all your equipment twice a year to keep up with the growth.

One of those players was America Online and their way of keeping customers was to pay others for content. That's right: AOL would pay other companies to make what we would today call web pages that drove customers to use their portal. And it worked, so well in fact that one day AOL said no more. You pay us now. And they did, because at that time there was no better place to get traffic to your company than through AOL.

There is another example, closer to home: your local supermarket, game store, or practically any retail establishment. Any company that has a product and wants to sell it in that store has to pay for shelf space and has to live with the store's draconian return and payment policies. Or else they get no shelf space and have to build their own stores (like Apple did).

It's just a matter of time. I'll take a wild stab at a year that I think it will happen: 2013.

Tags: Apple, iTunes, Switcheroo, Crazy Ideas

Feeding swallows: 1/4000s f/5.6 ISO1000 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, adjusted and cropped

A big reason for going DSLR rather than sticking with the Canon S3 that I had is speed. Everything is faster. The 30D can shoot five frames a second compared to the S3's two frames a second. The photo above was part of such a burst: it had to be. The parent swallow was feeding its young in about two thirds of a second. Here are the frames:

While it can do five a second, I usually leave it on the three frames a second setting, because that leaves a lesser chance of shooting off two frames when I mean to shoot one. The swallows were shot at 1/4000s f5.6 ISO 1000.

The shutter speed of the S3 tops out at 1/3200, and that is only effective for f/8. It's half that for f/3.5.The photo below was taken at 1/8000s, as was the fountain picture I have posted previously.

Dogs playing: 1/8000s f/4.0 ISO800 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, unadjusted

The higher shutter speed of the 30D gives me more range for a specific aperture, as well as being able to better freeze the action and use larger apertures.

Start-up time is zero. I don't turn the 30D off, just let it sleep, so there is no turn on time. I press the shutter and it wakes up and takes a photo. No waiting for the lens to extend.

Focusing is very fast and accurate. I tap the shutter and it focusses, simple as that, in a fraction of a second. No one-second delay while it hunts around for enough contrast. And the 30D almost always gets focus first time: only a few times when the light is very dim and I have pointed it at something flat has it failed to focus.

Zooming is manual, so it goes as fast as I can turn the ring. I no longer have to wait for the motor to whirr and the zoom to zoom.

The controls are faster too. Changing exposure offset or aperture is a quick flick of a dial. No press press press on buttons to go up and down, or trips to the menus.

Tags: DSLR, Speed, Swallows

This has to be seen to be believed. It's an image resizing technique that can convert an image while retaining features at the same size. For example this image:

Was resized from this one:

It looks like a scaling, until you see the rock in the sea, the waterfall, and the rock that sticks up in the center. Here is an intermediate resizing between the two above:

Tags: Images, Resizing

I'm finding that RAW lets me do some pretty wild things with images. This is a fountain back-lit by the sun:

It came from the image below by setting the Exposure to -2 and the Saturation to +2:

I also took this terrible sunset-ish photo by pointing the camera in direction of the setting sun and clicking the shutter:

By cropping and playing with the adjustments so that they looked like this:

I was able to get a more artistic result. Notice how the exposure is set below -2. How did I do that? The slider only goes to -2, but if you keep clicking on the triangle in the numeric control or type a number in you can go beyond the sliders.

The only real details that are visible are the power lines, so I called it Electric Sunset (click to see full size).

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Sunset, RAW, Fountain

As a follow-up to some of the comments, I did a bit more work on the lamp image. If I apply all the corrections except the mono conversion I get this quite acceptable result:

I did try the highlights control, even the advanced version, but found it useless at solving the main problem: too many pixels jammed up against the right-hand end of the histogram that would not move. Also, the advanced version of the tool gives me five more sliders to play with, and so an even smaller chance of getting the adjustment right.

Generally I try to avoid the Highlights and Shadows adjustments because they are very compute-intensive and hence slow. I do those last on any image if I have to. Here are the stubborn white pixels I was left with:

Tags: Aperture, Highlights

DPReview has the specs on the new Canon 40D, the successor to the 30D that I just bought. It looks very good on paper with some solid improvements, but nothing so important that I want to sell the 30D and get one right now. The one thing I really don't need that it has is more pixels: that's more pixels to process and store for every image I take with the thing, a big multiplier of effort.

Tags: Canon, 30D, 40D

Here is a crop (screen capture from Aperture) from an image with a lamp pointing directly at an iPhone. It was shot hand-held at 1/25 at f6.3, ISO 1000 with a Canon 30D and a 17-55 f2.8 IS lens:

I can't see an iPhone -- where is it? It's the big featureless white thing directly below the lamp. It must be an iPhone because it has no buttons. It should have buttons, but again Aperture has washed them out horribly, so there are none to be seen. Now I convert to monochrome using the Monochrome mixer and the image is just the same, not surprisingly:

After much twiddling I get what I am after. It improves the keyboard, the mice, and the curtain too:

Here are my final settings:

Again the technique is pretty much the same as before: Exposure way down, Brightness up, corrections with the Contrast, and Highlights and Shadows for the final touch.

Tags: Aperture, Canon, 30D, Highlights, RAW

I've been playing with all the options on the 30D, and today tried RAW+JPEG to see if it is useful. I didn't like the images it produced, but something interesting did come of it: an exercise in highlight recovery.

The whales were having a tea party on the deck and to record the event I shot one frame of RAW+JPEG. I imported the images and accessed the JPEG sister by control-clicking on an image and selecting New Version from Master JPEG:

Here is a part of the JPEG version:

It's not sharp and I don't like the colors. But I can see detail in the white fin on the left. Now here is the RAW as processed by Aperture:

Sharper and nicer, but the fin is blow out. The blown out pixels are on the right of the histogram:

The JPEG version doesn't have this, so I know it's not inherent in the image:

How do I get the fin back? And why did Aperture do this to me?

First I turn the exposure way down. That brings the highlights back, but it kills the rest of the image. So I move the brightness and saturation up to compensate and then twiddle with the contrast to get a reasonable image with some loss of shadow detail:
Finally I get the shadows back with the Highlights and Shadows control:

And my final result is pretty pleasing:

The bucket is much better and the yellow color can be seen reflecting in other objects. The fin is how I want it, but the rest of the whale is visible too. The histogram looks entirely different now I have finished:

I wonder why this is so hard to do? Did I just use the wrong technique, or is there something missing from Aperture here?

Tags: RAW, Aperture, JPEG, Highlights, Canon, 30D

Dominique James has a good article with a lot of tips at O'Reilly looking at slide shows. This is a very common requirement and there are many, many ways of making them and showing them. I usually do it the simple way: export the images and then import them into iPhoto, or for a very quick show, just select them and use Finder's built-in slide show accessed with a control-click.

[Update: Part 2 is now up. These two articles cover the subject very well]

Tags: Aperture, Slideshow

Adjusting photos from my trip is not what has been occupying my time: I can tweak three or four a minute and have been using the dark of the evenings to plow through them to the point of being about 80% done. What has been occupying my time is the recent arrival of a Canon 30D, two lenses, and the subsequent photographing of practically everything that reflects light.

Why the 30D? It's about to go obsolete isn't it? Yes it is. The 40D is coming and it almost certainly has more than I need. But the 30D is a very good price right now and it's been shown to be a great, dependable camera. I'm putting the majority of my money into lenses, opting for high quality, large aperture, and image stabilization. This new toy means that I am likely to have somewhat less time for blogging for the near future.

I've also been moving my Canon S3 galleries to SmugMug on my pages at http://bagelturf.smugmug.com/. I'll be posting more photos on SmugMug in my Canon 30D gallery as I get some good ones to share.

Tags: Photography, Blogging, Canon, 30D, SmugMug

I'm back from a trip, so I'm busy processing photos, catching up with email and comments, reading the Apple announcements, and doing laundry.

I took 1780 photos and imported them all into Aperture one folder at a time yesterday. After one pass through everything, 111 are rejects and 769 have been marked with one star to indicate that they are "show" images. I will be adjusting the ratings over the next few days.

Tags: Aperture

Nine months ago, in December 2006, I made a wild prediction:

As I write, Apple is a $78.3B company and Microsoft a $288B company. I reckon that Microsoft has topped out, so Apple has to grow to less than four times its current size (3.6 times) to have a market capitalization greater than Microsoft. At 20% per year growth, that's only seven years. And during that time, they will eat a huge piece of the PC business away from the current players.

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Even though it has fallen recently and stands at 131.8 today, I still believe that 160 is possible by the end of the year. AAPL has gotten to within $11 of that goal already, and it's only a 21% rise. MSFT is at 28.96 today, with a market cap much the same as before, $271B, while AAPL has grown to $114B.

How is Apple doing this? With FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. But unlike Microsoft that spreads FUD to its customers, Apple is spreading FUD to its competitors, and doing it in spades. Over at ChangeWave, there is a nice graph that shows the effect:

These are bogus statistics of course, because all statistics are bogus. In this case the population is large, but very specific: early adopters. And that is the whole point. If Apple can rapidly and effectively swing early adopters away from your products, then your strategy is toast and you are faced with a great deal of FUD.

I'll make another wild prediction, now we have the iPhone to play with: $225 by the end of 2008. Again that sounds like a lot, but I figure on continuing large gross margins and 20% growth, plus an extra 20% "look out here they come" factor. That will make AAPL seven tenths the size of MSFT, assuming MSFT stays static. And how could that assumption possibly be wrong?

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, Microsoft, FUD

This Hungarian web site maps and documents disasters world wide: everything from earthquakes and algal blooms to floods and power outages. But for smaller-scale and more personally-oriented disasters, Fark is still king.

Tags: Disasters, Interesting Stuff

RapidWeaver 3.6.2 released today includes support for Aperture. RapidWeaver's iMedia browser can access previews created in Aperture just like Apple's iLife applications are able to. An additional great feature is the ability to generate the sidebar with PHP: this makes for much short upload times on large sites like mine because fewer pages are affected by sidebar changes (in my case almost 900!).

Tags: Aperture, RapidWeaver, Blogging

Geoff Perlman at REAL Software is looking for a Cocoa programmer to help them complete their Cocoa platform layer and improve their Mac support for REALbasic. If you haven't met REALbasic yet, it's worth a look. It's a cross-platform programming system for Mac, Linux, and Windows particularly suited for rapid deployment, similar in many ways to Visual Basic.

Tags: Cocoa, Wanted, Programming

I think I just found a bug in Aperture and I'm wondering if you've come across it or have a workaround/solution. I'm trying to do a search by shutter speed. The speed I'm trying to isolate is 1/30 sec. The thing is, I try to use Aperture's EXIF search by creating a smart album and then using the "Smart Settings" of "Shutter Speed - is - 1/30" Ah -- so here we are at the bug: This field doesn't seem to offer support for fractions. Entering 1/30 will give me photos with a shutter speed of 1 sec. Any suggestions?

Aperture records the shutter speed as seconds and in floating point, so it is not interpreting the numbers you type as intended.

To filter on shutter speed, add a new line based on the EXIF data to a filter:

And then select Shutter Speed. If the shutter speed is a simple integral value like 1/100s, you can select is and type in the value, 0.01 in this case. Use a calculator to get the decimal value of the fraction. For trickier values such as 1/30s, it's best to use a range and bracket the exact value of 0.0333333 like so:

This kind of thing lends itself to saving as a smart album in order to save repeating all the typing. It would be nice if Aperture could recognize fractions correctly, or even have a pop-up of common shutter speeds available.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Filtering, Shutter Speed