Author Archives: James

About James

James is a photographer, videographer, editor and husband to a wife and two dogs.

Aperture 3 First Impressions

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By any account, Aperture 2 was long overdue for an upgrade.  The only other “pro” application in Apple’s stable receiving less active development was Shake, a compositing program Apple has openly stopped supporting.  Most people expected Aperture to simply die on the vine like other market experiments (AppleTV), and the continued adoption of Adobe Lightroom did nothing to breath life into Aperture.  What seems at first to be a capable and professional photo librarian was quickly starting to look like one of those pet projects that no one had the heart to kill, so they simply decided to ignore it instead.

A few years back I was searching for an easy utility to complete a photobook project I was working on.  My search lead me to a free trial of Aperture,  a package I found to be surprisingly well designed and easy to use.

My initial enthusiasm was slowly tempered, as in the two years since I installed there was only been one update released.  No new features, no new improvements and worst of all…not even a hint that anyone in Apple even cared about the package.

When iPhoto’s semi-annual release added gimmicks like face recognition and integrated GPS photo mapping, I assumed that these features would quickly roll into it’s “professional” big brother, but there was still no update (free or paid).  My disappointment in Aperture’s development changed to downright frustration when I began to start playing with Google’s excellent and free Picasa on my wife’s laptop.  Seriously?  Google’s free photo software from has working face recognition?

Just when I was about to download and install the Lightroom 3 trial, Apple finally released Aperture 3!  Face recognition, yay!  GPS photomapping, yay!  Brushable adjusments, yay!  Entire codebase rewritten for native 64-bit processing, yay!

Judging by the press release, Apple released a feature-filled, high horsepower software package that can legitimately handle most photographic tasks previously owned by Photoshop’s full version.  Is Aperture 3 finally a worthwhile contender?

…that depends on if you can even get it to run.

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The MC Zenitar 16mm fisheye

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The messy political conclusion to World War II had an interesting and beneficial impact for photographers.  With four nations occupying the ruins of Germany, each country quietly began attempts to loot the decimated Nazi empire of all its valuable scientists and technology.   While the majority of their efforts were focused on trying to capture high-value German military scientists in the field of rocketry, aeronautics and nuclear research, there was also a campaign of direct seizures of German commercial designs, industrial trade secrets and manufacturing equipment.

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The Soviets, having overrun a Carl Zeiss factory in Jenna, claimed the existing designs and tooling to all the pre-war Zeiss optics as war reparations and began manufacturing copies of Zeiss lenses and rangefinders at their own factories, Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod in Krasnogorsk just outside of Moscow and Zavod Arsenal in Kiev, Ukrane.  While the quality control and finish details of Soviet manufacturing were far below the German Zeiss standard, the Zenitar and Kiev photographic lines they turned out eventually found a secondary market in the west with quirky and adventurous photographers.  

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Shooting a Wedding for free

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Professionally, I’ve shot one wedding before and it was a complete nightmare.  I was somewhat roped into it by a coworker at the last minute and I ended up shooting the whole thing with a Nikon D200, a Nikon SB600 flash, a Nikon SB800 flash and the wretched Nikkor 18-200 VR zoom lens.  I had very little experience on the equipment, zero experience shooting a wedding and zero room for failure.  Although the pictures were mostly acceptable from an artistic perspective, I would never put myself in that sort of situation again.

weddingparty

The flowergirl was a ham.

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A sea-change in copyright attitudes?

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Right-wing blowhards, sensing impending defeat began to bang a drum of vilification against Barack Obama in 2008.  Tossing around loaded terms like Marxist and Socialist, they tried to use vintage red-scare tactics to link the rapidly fading fear of communism with the Democratic presidential candidate.  Much to their delight, amid a tepid campaign a portrait of Obama by artist Shepherd Fairey emblazoned with the word “Hope” found its way onto tee-shirts, stickers, posters and fliers, all embraced by a youthful movement of supporters.  The image, which drew direct inspiration from soviet era propaganda posters, incensed the extremist right who marveled at the masses plastering the picture across the US while failing to intellectually connect the communist-inspired imagery with the communist-inspired fears they were attempting to sow.

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The political rebuke of the aging republican party that followed in the presidential election of 2008 signaled a changing of the guard in the political landscape signified by the death knell of the red scare.  Less about one political party over another, the future will likely show this to be a contest more based on generations then ideology, and for the observant student of copyfight culture, this moment also marked a growing change in the attitudes towards the very concept of an artistic or creative copyright.

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