Merry Christmas

It's always a beautiful time of year around the McCrystal house. My wife is so amazing at stitching together all the elements of the season and making sure our kids have a real view of the importance of our faith in this time of year. It is so easy to get carried away with all the excitement and gifts. We aren't always successful, but we sure try to make sure the cradle is more important than the presents.

Aperture

I have been a die hard Adobe Bridge person ever since I started photographing in RAW. That wasn't too long after I went digital. I liked the speed of doing things, ability to create presets for common toning issues and the freedom to file in any way I wanted.

When I switched back to Macintosh after years working with PC's I bought a copy of Aperture. I thought that it might be useful for organizing and could potentially make my digital life easier.

Well, I played a bit with Aperture here and there for a long while. I loved the interface, but couldn't get over not having ultimate control over file locations. I also had some big concerns about processing speed and having to hand tone each image.

There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then... Aperture has made giant leaps forward and has made me a believer. I have moved all of my image archives into Aperture. Roughly 40,000 images to date.

What made this possible? First, I love to learn and I stumbled on an online course for Aperture that really got me started thinking about a better way to use that system to my advantage. Also, after a hard drive failure on my RAID I did a great deal of scrambling to re-back up a ton of data. That in itself is a huge process. On top of that I am constantly looking for images in my archive and finding a particular one can be quite frustrating if you don't have the number.

Aperture is opening a much better door for me in organizing, key wording, accessing, uploading and management. I have also found a great affection for Photoshop "Round-Tripping," a process where you open an image in the aperture library in photoshop for specific edits that cannot be done from within the main ap. Having the image tied to the original, matching keywords and maintaining continuity without ever harming the master image is solid gold in my book.

Yes, there has been a learning curve. As I mentioned, I like to learn, so that's not a problem

I Can't Believe It...

It has been almost a month since I checked in on the blog here. My apologies. It has been a very busy month for me with portraits, weddings, albums to make, holidays to prepare for and of course just trying to live life with my family. I know everyone feels about the same way. This is a time of year when we should slow down and be with our family and celebrate. Instead, we are running around like nuts trying to get everything done on our to do lists.

Well, here are some of the highlights from November to December...