Saturday, October 8, 2011

Going around three lakes

Today I walked around three lakes in Luukki forests: Vääräjärvi, Mustlampi and Halkolampi. There were also swamps and rivulets to explore. And even though we had occasional rain showers today, it was mostly dry, and thus a pleasant time for walking.

I have been reading the book Focus On Apple Aperture: Focus on the Fundamentals by Corey Hilz. This is a clearly written introduction to using Aperture, from the point of view of a landscape photographer. Even though I have already some practice, many things in the book were new to me, things which will make life easier, such as tools which help in automating workflow and organizing the photographs.

I noticed that Hilz didn't merge projects at any point in the book, thus avoiding all the worry I had when I started using Aperture. Merging projects is buggy in Aperture, because deleted photographs get orphaned and later turn rogue.

Instead, Hilz used existing projects such as "Initial Import", "Initial Edit", and so on, in going through the imported photographs, and moved the photographs between different projects, not using the merge feature.

Another observation from Hilz' book was that folders are valuable if you have plenty of projects going on. So far I haven't used them at all.

Today I started to implement some of the suggestions from the book for my workflow. I haven't much used the full-screen view, but that seems to be useful, even though different from the window-based way of working.

However, Aperture does have a lot of features I haven't yet even tried. Some day I might do a bit of exploring.

But "spending more time taking photographs and less in front of the computer", that is the target.

By the way, Mark Hobson seems to not like certain kinds of autumn photographs: "I unequivocally state that I hope I never again see a picture of a single red/yellow (or red+yellow) leaf on wet rock in a stream."

While going for a walk today I thought that maybe I should take such a photograph just to be contrary. And there must have been such things on the way, but they just never caught my eye. Next time perhaps.

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