Blake High School Lighting Seminar

I spent another great afternoon with some excellent students at Blake High School. This is such a great opportunity for me to give back what was given to me by so many great photographers when I was younger. I owe so much to people that would take the time to share their passion for photography with me. I think this should be part of every photographers life, giving back to the next generation of photographers.

I spent my time talking about the Nikon CLS system and how using the technology we have now can really foster a sense of play with the light. It is very freeing. I come from a very formal background in lighting and being able to experiment and "play" with light is such a delight. I can't help but have fun with all the possibilities.

Here are a few of my favorites from the day.

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

Tampa Open Source Photo Road Trip

Last night was awesome. Tampa, Orlando and Miami area photographers from Pictage gathered for an awesome night. We shared ideas, swapped stories, shot together and stretched each other creatively. I especially enjoyed getting some to the Open Source Photo people together. This is an amazing and talented bunch. Here are a a handful of selects from the evening.