What Is Noise

If you are like many digital photographers, you may shoot a rather excessively large number of photos compared to what you would have shot with film (keep in mind that Ansel Adams only generally took a dozen or so sheets of film with him on a camping/photography trip). If you’re shooting with a camera that is capable of it, you should be shooting RAW at all times. The only downside to this is that every image takes up a lot of space!

Basically you’ve got gigabytes full of awkward poses, poor exposures, or just boring and crappy photos that should never see the light of day. Aperture can save your hard drive space however!

You should take all photos that are absolute horror stories as an “X” in Aperture when sorting them out. You shouldn’t put anything rated as such unless you’re basically saying that you want to trash it later. Then, make a smart folder of all photos rated as “X or lower”. You can now select all of these and delete them. This will cut the size of many Aperture libraries in half.  Then simply empty your trash and thats it! So simple, but I’ve seen a lot of Aperture users not doing this for some reason and running out of drive space quickly.

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In January 2007 my father purchased me a Nikon D200. I don’t think he had ever purchased me a gift of such magnitude and I am very grateful for it. Let’s say it didn’t go over well with my mother.

Anyway, the D200 is my only digital camera among several film cameras (Holga, 2 Minolta 35mm bodies, and a Polaroid that I inherited which I have yet to use). I currently have the 18-200mm VR lens, and a 50mm 1.8 (both Nikkor). I also have the SB-600 Speedlight. It all carries easily in my Crumpler Customary Barge bag with my Macbook Pro. On my shortlist of additional purchase are the 30mm 1.4 sigma lens (although I’d rather have the 28mm Nikkor 1.4).

I absolutely love the D200 body. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone as a killer body for almost any level of photographer. The quality isn’t that much below the D2xs (ok the new D3 stomps it, but it’s a $5,000 body alone) and you can find them for some great deals. It’s a super reliable camera and I have yet to have problems with a dirty sensor or any shutter issues. I’m well aware of the D300, but honestly the D200 does everything a camera is supposed to do imho and stuff like liveview is just fluff and promotes yet more poor composition. Some of the lesser cameras like the D40 seem to lack too many features and controls. They are great for someone just wanting a step above a point and shoot, but aren’t great as SLRs imho. Another great feature being that it’s a weather sealed body. I wouldn’t take it in a hurricane, but I’ve taken it skiing and in the rain/snow a bit with zero problems. The heavy duty metal body is also incredibly key. It takes a beating and for my hands feels great. The D200 unlike many of the other lower down bodies can use just about any lens that Nikon has ever made, which I seriously love.

Overall I couldn’t be happier. My qualms on the camera being that you can’t assign both function buttons to literally anything you want, Nikon wants too much money for the wifi adaptor (I’m getting an Eye-Fi instead), and the fact that at ISO3200 it gets insanely noisy.

I want to get a D3 at some point, but that is serious cash. It would be the ultimate night camera since it can shoot up to ISO25600 and not get any noisier than the D200 at ISO3200. That makes stupidly expensive and fast lenses completely unneeded. A versitile but slow lens like the 18-200 (3.5-5.6) would be amazing on the camera (well if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a crop lens, which still works on the D3 but the image is cropped).

You can see my photos at http://flickr.com/photos/davefishernc

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My friend Julia Roy showed me iStockPhoto.com a few months ago and I simply love it. I think I had came across it once before, but not actually used it until I needed to search out ideas for a photo for my yet-released guitar pedal.

iStockPhoto allows you to browse a simply massive library of royalty free images and videos for you to use and then pay for them depending on the size/quality that you need. While I am not a shabby photographer myself imho and have some great equipment, when it’s 2am and you need a photo for your blog… this is the great and ethical option for getting a photo that you’re fully licensed to use. Sure you could always pull up flickr or Google Images, but honestly those aren’t your photos to reuse for commercial gain.

Simply put, if you ever need images online for a reasonable price, then iStockPhoto is the way to go. The prices are super reasonable (normally like a dollar or something for a mid-sized photo) and there’s amazing photos to choose from. The photo of the cocktail glass a few posts ago is from iStockPhoto too. Not shabby and well worth the dollar.

iStockPhoto.com is a pretty neat place to sell your photos if you do stock photography as well. Yea, it’s kinda kicking stock photography in the teeth and probably underpriced, but this is the information age and that’s what it’s coming to. You can no longer sell a “single” for 5.99, and you can’t sell an 8×10 stock photo of a cat for $50 anymore. Sorry. If you’re damn good, or fill niches you can make a bit of money on there.

Not to be overlooked as a killer photography site is Smugmug.  Smugmug is a digital photo gallery site that on it’s surface is pretty similar to Flickr. You can even get photos printed (then again so can you from Flickr). What sets it apart is that it allows their “pro” users to have their own gallery for sales. For the most part, you put up the photos, and they handle the rest. There’s a killer workflow for proofing which is very smart and saves you doing color corrections on 1,000 photos and then only finding that 2 of them are bought. It’s unlimited space (they use Amazon’s S3 servers for storage) for your photos. They handle most things including:

• Super high quality printing of just about any size
• Shipping (super fast)
• Credit card payments
• Social networking features
• And even allow customers to have things like t-shirts printed at fairly reasonable prices.
• Digital license management (allows different pricing for commercial and personal uses)

You get to set your own prices (and thus profit). Not shabby. I love using it. Check out my photos at tibbon.smugmug.com. I really need to redirect that to a real domain and update the photos, but I haven’t been trying to sell many in a while.

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At one point not too long ago I had three computers, and two external hard drives. Now I have just one Macbook Pro, and four external hard drives. Somewhere between running out of space on some drives, not having external drives always with me, etc… I ended up with around FIVE Aperture libraries. That’s not really useful. Apple has no ‘easy’ built in way for merging Aperture libraries. I couldn’t find anything decent online, asides from exporting and importing them into different libraries. That seemed silly, and painstaking. I have around just 100Gb of photos at the moment, but that makes it a pain still in 5 libraries. So I figured it out! Well, I just figured it out and this is still an ‘at your own risk’ operation. Remember kids, backing up is cool. Losing data isn’t. Don’t blame me if this screws up.

1.  Find what library you want to merge everything to. Set that as the library that Aperture will use, under the Preferences pane in Aperture. Easy enough. Close Aperture.
2. Find that library on your hard drive. Right click on it and go to “Show Package Contents”. This will open a new window and you’ll see lots of .approject files in there. Each one has the name of the projects in that library.  Leave this open.
3. Now find the library that you want to merge from. Again, do the “Show Package Contents” thing.
4. Find the Projects that you want to move over (specified by the .approject ending). Drag them over to the Library that you want which you opened in Step 2. Notice that we haven’t had to open Aperture yet.
5. After it’s copied you can close all of the windows. Now open Aperture. It will pop up with a little error that says unknown items have been found in the library. It should give all of the project names of those that you copied over. Hit “Recover Now”. It will do it’s thing for a few seconds (maybe longer depending how many you have) and then pop up another prompt that says it’s done. Hit ok.
6. Boom! That’s it! Libraries merged. IF everything works ok, then you can delete the OLD library file.

I’m going to make a screencast and post it here tomorrow.

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At one of the parties surrounding VON/Podcamp, I met Jeff O’Hara. He was carrying around a Nikon D40, and I’m always interested to talk to other Nikon guys to see what glass they have in their bag (and by that I mean lenses). I was tired of shooting, and he didn’t have anything good on him (I think just a kit lens) so I let him borrow my 18-200 VR Nikkor lens.

So he goes off to shoot better photos with it than I could. Me knowing the lens, and also having a camera that costs nearly 4x as much didn’t help me when it came down to skills and having an eye for it.

His photos from Podcamp are pretty good, but also he’s got all of this other photos which are simply great. He got a almost decent one of me even (and a somewhat funny one), and a really funny one of Julia Roy (ok two).

His other photos however are simply great. He’s got a few that I really really like from around what I guess is his home. His ones of flowers rock.

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