Just a quick update – Apple have released Aperture 3.0.1. The release notes can be found here.
Just looking through the release notes, it would seem that Apple have addressed the majority of issues I was experiencing with Aperture, in particular the Library import, and the memory leaks and crashing.
The update is now available in software update and is 32MB
I mentioned that I had my camera sensor cleaned. So what did it look like before? The dust didn’t particularly manifest itself until I started shooting above f8.0. Here is part of an image shot a f22, and the dust is all too apparent. My options were to shoot at lower apertures, retouch the photos in post, or get the sensor cleaned and make the problem go away. After attempting to clean the sensor myself, I send it down to Walch’s, where for the princely sum for $50, I had it professionally cleaned.
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When Aperture 3 was announced yesterday, I didn’t need convincing to buy it, having been using version 2 of the application for some time. Apple has a detailed list of new features on it’s website, but I do not intend going through those right now. Instead, I will go through the good and bad things I have discovered throughout my initial use.
Read on to continue.
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For Win/OSX/Linux. Price: Free
Last night in the wee small hours I was looking through some “gonna get to it links”, and came across SmillaEnlarger. As the name suggests, it is an image enlargement tool.
I have been looking for a good tool to do this, as many of my images are from my older digital camera which had a lower resolution, so I am unable to get some larger prints because of this. As a result, I have been begging photography buddy Nigel Honey to run them through Genuine Fractals for me.
What makes SmillaEnlarger & Genuine Fractals different from using your favourite photo editing program and choosing resize is that they use special algorithms to enlarge the image while retaining sharpness & detail.
But what piqued my curiosity was Smilla’s price: Free
The sample image above is my Fungal Infection image. The original is 2549 pixels along the long edge. For comparison, I have used Genuine Fractals & Smilla to enlarge these images to 7200 pixels on the long edge – a 293% enlargement. Smilla’s processing settings were set to full sharpening. The resulting images are a 1:1 crop.
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Today I had a valuable reminder that sometimes you do not need to spend heaps of money on that SLR Camera, the expensive lens, the filters and the tripod in order to get a great photo.
I went up to Mt Field National Park again today with a friend – she has not been there before. I went up with every intention to shoot 3 different waterfalls in preparation for a calendar I wanted to publish. I also wanted a couple of portrait pictures for this website & publicity.
I handed her my Canon Powershot G3. This was my first “serious” Camera, and was one of the most expensive Digital point & shoots you could buy before just purchasing a DSLR, and I used it religiously until the purchase of my EOS 400D in 2008.
After taking a photo of the friend to show her the sort of picture I was after, She took a couple of shots and we continued on our journey. We had an enjoyable day exploring the National Park – though I always seem to run out of time to do what I want to do there.
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Social networks are all the rage these days. They cover information (Facebook and Twitter), video (Youtube) as well as photography (Flickr). When trying to increase traffic to a new photography website though, are social networks the answer?
Sort of.
It has been about a month since I started this website. One of the things I do when I create new posts is use my social networks to advertise this fact. The idea being that someone will be interested in the post and follow the link I provide. From the image to the right, you can see that significant portion of my traffic is referred from various social networks.
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Today I’m going to talk about what are my tools of the trade. These are the bits and pieces I use when taking landscape photos such as lenses, tripods, or in the case of today, the Cokin System.
I am a really big fan of the Cokin Creative System. For the amateur photographer it makes buying filters cheap. How so? Well its made up of three components – the lens ring adaptor (which you cannot see) that screws into the front of your lens, the filter holder, and then the filters. What makes this so cheap?
