Organizing Photos

Whoo, doggie! I should have been better about keeping track of my digital photos for the past few years. I am cleaning off the Capture drive on my powerbook preparing to upgrade to OS X 10.4 tiger and it looks like a bomb went off on that thing. So, while I am transferring them to my external Photo drive I am also backing them up to CD. Still need a good naming convention. Right now the one that makes most sense to me is the event and the date as the directory name for a specific project. I just need to follow it!

For individual projects I have been using iView MediaPro for a few years and like it a lot. I guess I could just keep a master iView file for everything too. I like how easy iPhoto is to use but it still lacks some functionality I want. I do use it for specific things like making a book though.

One of my favorite features in iView is the HTML export feature. I made some templates for slopeflyer.com and can now make web galleries really easily. See some slopeflyer.com galleries here.

[composed and posted with ecto]

iPod Photo 40GB

I recently got a 40GB iPod Photo to replace my aging Gen 1 5GB model. I bought it when the new iPhotos came out for a good price. Now the 30GB and new 60GB are the available iPod Photo models. So far I am happy with the new unit. It has allowed me to take my whole music library with me, given me the space to load in some Podcasts, let me load in a gallery of my daughter to have with me and still have 20GB of free space for files.

My real justification for the purchase was to load pix from my Nikon D100 on it when I am in the field. Sure hope the new camera link from Apple works with the D100! According to the KB article at Apple the test outlined there says it will. When I clicked Device Options in Image Capture the D100 says “mass storage.app” so it seems like it should. I’ll let you know when I get the connector.

Contrails Suck!

Just got done with a trip to Kansas. The middle, dead center of Kansas. No one around for miles. Except for 200 or 300 people every few minutes cruising 7 miles above my beautiful sunset. Where in the US can a guy go to find a nice sky sans contrails? I’ll bet, besides 9/11 and the day or two afterward, there are very few spots in the continental US where this is possible. Well, it was a great sunset anyway and I shot a few photos of it despite the intrusion of the man-made clouds.

I’m Reading Real World Camera Raw

Raw is the native file format of many digital cameras. This book is about how to build an easy workflow even if you deal with thousands of images.

The Camera Raw plug-in for Photoshop has been around for a while and ever since I got my Nikon D-100 I’ve putzed with Camera Raw but, besides doing the required conversion to get Raw images in to Photoshop, I didn’t work wih it much.

I’ve read several digital image books but all the rest have delt with using Photoshop and were more like “darkroom” books. This book takes you from the “negative” on and so includes a lot of info I did not previously know. There are several parts of the image optimizing process that are better done in Camera Raw. Some are better to do after the image is in Photoshop. This book helps explain what works best where.

Let me know what you think if you read this book.

SB-600 Arrived today

My Nikon SB-600 flash arrived today. I shot a few test shots at the warehouse with the built-in flash and then with the new SB-600. The preview on the camera showed a noticible difference but like a dummy I left the rig at the shop. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to look at the pix on the computer.

Nikon SB-600 Flash o the Way

I got a paying photography gig and hadn’t upgraded my flash system since I bought My Nikon D-100 last year. I was going to go for the SB-800 at that time but it was a pretty spendy and I didn’t have a real need for it. Today when I went to buy one at Amazon I noticed the SB-600. Seems to be just the ticket for this job and most others I am likely to do for the foreseeable future. Just slightly less power, faster recycle time and lighter. All good things. If I do deceide to get the SB-800 at a later date this will work nicely as a slave unit so I think it was the right flash at this time. I’ll keep you posted!