RB|Design

You may not know this but I cannot stand getting all techno geeky with my photography. It’s not that I don’t have the capability of understanding the technical or that I find it in some way hard, or even that I don’t know what to do “technically”. It’s just not where I want my head when making images and something I really don’t want to spend a bunch of time on after shooting an image. Yeah I write a lot of techno geeky stuff - more a mission to hopefully help a few people along so they don’t have to waste so so much time covering the same ground.

You may actually find a couple of things I declare a bit contradictory if taken out of context. Maybe but on the whole my intent is just making pictures. Everybody has certain “needs” and little fetishes when it comes to what they are looking for in a piece of gear they will for the most part have to live with. Some of those needs or desires will be critical in helping or hindering making the kind of pictures that you want to make - others are just fantasies or distractions and have nothing to do with your photographic endeavors.

The first two lighting field guides have been out for a month or two now and to be candid I have been extremely happy with the response so far. They are proving a bit more popular than I expected and the feedback overwhelmingly positive - so far. I have received a couple of questions from photographers that have read them though. As usual those questions are never what I would have expected. I probably should have but I didn’t. While I answer all of them via personal email and address answers very specifically there are a few things that have come up that I thought might interest a broader audience than one so here is a mixed bag of things that could be considered themes.

That series of posts I started a short while ago regarding thought process etc. on making a particular picture - good bad or indifferent - has generated a few interesting conversations so I figured I would continue it with a slight twist today. Instead of one image it will be a whole bunch of them. Partially just for the hell of it and partially to consolidate a few points of conversation I have had sparked by a few of those other the making of posts. It’s only natural to be curious of other photographers working method and process. I certainly am intrigued when I get a glimpse into other photographer’s processes. That’s part of the drive behind my contact sheet fetishism.

Nothin’ like a little shameless self-promotion so here it is. Actually this is better than self-promotion it’s a reasonably rational review by a great photographer - Patrick LaRoque - of my newest lighting field guide simulating sunlight. I probably would have written a similar kind of thing if I would have reviewed it. My review would have used a whole lot more words and sounded a little less ummmm… gushing but I did absolutely love one of the quotes - very much my kind of assessment.

if it sucked I wouldn’t be writing about it. Patrick LaRoque

That’s fair. Actually funny because I have been seriously thinking about branding for about a year. The driving force I keep coming back around to is pretty much “Stuff that sucks less” - that’s just the way I am wired.

Kind of a strange week of posts for me. Probably too much anger over the whole Adobe shafting a lot of it’s customers or at least positioning for the big shafting to come. Maybe a bit too tool focused be it Aperture 3, or Lightroom, or VSCO, or the Fuji X100S. Enough of that for now, it’s not about the tools really - it’s not. As long as the tools are competent to some degree you’re golden. Limitations, constraints and obstacles can be a good thing in a lot of cases as I have written about a number of times before. All of them cause you to work differently and think differently. As you can probably imagine I happen to prefer tools that just get the hell out of my way. Even if they have their own set of limitations. You may view that statement as a bit of contradictory things. In my mind it’s not depending on your definition of limitations as well as your interpretation of “getting the hell out of the way”.

So a question came up while chatting about VSCO for Aperture 3 that was actually pretty pragmatic. Simply “is there a simple way to make VSCO work in Aperture 3”. Work meaning make it look a whole lot more like VSCO for Lightroom and ACR. The answer is a mixed bag I will give you my take and you decide. The short version is generally yes.

Okay, so a couple of people have asked me what the hell I am on about regarding the Aperture 3 version of VSCO and why I am so hypercritical. Well… I posted this quite a while back but I guess that didn’t quite tell the story clearly enough. I swear this is the last time… maybe. Here we go.

Image at the top - my goofy “Kodak-y” preset that I have had laying around in Aperture 3 for like 2 years or more maybe longer versus the ACR 7 Lightroom 4 version of VSCO Portra 160. It’s similar to my own “presets” that I lifted and stamped back in Aperture 2 - of course taking into account the RAW defaults that Apple changed a hell of a lot since Aperture 2.

It’s Friday so this will be a bit of a mixed bag of things but could also be considered the first in a small series of posts regarding Fuji X100S RAW files and my thoughts on how Aperture 3 handles those. I know the back story - yea Lightroom “sucked” but now it’s better, Capture One is the ultimate for XTRANS blah blah blah. To tell the truth the kind of things I care a lot about in terms of IQ are probably not making myself cross eyed searching for some “water color effect” across 7 pixels under certain circumstances when the moon is full. So if you are counting on me to point out some minor “gottcha” in terms of artifacts vs other RAW processing of the same file vs yet another I am not your man.

So… I have had more than a couple of chit-chats with people that seem eager to get their hot little (or big) hands on some Aperture 3 presets. Some of that was because I asked. Some of it was shared anti-adobe sentiment, some of it was that I am not the only lunatic out there that thinks VSCO for Aperture three is kinda off the deep end. I swear I am not a big fan of random presets - I am more of the school of just make-um yourself but I am the odd man out I guess. In any case I am now commited to re-arranging some of the mess that I use for myself in Aperture 3, organizing them so that they are at all understandable, and putting them out there for consumption.

Had a chat about the Nikon D600 with an eBuddy yesterday. Specifically my opinion on the camera and if it was a worthy competitor to the D700. You can probably guess my response - especially at the price point that was being discussed. A low low $1600 used. That’s a steal unless it’s broken. I think the Sony 24 megapixel sensor that camera houses is one of the best available at the moment. I really have no complaints about it’s performance. It’s a great balance all around.