Printer Profiles With The ColorMunki

It's always very exciting when evaluating a new product. Being one of the first on the planet to try something out that's going to enhance one's future workflow or a new tool which will add benefits is great. It goes without saying that this is how it felt when Canon asked me to evaluate their new 12 ink large format printer aimed at photographers; the iPF6300.

However, it's not all excitement and fun as there is a surprising amount of hard and laborious work involved. One of the things I was asked to evaluate was how the printer behaved with various papers; both Canon and third party. This entails having to make hundreds of prints, in colour and black and white, using a variety of images and also a variety of print settings on all these different papers.

One hurdle I soon came across was that as this printer was so new and hadn't even had it's European launch, I was missing a large number of paper ICC profiles. These profiles, along with the correct media setting tell the printer how to print (how much ink, how to print the correct colour, which black ink to use and a host of other 'under the hood' settings which are chosen automatically) once the ICC and media settings are applied in the printer driver or plug-in. These ICC profiles simply didn't exist. Canon had supplied me with most of the profiles for their wide range of papers but Hahnemuhle and Ilford didn't yet have profiles and were working on getting them to me for some of their papers. I also had other papers from other manufacturers like Olmec too.

At this point I asked to borrow a ColorMunki photo from Canon's Gary Vaughan who had kindly trained me on the printer. Apart from being used for screen calibrations, the ColorMunki from X-Rite can also be used to create ICC profiles for printing.

I loaded up the software, read the concise instructions and was good to go. Although my screen was already calibrated using my Eye One Display 2 and Color Eyes software (with which I've always been happy) I decided to calibrate my screen with the ColorMunki too. One very neat feature is that it can measure the room's ambient light and take this into consideration when calibrating the screen's luminosity.

After the screen was done I proceeded to getting my paper's profile done, and chose Canon's Glacier paper as my first port of call. I had already made some prints with this paper using a profile of a very similar paper but the results just didn't sing. One extremely important thing to remember when making paper profiles is to make sure that colour management is switched off in the printer driver. The software guides the user through and I must say that I'm very impressed by the way it makes it child's play to use. After a few steps, it prints out a colour chart which one then 'reads' with the ColorMunki puck. All you need to do is basically run the unit over the coloured bars, one column at a time. It then creates a second print out with a different set of colours and the same step is repeated, allowing the software to create an extremely accurate ICC for that paper. So easy and very smooth.

I chose my newly created printer profile and made another print - this time the print sang. I must say, I'm so impressed with this unit. It's so straightforward to use with extremely user friendly software and is such a capable unit calibrating my screen and printer paper that I'm in absolute awe. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Tips On Upgrading To Aperture 3

The biggest part of upgrading from Aperture 2 to Aperture 3 is that your library will need to be upgraded. The library file can hold many thousands of images (mine has around 350,000 referenced files) and all the data needed for showing edits, adjustments and metadata. All of this data, which is pretty complex, needs to go through the upgrade to use the superb new features in Aperture 3.

You can take a couple of steps to ensure a smooth upgrade. First and foremost, make sure you have a good and current backup of your work; regular readers, colleagues and friends will know my feelings on having a good backup regime. Secondly, this is not a rush job. If you have a very large library, this can take a couple of days, so try and time it for a weekend.

Whilst still in Aperture 2, start up the application holding down the 'alt' and 'cmd' keys. This allows you to then choose to rebuild your library. This will fix any issues your library has and in my opinion is a must for anyone upgrading, especially if they have an old library.

Once this is done, you can install Aperture 3. However, don't start it just yet! I would recommend you start it by holding down the 'alt' key. This will let you start with a new library. Once you have done this, go into the preferences and for the time being, switch of Faces; this is the useful facial recognition facility. If you have a large library, this feature can take many hours, sometimes overnight, to go through all the many tens of thousands of faces; so switch it off for now.

Now quit Aperture and start it up again. Then run Software Update and install any updates available. After you have started up again, choose to quit. Lastly, start up again whilst holding down the 'alt' key and choose your library from Aperture 2. This will now begin the upgrade process. Depending on how many images you have, this could take a while. My archive goes back a couple of decades and as it's rather large took almost four days to upgrade.

Once your upgrade has happened, the images are upgraded within the program. You can check on it's activity by looking in Window / Show Activity. Once this is done, I suggest you quit the program, maybe even restart your Mac. Launch Aperture 3 and begin to explore. Now's the time to switch on Faces again. As I mentioned though, this is pretty computer intensive the first time you run it, as its cataloguing a huge number of faces; I'd recommend you leave it to do it's thing and only use the computer once it's finished.

My last piece of advice would be to upgrade to 4Gb of RAM. Aperture 3 is not only the best imaging program in my opinion, it also becomes your multimedia hub, allowing not only storage and cataloguing of clips, but also basic editing of video and audio. More RAM will mean a smoother and more enjoyable experience.

As mentioned before, for this upgrade, it's best to just leave the computer running overnight and over the weekend to allow it to work without distraction. The new library of Aperture 3 is faster and has a huge number of excellent features like the non-destructive brushes, so it's well worth showing some patience. You're going to love it!

Addendum: Thanks to Carlo with his comment below which reminds me:

1- Aperture will need twice the space of your current Library for it's upgrade; the reason for this is simply that in case your upgrade fails, you still have your original Library file intact. It's a great safety feature.

2- As drives get fragmented over time, to have the absolute smoothest upgrade, get a new drive (internal SATA or external FW800 ideally) and format this. Then drag over you Library file. This allows it to to copy across and keeps all the data continuously and not in a fragmented way.

Aperture 3 - Quick Performance Tips

No doubt most Mac users have been trying out Aperture 3.0. On Twitter and some forums, there has been the occasional users who have upgraded to version 3 reporting slower performance to what they expected. The majority of what I've read though is reporting faster performance, which is something I totally agree with.

I have two tips to help out those who may be experiencing slow systems; before that though, you should ideally upgrade to 4Gb of RAM. Being a 64-bit program it can manage extra RAM extremely well, so the more loaded your system, the more obvious speed gains you will see.

Tip 1: In Preferences go to the Previews tab and only tick "Use embedded jpeg from camera when possible" and if you don't need it, choose to 'Never' share previews with iLife and iWork.

Tip 2: Aperture 3.0 now has the Faces feature. It has to be seen to be believed; it still amazes me how it can pick out faces throughout my Library and start to recognise people after they have been tagged a few times. Whilst this feature will be of great use to some, you need to realise that it's a very computer intensive process the first time it runs after an upgrade, or if you are using a trial and have imported many thousands of images. My suggestion would be to switch off the feature when you're using the program and then switch it on to run over night. Once it has catalogued the many thousands of faces, you won't notice a performance hit.

During my beta testing period, I used a 15" MacBook Pro with 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4Gb of RAM. It's definitely not the fastest in Apple's line-up but by following the above suggestions, runs extremely fast with Aperture 3.0.

Lastly, check out Mac Create for some great information on Aperture 3.0.

Storage For Photographers

Your Hard Drive Will Fail;

It’s Just A Question Of When

A yawn is the typical reaction from my colleagues when the topic of digital storage, archiving and backing up is talked about. That is, until one of them loses their work, because they weren’t paying attention to the need for a reliable back-up strategy. The yawns are then replaced by much shouting of obscenities and tears.

In this day and age of digital photography, the obsession of ever increasing megapixels, the need to shoot video and record audio, one thing is for certain; we need somewhere to store it all. The lazy and stupid will leave it all on their laptop until the disk’s full and then drag it off in a hurry, onto an external drive, usually losing stuff. Sometimes they’ll even be stuck on a job with no choice but to delete older stuff just so they can download the latest job and process it. I’ve even seen colleagues work straight of a CF card when in a hurry send a low res jpeg, forget to download the card and then format it. Disaster.

Sonnet's Fusion D800 RAID box with 8 bays

Although it’s a pain, at the end of a long day, it still pays to have a system. My personal way is to never format my CF cards until I have the same work on at least two hard drives. If it’s just on my MacBook Pro, then the CFs remain in my belt pouch until this has been backed up at home. I have a ThinkTank Photo Pixel Pocket Rocket which is always full of CF cards. I make it a point to have more than enough cards with me. I always have one small external hard drive with me too, so I might back up onto this. When on foreign assignments, I carry two external drives and back up onto these (these portable drives are never stored with my laptop. I’ll leave one in my luggage and have the other with me if leaving the laptop in a hotel or car). Once home, after a typical day in town or a trip, I’ll back up the assignment onto my Mac Pro’s Aperture Library.

I’m a big fan of Aperture and have it on all my machines. Apart from RAW processing, Aperture also acts as a fully searchable image database. At the moment I have more than 385,000 images in my Aperture library, and this number is constantly growing. RAW images are stored on an internal drive, in separate Project folders which are derived from the assignment. These are titled using a date and a name. An example would be “2009-09-28 Gordon Brown”. These Projects (with consolidated masters) are then backed up onto a Sonnet Technologies external SATA RAID box (more on which later). The same Project is also backed up onto an external hard drive which is kept off-site. It’s important to have off-site storage to secure the safety of data in the event of fire or theft. Lastly, important images, documents, video and audio are backed up to “The Cloud” (more on which later).

What’s New?

The old ways to back up were CDs and then DVDs. Blu-Ray doesn’t seem to have caught on, even though a double sided disc offers 50Gb of storage. The problem with optical storage, apart from the slow speed of writing, is that they don’t seem to have the longevity needed. I’ve had top brand CDs, kept upright in their cases and stored in cool, dark and dry conditions become unreadable after a few years. There is a 500Gb optical disc that’s being talked about, but again, how long is any media stored on that going to last? I for one certainly hope that it has proper archival stability, as it really would be useful to have.

My thoughts are that using several hard drives which are swapped out every three to four years, is the best method available. This provides speed and security. It also offers value for money, as drive prices continue to fall, with speed and capacities rising.

Seagate's FreeAgent FW800 hard drive units

If you’re wondering why I seem to have an obsession with several hard drives, and a golden rule that everything is kept on three drives at least, it’s because hard drives fail. It’s an absolute given. Anyone in IT will tell you that hard drives fail, it’s just a question of when. I’ve personally had a major brand name drive fail after 3 months of use whilst sat on a desk, but had others which have worked solidly for many years. It’s always a gamble, and you should be well prepared.

At the moment, I have 12 external drives in my office and all the associated cabling and power bricks cluttering up the floor area. After some research, I recently decided to go for a Sonnet D800 Fusion RAID ( www.sonnettech.com ). This is an external SATA RAID box with eight drive bays. This means that it will hold eight hard drives, connect to my MacPro (its multi platform) using eSATA cables (connecting to its own controller card which installs inside your computer) which means that it’s blisteringly fast, and has only three cables; two eSATA cables and one power cable. To say that it’s a neat and tidy solution would be an understatement. I’ve recently finished moving my archive over to this system and will do away with most of the external drives. This also makes the office more quite and power-efficient.

I have the drives in the D800 set up in pairs of RAID 1 (also known as Mirror RAID). This basically means that everything that is saved on the drive (and you will only see one of the drives on your computer), is automatically copied onto its partnered drive. This is transparent, automatic and at the same speed. This protects the data from a hardware failure. I then manually back up data from this unit onto an external drive via FW800. This ensures that if by accident I erase an image, or an image gets corrupted, I can get it back from this back-up. These back-up drives are then stored off-site.

In use the system is amazing. Accessing images or video on the unit is blisteringly fast as it’s working over SATA, which is much quicker than even FW800. I’ve had the unit running for weeks without powering down and it’s been absolutely stable on the Mac Pro running Leopard.

The other new term you may have heard is “The Cloud”. This is virtual storage that’s kept on servers, somewhere in the internet, sometimes even in different countries. The Cloud’s not such a new thing, but with faster broadband, it’s now becoming more usable. Apple has had “.Mac” (now called “Mobile Me” www.me.com ) for years. Part of this service has been the iDisk which has been a virtual drive, available for use by Mac and PC users. I’ve been using this system for many years, and although a little slow, it’s been solid and stable.

The other Cloud system I’ve been using for around a year is Amazon’s S3 via Jungle Disk ( www.jungledisk.com ). This mounts a virtual drive onto your desktop (it’s multi platform) and allows you to use it like any other drive. It’s a faster system than iDisk and allows you to pay for the storage you use. At the time of writing, this is $0.15 per Gb per month. Your data is then saved on Amazon’s servers either in the USA or in Europe at locations which are not disclosed.

I’ve been using the Cloud in two ways. When on assignment, if I’ve shot a particularly important image, I’ve been saving them immediately to my iDisk. This has been for back-up purposes. Also, if I’ve got documents to which I need access, as well as having copies with me, I’ve also got them on my iDisk. This also includes email and FTP account details, which means if my laptop gets stolen, I can still function by accessing this information from another machine.

Jungledisk's activity monitor shown running on a Mac Pro

As my working year continues, every few weeks, I upload the edited pictures from assignments to my Amazon S3 drive. At the end of the year, like most photographers, I look through that year’s work and select my best work for competitions. Once I have this edit sorted, and the images processed to perfection, I take the contents of this folder and also upload it to Amazon S3. This gives me an off-site back-up of the year’s de facto most important and best work.

Lastly, a word on automated back-ups. I use Apple’s Time Machine to back up everything apart from my work images. This includes emails, invoices, letters, music, family snaps and so on. It’s saved me twice so far after I accidentally deleted important information. You can get back-up software for any platform, and I urge you to also have this system in place. For me, I use a separate FW800 drive for this purpose.

One thing’s for sure; as prices tumble for memory cards and hard drives, there’s no excuse not to have a solid and dependable back-up strategy. A little time spent planning and executing this strategy will save much stress and tears; trust me, I’ve seen enough colleagues suffer.

This article was originally published in the BJP on October 07, 2009.

First Open Workshop

A montage of images of me at work, ranging from 1994 to 2009

I'll be having my first ever open workshop on November 28th, 2009. The general themes will be photojournalism and street photography. It's going to be most suited to intermediate and advanced photographers, both amateur and professional. Although having done many workshops, lectures and presentations in the UK and abroad, this is the first ever open one, meaning anyone can book and pop along.

Part of the workshop is also a portfolio review, so if you think your work might benefit from some one to one attention, you can also book this.

I'll be showing some work from my 20 year career as a press photographer, answering any questions you may have and then getting down to the actual workshop, so make sure your batteries are charged and your cameras ready!

The business and booking side of things is being dealt by Ghene Snowdon, so visit the Photosocialise site to make bookings.

As it's a first and there's a recession, we've decided to keep it mega cheap. These prices will definitely never be repeated again, so if you're interested, do make a booking sharpish - places are limited and are booking up already!

To see a report from the workshop, click HERE.

MacBook Pro: Cool As A Cucumber!

Let me paint you a picture; I'm in London and we've got a heat wave on! Its been in the high twenties and low thirties (in centigrade that is!) and I'm stuck indoors working on several projects. I'm editing a huge portrait project in Aperture on my Mac Pro, doing office stuff, accounts, countless emails, Twitter and getting a presentation together in Keynote on my iMac and also in need of scanning in many rolls of 35mm and 120 roll film.

I decided to hook up my MacBook Pro to my Nikon Super CoolScan 9000 ED for this task, and let it scan away whilst I concentrated on working on the other two machines. Like a maniac, I've been sliding my office chair between these three machines for the third day now!

I've always used laptops out in the field to edit and file photos from assignments. I've never had a laptop work intensively for anything more than a few hours at a time; until now. I've been working away from around 10am to around 2am the following morning for three days solid. I'm just stunned that the MacBook Pro has been absolutely stable without even a sign of a hiccup. Its been scanning 220Mb images, some of which have had a lot of processing done (due to scanning settings like shadow and highlight adjustment). I'm just stunned that in this heat (alas, I don't have air conditioning), working solidly all day and evening long, doing intensive work, my little MacBook Pro's just got on with it, without the slightest tantrum. I expect this from the Mac Pro and the iMac, but from a laptop? Amazing!

Aperture Zoom Tip

Although I'm usually pretty thorough with reading manuals and finding out helpful tricks with software and equipment, I must admit to stumbling on this very neat trick on Apple's Aperture just recently.

If you hover the cursor where you want to zoom in on and then hit the zoom shortcut key, it will zoom in exactly there, using where your cursor is as the central point! Genius!

The new Mac Pro (Early 2009 model)

Anyone who's used Mac OS X knows how quickly the OS starts up and is ready to use. Its stunningly quick. As always though, I'm looking at ways to shave off time and speed things up so I decided without even turning on the new Mac Pro, I was going to install a 300Gb WD VelociRaptor hard drive; what makes this drive special, is that it runs at 10,000rpm compared to the standard 7200rpm drives. This drive takes up one of the four internal bays and will only be used for the OS and applications. I've populated the others with larger 1Tb and 1.5Tb drives for storage. With this drive, the computer starts up fully in just over 30 seconds from pushing the power button! Programs start up in seconds!

Years ago I switched from Mac to PC as before Apple went over to Intel chips, the PC platform was quicker (on hardware). Back in those days I used to make my own workstations and would spend days wiring them up perfectly and arranging fans for the perfectly cooled system. So, yes, I admit that I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to interior computer design and set-up. I was already amazed by the first Mac Pro's innards, but the latest model is a pure work of genius and a work of art. The way the processors and ram are arranged is superb. I upgraded the graphics card to the new Radeon and discovering the retention clamp and release mechanism did leave me speechless! Absolute genius. Ok, I'll stop this anorak tech talk now!

Although nothing new, MobileMe (or .Mac as it used to be called) still puts a smile on my face when. When you configure a new machine, all you need to do is put in your details and within minutes all your contacts, calendar appointments, Safari bookmarks, Keychains, Mail settings and more are automatically loaded in from the "Cloud" - simple, straight forward and genius!

I'll be setting this machine up as my main workstation for Aperture and Final Cut Pro. The older Mac Pro will be given over to server and storage duties and I've spent a while researching the perfect storage solution for my 350,000 (so far) picture archive, plus videos and sound, as I'd like to retire my PC server; watch this space to find out which company I've decided to go with and how I end up setting the system up. I'm also about to start scanning in negatives and transparencies from my 20 year career, so this new storage system is going to play a huge role.

Digital Storage & Back Up! Back Up! Back Up!

We push ourselves to the limit; reach the highest peak, dodge bullets and land mines, badger PRs and argue with the Police...all because we have one agenda; that of making a great picture and communicating the story.

So, after all this effort, sometimes whilst risking our lives, other times at the risk of damaging relationships with loved ones, we dump the pictures onto a hard drive and forget about it, as the next assignment beckons.

We only remember as the cold sweat builds up when that hard drive goes down...and my friends, I guarantee, it will. Hard drives break; its only a question of when. I've had a hard drive go bad after three months of use and others which have lasted for many years.

What's interesting though is to see how well the new SSD (Solid State Drive) will do. I for one hope that they will realise our need for safe and archival storage.

So, how do I back up? I use two machines in my office; an iMac for office work and writing and a Mac Pro for photo work. The iMac has an external G-Tech 1Tb drive connected to it and is my Time Machine hard disk. For those who may not be familiar, Time Machine is built into Apple's Leopard OS and is a superb backup utility. It just works and has already once saved me when I deleted all of my archived sent emails by accident! On the iMac I also have a second hard drive (soon to be a G-Tech as the Freecom has given up!) which has a second backup (done manually and also with Apple's Backup utility (part of Mobile Me) of my letters, invoices, articles and my iTunes library. Lastly, the documents are also backed up onto my iDisk every few weeks.

The Mac Pro is a bit more complicated! Before I switched back over to the Apple Mac platform a few years ago, I had several years worth of images on my PCs, so with these I decided to keep them on an HP server, where there are 3Tb of images (all stored as a RAID 01 or Mirror RAID onto another 3Tb of disks, so 6Tb altogether). These images are all referenced into my Aperture library on the Mac Pro. This means that I can search for and see images even when the server is off-line and if I need a high res file, then I simply switch on the server and export the file through Aperture.

On the Mac Pro I also have one hard drive which is my Time Machine volume. This is used for everything but picture, sound and video files. Inside the Mac Pro are four drives and attached externally are eight other drives. Two of these external drives are WD MyBook Studio RAID boxes configured as RAID 01 or Mirror. My working files, pictures and video are stored on the internal drives, and backups on these WDs. This means that anything on these drives is actually stored on two drives; this is great as it saves you from mechanical failure in one of the drives. However, it doesn't save you from a file being accidentally deleted, so these drives are backed up onto external Seagate drives. The other drives are older work from previous years. My thought process is to use two different manufacturers, so the WD is backed up on Seagate. This is just in case in the future it becomes apparent that there are issues with a particular batch or make and model of a hard drive.

I do also have a Buffalo Terrastation NAS box on the network.

Lastly, all the important stuff is also backed up onto a virtual drive; a cloud disk. I've decided to go with Amazon's S3 as it seems a secure bet. I use Jungle Disk to access my S3 cloud storage. I did today see something called ExpanDrive which seems quite neat and does a similar job. So, by important stuff I mean; all the jpegs files I have sent to clients for publication (filed per year), all images are enter into competitions (filed by year), RAW files of mega important jobs, and video and audio associated files of importance.

I think that cloud storage is definitely the way to go as a third backup. You could have ten backups in your office, but if disaster strikes, they can all get damaged. You definitely need a form of off site storage. I initially was doing this with DVDs and hard drives, but it just didn't work. The archival qualities of DVDs is not really known and I've already had issues with CDs from a few years ago stop working. The problem of hard drive swapping off site is that its a job you have to keep on top off. With cloud storage (like iDisk and Amazon S3), its just a simple matter of drag and drop! Simples!

Mega Useful!

I remember the days when a desktop computer with a couple of internal hard drives would serve us well for years of storage and backups. Well, with all these huge megapixel cameras and most of our music and some video residing on our computers, gigabytes are no longer enough and terabytes are the order of the day.

The Signum with a mains extender and AC adapters

Once our computers are full, we then start to add external hard drive after external hard drive. At present, I've got nine hard drives connected to my Mac Pro! One thing that becomes very clear, is that the cables become an absolute mess! Even though half of these are daisy chained FireWire 800 and the others are all connected to a FireWire 400 hub, the cables are still a mess and when you add the mains cables, the mess turns into a nightmare! Anyone who has tried to Dyson (I don't have a Hoover!!) under their desk knows what I'm talking about. The same problem arises when you try and remove or add a piece of hardware; gaining access becomes a nightmare.

The other Signum used, just after fitting 

So, to get over this, I came up with the idea of attaching as much of the cables to the desk and also putting a mains surge protector socket expanders onto the desk too. By complete coincidence I found a perfect thing to help tidy up some of the mess of the cables and mains transformers at Ikea; the Signum is absolute genius! I've fitted two of these to one of my desks and it has cleared up so much of the mess. If I need to get to the back of the desk, all I need to do is pull it out as there's no longer a huge pile of cables anchoring the desk to the carpet beneath.

A Belkin Surge Protector attached with sturdy cable ties. You need to be very careful when attaching with cable ties as its not really the most secure way; I'm still looking for a better alternative. use at your own risk.

So, my suggestions would be to try and do a similar thing and see how much tidier and user-friendly your workspace becomes!

Samsung SSDs In Stripe RAID = Speedy!

Ok, so this is pretty geeky, but it shows how fast a RAID 0 set-up using SSDs (Solid State Drives....basically using the same technology as your CF or SD camera card) can be.

I have an SSD in my MacBook Air and I'm a huge fan of these drives. They are solid, quick, dependable and silent. As they have no moving parts, they should last longer than traditional mechanical drives and more so, they are rugged as movement doesn't damage them.

This is definitely the shape of things to come.

FeRAM and 64Gb SD Cards

There's a lot happening in the world of memory. Sandisk has just disclosed that they are about to start work on mass production of x4 flash chips. This means that it will soon start selling 64Gb SD cards. Whilst for photographic needs 64Gb is overkill, for video its superb news. Lets also hope that this technology is ported to CF cards.

Toshiba on the other hand has announced that its wrk into FeRAM is yielding a huge speed increase in read and write speeds, with speeds up to 1.6Gb per second; this is absolutely huge and will revolutionise SSD hard drives in laptops and desktops. If the technology is ported into memory cards, running out of buffer on your DSLR will be a thing of the past. Also, for video shooters its going to provide great news.

25 Years Of The Apple Mac

The Apple Mac's been with us for 25 years now; doesn't time fly?!

CNET have a photos of the Mac through the years; it brought back many memories!

Muse - The Full Film

Its finally done! I've been working on my first ever short film called "Muse" and its now finished.

Filming took three nights to finish and editing well over a week.

The film was shot on a Canon 5D MkII DSLR using Canon lenses:

EF 16-35mm f2.8L II, EF 35mm f1.4L, TS-E 45mm f2.8, EF 50mm f2.5 Macro, EF 85mm f1.2L II and the EF 135mm f2L.

Editing was done on a Mac Pro using Final Cut Studio (Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Compressor and Motion).

I have posted a 720 HD version on Vimeo and a 1080 HD version on SmugMug.

I've been testing the 5D MkII for the BJP (British Journal of Photography) and the film was shot as a way of exploring the camera's video abilities. There will be a full article on my experiences and thoughts, so keep an eye out for the magazine.

Survival Technique

Well, I don't mean how to trap an animal, make fire, cook it, create shelter and purify water all with a pocket knife; what I'm referring to is surviving if your laptop goes down whilst away on assignment.

I've never actually had to use this technique, but for years have had this as an insurance policy. Imagine this, you're on a dream assignment abroad. You've got great pictures and your picture editor is desperate for the images. You boot up your laptop and.....nothing; its dead.

I have two USB memory flash drives; one for a PC and one for a Mac. They have a full host of all the software I need to be able to work. Image editing software (Aperture, Photo Mechanic, PhotoShop, FTP programs, settings for FTP and email servers, image rescue and so on).

With most software now purchased over the internet, its very easy just to keep the installer files and their associated serial numbers together in folders. You can also download trail software and not install it, but keep the installer files on your flash key.

If it all goes wrong, I can either pop into an internet cafe and ask them nicely if I can load up my software, find someone friendly with a laptop and do the same, or pop into a store and buy one! On a Mac you could even go one step further and have your whole operating system on a USB flash drive with all your software and settings and if your hard drive goes down, you just boot off the flash drive. I haven't actually tried this yet, and I know it'll be slow, but it will save the day.

If you're wondering which ones to get, Test Freaks have done a round up of 21 flash drives and put them to the test. 

Viveza Special Christmas Offer

Regular readers will know how much praise I have for the Aperture and PhotoShop plug-in by Nik Software, Viveza. Its absolute genius. Nik have a special Christmas offer with €100 off the regular price. Now I know the weakness of the pound to Euro is at and all time low, but its still a good offer.

Aperture 2.1 Article in Hotshoe Magazine

A couple of months ago I did an article for Hotshoe magazine on Apple's Aperture:

Photographers are a creature of habit. We find a system that works and stick with it until absolutely necessary. This way we can concentrate on the assignment and the equipment is just an extension to the photography. The downside is that often we don’t embrace the newest of technologies. Therefor the decision to switch to anything new doesn’t come easily.

Working for the wire services and newspapers, for me speed and quality are of the utmost importance. In this day and age of evening papers, national and international clients, there are always deadlines to meet. Speed means publications.

I used to shoot RAW for around 15% of my assignments, when the deadline was days away, not minutes away. Then, a couple of years ago, I came across Apple’s Aperture which was at version 1.5. Shooting RAW has its obvious advantages but its always been just a little too slow to process. My old work flow for RAW used to include five different software packages. Now with Aperture I've cut this down to three.

Initially I had a bit of a steep learning curve to conquer. Aperture did things differently to the way I worked. However, after a few days of using it, I was smitten. I sold my PC laptop, embraced my new MacBook Pro and added Aperture to my arsenal.

My workflow with Aperture begins when I plug a card in; images are downloaded to a folder which I create for every assignment. I choose to use the referenced file method and not the Aperture library. You can choose which ever method suits you best. After this, I can quickly do a batch caption to all the images and rush through the images tagging the ones I need for my edit. Once I have my final choices, I use the adjustment tools available to polish up the image. Initially I used to shoot most of my images in jpeg format for speed, and use Aperture to process these. When I realized just how fast Aperture deals with RAWs, I’ve switched over to shooting RAW 100% of the time. The real beauty of the software is how elegant it is in operation. It can make the most subtle of corrections, leaving the image looking natural.  The other great feature is the way you can export your image into a wide range of formats and sizes; these can be pre-set by the user. I have a list of export preferences I use for my various clients. The only downside to the program is that you will need a recent Mac with at least 2 Gb of RAM to make it work efficiently.

I've been a big fan of Aperture since version 1.5 and have since completely switched my computer platform over to Apple Mac. A lot has changed since then with version 2 and now 2.1 being released. The program runs a lot faster and has made big advances in editing speed. Even on my tightest deadline I use Aperture without hesitation. Its elegance, speed, robustness, full control over RAW and jpeg editing, plug-in architecture and digital asset management are unique.

Aperture’s plug-in structure allows the program to use third party plug-ins. Apple provide their own sample plug-in for dodging and burning. This architecture has opened the doors for some excellent plug-ins and I find needing Photoshop less and less. With version 1.5, I used to use Photoshop around 10% of the time. Now that’s probably down to 3%.

I've been using Nik Software's Viveza plug-in for around a month and its now part of my workflow.

Its absolute genius; in Aperture you click edit with Viveza which creates a copy of your original (keeping the original RAW or jpeg untouched) and opens the image in its own window, after applying any adjustments you have made in Aperture. You then click on control points and select the area of the image you need to change.

The control point then gives you a set of sliders which choose circle size (which is feathered), brightness, contrast and saturation. By clicking on the colour you want to change, it only makes these changes to that particular hue and the surrounding area of the same value, within the circle diameter you choose. Very easy, fast and accurate. Its much faster and more elegant than exporting into Photoshop. Darkening a sky for example, no matter how complex the skyline, is done in a matter of seconds. After saving, it adds the new modified image back into your Aperture library.

The other plug-in which has become part of my workflow is Picture Code’s Noise Ninja. Being a long time user of the software I'm delighted that its available for Aperture. 

Looking into the plug-ins scene, there are more than 70 available. Apple lists these on their web site http://www.apple.com/aperture/resources/plugins.html

You can get free trials of Aperture and all the plug-ins mentioned and I definitely recommend giving these a go.

400Gb Blue Ray Disc

Pioneer has showcased its 16-layer 400Gb Optical Disc at the Taipei IT fair.

Its due for launch in 2008-2010 in a read only version, but there are plans for re-writeable discs in 2010-2012 and a 1Tb version is destined to follow in 2013.

Whilst optical discs like CDs and DVDs have proven not to be the best solution for archiving digital media, here's a chance for Pioneer to concentrate on not only making these large discs (which are so much better than using hundreds of CDs or DVDs) but also put emphasis on trying to make them archival in nature. Lets keep our fingers crossed!

Does The Apple Mac Need Antivirus Protection?

The short answer is possibly. For many years the Mac has survived the constant barrage of PC viruses and worms. However, as the platform grows in popularity, spreading outside of creative circles into most people's lives and work, it becomes a target for virus writers.

OS X is still a much more secure and solid operation system than its competitors, which needs user verification before it installs anything. Common sense will prevail; don't open or install anything that you weren't waiting for or that looks either too good to be true, or dodgy!

In all my years of computing, I have only heard of a small handful of malicious codes in the wild (virus, worms etc), but my strategy, as well as Apple's, is better safe than sorry. Apple themselves recommend Intego, McAfee and Symantec. Read this article for more details.

Addendum 1: Apple have since removed the article saying that it was old and inaccurate.

Addendum 2: Here's an interesting article on this subject at TidBITS.

Aperture 2.1 - Digital Asset Management

As regular readers will know, I've been using Apple's Aperture for a couple of years now. I was so impressed by it I even switched computer platforms as a result. With its speed, ease and

 flexibility of workflow, accuracy, robustness and plug-in architecture, I use it quite happily on deadline and shoot everything in RAW. Its such a capable program that I find I need Photoshop for perhaps three percent of my work.

I did however keep all my images from the PC days on a PC server on 6Tb of drives set in RAID 1 (Mirror) and would access these files on my Mac using Expression Media. I would search for them in catalogues (split up by year, as the software has a limit of how many images you can have in a catalogue, rather annoyingly!), then find it in the finder and copy it to a local folder and then import it into Aperture to work on; very long winded workflow, but it worked.

I had a bit of a brain wave a few days ago; why not import all these images into Aperture on my Mac Pro? One aspect of Aperture is that its a very powerful DAM (Digital Asset Management) for images.

I decided to give it a try. My 3Tb of images resided on my HP server, so I set up dated folders within the Aperture library for each year. Then I imported files and folders into the relevant dated folders. The beautiful part however was being able to keep the originals on the RAIDs on the server (which you can choose on the import files and folders dialogue - also make sure you keep file names as they were originally named). What this means is that I have access to all my images, can perform full IPTC searches, apply any and all adjustments and then export the image into whatever format and size needed.

As this importing was over ethernet, naturally it took a while. I did a year at a time and after around four nights, all images were in Aperture.

At the moment my Aperture library has 342,953 images to which I have total and full access.

A tip to anyone who has a similar set up; once you have imported the images in chunks (in my case, by year), keep the server logged on as in the background Aperture will create:

i) thumbnails for all the images, and

ii) previews as well.

Once this has been done (which took another day or so - to check its status, go to Window and then Activity), you can switch off the server and still have access to searching and previewing images. If you find something that you need, then you can switch on the server and access the original image and carry on working with it. You can also use this method on external drives, be they a PC format or a Mac format.

Absolute genius (Aperture, not me!).

Addendum - Although the building of thumbnails takes a day or so, the building of previews has taken a couple of days more for my library; there are around 130,000 still left to do. However, this all happens in the background so you can still use Aperture (the program automatically pauses the preview building if it sees that you're working on something else - also, if you need to shut down the program, it'll pick up where it left off). Its important to let the program do all this as it will allow you to see images properly when your server or external hard drives are off-line. Also, its worth pointing out that if you're going to do this for external drives, the procedure will be much faster than doing it over ethernet (which is what I'm doing).

I have to add that I've been doing this for a fair few days of solid importing and thumbnail and preview building, whilst also working on Aperture; I've even done some video work and the Mac Pro and Aperture have been solid as a rock - that's what you call well engineered!