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Photography – I Love Art, I Cannot Stand The Art ‘Culture’

RB — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:43:16 +0000

So here is my latest creation. I just happened to be playing around with a couple of lights in the basement while getting blasted. One of my favorite weekend activities. I perfectly captured the way my girlfried acts when I tell her that I am absolutely not refinishing the basement and no I do not want to see the latest chick-flic with her friends tomorrow. I think this is an awesome shot considering I had 5 martinis and I didn’t even adjust the lights. I got the whole semi fake melodrama thing that she does and it even looks kind of strait. I am selling copies for $16,000. Get’um while they last.

Actually this is David Drebin’s photo that just set an auction record for somewhere north of that price this month. Don’t believe me? Google it, the title is “Movie Star”. I have no issue with David Drebin. I have an issue with society in general, you have got to be kidding me. Yeh, yeh, yeh, I am missing it, I am an idiot, I have no idea what it took to make this image, the blood, the sweat, the planning, the humanity, the suffering. Screw that, I cannot believe this crap. But wait it’s a “limited” edition of 30″x40″ digital C prints. You see this art is so rarified that the bits deteriorated after just a few of the ultra rare digital C print process and you just can’t make them any more.

Hilarious.

Aperture 2 Quick Tip – Referenced Masters and Previews

RB — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:17:55 +0000

If you have been using Aperture for more than a little while, especially on a laptop you may be struggling with storage space issues. Referenced masters to the rescue – sort of. For the readers not familiar with referenced masters a brief review is in order. With Aperture there are two options for storing the image files that you import. Option one – the default – is called managed masters. Using managed masters Aperture copies your precious original image files into it’s mysterious secret abyss never to be seen or heard from again (according to some people). In reality they just get copied as regular old files, into regular old folders, inside a special folder with a flag that doesn’t let you so easily navigate into it – in other words your Aperture library. People using laptops or with huge libraries and smallish hard drives this can become a constraint sooner rather than later. Enter option two – referenced masters – using referenced masters Aperture allows you to store the files anywhere you want, on more than one hard drive, on externals, on DVD’s (yuck!) wherever. You can choose the location of your master images as you import them or later down the road. In the Aperture import window you have three options to manage storage of your master images as you import them. In the Aperture library (managed masters), in the current location (referenced), or somewhere else (referenced but Aperture moves them to the location for you). The way that you deal with this down the road after importing is using File->relocate master… This function allows you to move managed masters out of the library to the location of your choice or to move referenced masters from one place to another. Aperture allows you to bring them back into the library as managed masters as will with File->Consolidate master… There is one other Aperture funciton that screws around with master image location, I’ll cover this later as it deserves a it’s own discussion, that function is – File->Manage referenced files. The common thread with all of these functions under the File menu is that you must select the images that you want to manipulate in the browser window before using the functions, I know that seems obvious but I see a lot of people get tripped up and confused with this one tiny little thing when trying to change over from 100% managed masters to referenced masters.

Okay, enough of the review, so where does this leave us? If you are feeling a little clostrophobic on your current Aperture machine you can easily move some or all of your image masters to an external drive using the functions just discussed. After doing so you will notice a little badge on your image thumbnails that indicate that the image is using a referenced masters. Aperture functionality will be idendtical right up until you unplug the external drive. When you do unplug the external drive that contains some or all of your master images a different little badge indicator will show up on the image thumbnails that have masters on that drive showing that the master is “offline”. When a master image is offline there are a number of things that you cannot do in Aperture with that images but there is also a surprising number of things that you can continue to do even without the master images. The usefulness of what you can do will somewhat vary depending on the size of the previews that you chose to generate or if previews exist at all. You can set up preview size in the Aperture menu under preferences. I personally use HD sized previews (fit within 1920×1920) so that all of my previews are at full resolution on my presentation device of choice – HD flat panels and projectors. So part of moving to referenced masters is learning how to manage your preview images and fine tuning this as well.

Here is a succinct list of things you can and cannot do with “offline” masters:

You cannot:

Use any of the adjustment controls – they will all be greyed out. Surpisingly you can see the adjustments made and even lift/stamp them to other images that are either on-line or managed as the adjustments are merely metadata.
Use any of the export functions.
Use any plugins
Use the email from Aperture (kind of stupid if you have previews)
Print any images that are offline from Aperture

More importantly you can:

Use Aperture slideshows as long as you have previews.
See and manipulate all image metadata including EXIF
Do anything you want to the organization of the Aperture library.
Use all of the keywording functions, so that you can someday catch up with the boring metadata stuff while you are on a plane and can’t play around for the 1000th time tweaking the contrast on that one image.
Use the Aperture JPG previews in all of the other OSX applications with the image browser. Pretty cool.

One other caveat to referenced masters – vaults will no longer backup your master image files. You will need to handle the backup and safety of your original master images using another solution (time machine, superduper, whatever).

Lessons From Other Genres

RB — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:36:07 +0000

Way back in the 1990′s I took the plunge and attended a workshop. Not just any workshop, I had this thing in my head that I was going to take a workshop that had nothing to do with commercial photography. After looking through the Woodstock Photographic workshop catalog I settled on one. Unfortunately I had no idea they were impossible to get into if you didn’t sign up and get accepted within the first week that enrollment opened up, March or something like that. Cutting to the chase, I being the determined tenacious being that I am, got the catalog for the next workshop season – sent my project prints in – and got one of the 10 spots in Keith Carter’s workshop. Now this was a foreign land for me. I had a great time even though I was apprehensive and felt like the odd ball in a group of artsy fartsies. I learned a lot – nothing that I expected to learn which made it even more enlightening. If I could do it over I would not have held back and been so conservative with the project that I took with me, more on that some other time. One of the things that was introduced in the workshop that I really didn’t pay much attention to, sort of a yea yea yea, I get it, let’s move on kind of thing was Keith mentioning numerous times how he is inspired by work in other completely different genres. He was not talking about landscape versus portraits. He was talking about genres not photographic, in fact not even graphic. His thing was poetry.

Back then I took this quite literally and he may have meant it literally as well – maybe not. You know read a story or a poem and get inspired by the theme, the feeling, the setting, et al. Then incorporate that into your work. For some reason that whole cross genre thing stuck in my head even though I didn’t seem to get any of those literal inspirations or ideas for whatever reason. Having that rattling around in my head that long caused me to observe some parallels and lessons as well as some inspiration from other genres that were anything but literal over the years. Rephrasing that a little, having that concept rattling around led me to be conscious of parallels, lessons, and inspiration that I was learning from writers, poets, and other artists, that somehow some way were creeping into what I was doing and how I was evolving photographically. Consequently I started subconsciously and then consciously looking for inspiration and parallels in work that I admired. Most often in literature. Just one example that crossed my mind today as I was pondering how an author that is so qualified, so educated, so – writing a book on careful reading could have missed something so obvious in an writer’s work that she was referencing. The writer being referenced happened to be one of my favorites of all time. Hemingway, master of subtext, simple language, and strait forward presentation, magically conveying meaning without explicit words even being on the page. The lessons that one can learn from Hemingway about the importance of framing, control of perspective, and composition, what needs to be there, and more importantly what does not, are endless. Sometimes what you don’t include is far more powerful than what you do.

Just an idea for you to ponder. Thoughts?

Aperture Quick Tip – Blue Folders and Projects

RB — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:05:54 +0000

If you create a folder while clicked on the library (or another blue folder) you get a blue folder. You can group projects together inside a blue folder as well as other blue folders. That’s pretty evident but one of the other things that you can do is create other things like smart albums inside a blue folder that are not inside any one project. The really cool thing about smart albums in a blue folder is that the search criteria is restricted to only the projects that are also inside that blue folder. The same goes for searches in the browser. Try it. Drag a couple of your Aperture projects inside a new blue folder that you create and then click on the blue folder itself. You will notice that you will see all of the images inside all of the projects that are contained in the blue folder. If you do a search in the browser only images that are in projects contained in that folder show up. Nice.

I mentioned in the Aperture 2 Organization PDF that I use blue folders to group projects by genre in my Aperture library. Things like Family, Fashion, Portraits, Glamour, Experimental Projects, Events, etc. For commercial work I usually create a blue folder for each client under the main genre folder. Guess what projects go in there. The other thing that I use blue folders for is to follow some of my own advice regarding keeping project size relatively small. If I am working on an ongoing project that can span months or even a year or more, I usually will create a blue folder to represent the whole project. Inside that folder are housed the Aperture â€œprojectsâ€ that comprise the whole conceptual project. Pretty nifty.

The bottom line is that in addition to reducing the visual noise of tons of projects in the project inspector pane it also provides extremely useful context restrictions as well. If you are not using blue folders or are using them only for boring pedantic things like year, month, etc. try getting creative with them.

As usual iWeb/MobileMe comments are screwy so give me a shout at rwboyer@mac.com