Nikon

Hardware / iPhone / Nikon / Photography — No Comments
5
Oct 11

The Best Camera Is The One You Have

There’s plenty of coverage for the latest Apple iPhone announcement so my round-up is not needed. However, there seems to be very little excitement about the new camera. Most of the press seems to be disappointed. I look at it differently. If Nikon announced a new point and shoot camera with f2.4 and 8 megapixels that could remotely post to any photo service and generate greeting cards, the media would probably go nuts.

I use my iPhone 4 as a music player, camera and GPS unit. I rarely use it as a phone. I plan to get the 4S just because it’s a better camera and a faster GPS device (A5 dual core). I don’t think I could ask for much more than that out of a new iPhone.

The Camera

I have a DSLR and an iPhone 4. 90% of my photos and videos are taken with the iPhone. It’s the device I carry everywhere. It’s not bulky and awkward to carry. I can edit and send photos directly from the iPhone. It’s the best camera I have. I only use the DSLR for special occasions and when I want to use my f1.8 lens. The iPhone 4s camera will give me more options and probably take over even more of my photography work. An f2.4 lens in a phone is just amazing. If a future iPhone gets an f1.8 lens then I doubt I will ever use my DSLR.

Photo Quality

I recently digitized a large number of my childhood photos. One thing that stuck me was how bad photo quality was in the 70′s. Many of the photos were Polaroids and either did not age well or were never very good. Here’s the thing: they’re still great memories. What makes great family photos are the memories not not the camera. Of course blurry and out of focus photos are still bad, but grainy and washed out photos of my 4th birthday are still nice to show my daughter. My iPhone camera has enabled me to capture a lot more of those memories for my daughter.

Aperture / Apple / iPhoto / Mac / Nikon / Photography / Productivity / Quicktime / Review / Software / Tips — 1 Comment
28
Apr 07

Aperture training

If you’ve been following along with this blog, then you know I love Apple’s Aperture application. I upgraded from iPhoto shortly after I started using my first DSLR camera (the Nikon D80). Aperture is pretty straight forward to use. It’s elegant and intuiative, but there are many different workflow options when managing a large photo library. I started by reading through the Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5 (Apple Pro Training) which is a wonderful reference. It has some gorgeous color images on every single page. Detailed descriptions of the various tools and nice step by step instructions. It is well worth the price for both beginning and intermediate amateur photographers. It even comes with a DVD that contains all the images for the lessons and examples shown throughout the book.
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After working with this book for a couple of months I was really working more efficiently in Aperture and taking advantage of some very cool features. But I still felt like I was missing out on some features that the professionals over at Inside Aperture took for granted. After some Google searching I came across Aperture 1.5 Beyond the Basics and bought it off Amazon. It was kind of pricey but I knew Derrick Story and Scott Bourne would not do a bad job. I regularly listen to the iLifeZone podcast and it is usually chock full of good tips. I was not wrong. The DVD is essentially a stand alone application with a simple user interface. You can watch an entire chapter at once, or just a single lesson. The video quality is very high and professionally produced as well. The best feature is that the material is completely un-biased. It is not certified or sponsored by Apple in any way, so you get the truth about what works and what does not. Click on a topic in the list shown and a video pops open and starts playing. You are even given the option to run in windowed or full screen mode. This publisher really gets it.

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The training DVD helped so much, that I went over to Lynda.com (the publisher) to check out some of their other training products. WOW!! They have a lot of great stuff. On-line training videos as well as “ship to your home” DVD training is available through the site. They already have an Adobe CS3 training package available.



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Aperture / Apple / iPhoto / Nikon / Photography / Review / Software — No Comments
9
Nov 06

Fun with Aperture

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The new D80 has kept me pretty busy. This is my first “Pro-sumer” camera. I’ve never even focused a camera my self let alone adjust the f-stop and shutter speed. It’s all quite interesting. I rely heavily on Wikipedia and the Nikon user groups for help.

But when it comes to the processing side, I’ve taken full advantage of the 30 day trial of Aperture. After playing around with it for a week or so, I can say that it is far superior to iPhoto, but you will pay the learning curve tax. You not only need to be committed to the $300 price tag, but also to the time commitment to really take advantage of the features. Aperture adds many more options for controlling metadata. In fact, there is more metadata than the casual photography could really use. After all, it’s really meant for photographers that want to know what f-stop and ISO the photo was taken with.

The photo editing tools are not a replacement for Adobe photoshop but they are quite advanced. Once again, Apple has integrated elegance into the user experience. The Loupe is a magnifier that allows you to fluidly move across photos to check for imperfections. The red-eye reduction is easy to use and very effective as well.

Even though Aperture is aimed at the advanced user Apple has included a plugin architecture that allows third party tricks for amateurish tricks such as a Flickr plugin for Aperture (there is also one for iPhoto). Apple finally got it right. Third party plugins!!!! Why not let someone else finish the product for you? The Flickr plugin is still beta and managed to crash Aperture a couple of times. But for the most part it worked as I had hoped. I selected a photo and chose Export to Flickr. The plugin provided a screen to input a title, description, tags and even let me choose the image size. Everything I could need.

My final analysis is that Aperture is good but I’m still not ready to part with $300 for Aperture when iPhoto can now handle RAW photos for the D80.

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