Aperture's levels control can be used to easily add color to otherwise gray images. This original photo of stacked chairs has a range of grays that exist only on the chair backs and seats:

By selecting the Blue channel on the levels control, I can alter the amount of blue in the gray part of the chairs. In this case I'll boost the darker tones significantly to give a blue tint:

With some boosting of the saturation with the exposure control and a crop to focus attention where I want it, I get my final image:

Of course the colors can be cut or boosted individually or in combination to get any color. The Colors control can also be used to adjust the color once one is applied.

Tags: Aperture, Adjustments, Color

Ian Wood continues to work on the problem of interchanging GPS data with Aperture. From a posting on DPReview:

GPS2Aperture is a floating system window which can grab GPS data from either Aperture or Google Earth, let the user edit it and then send the data to either Aperture or Google Earth.

http://ianjameswood.co.uk/aperture/GPS2Aperture_beta.zip (3.2MB)

For instance if an image Version has incorrect GPS info, you can view the location in Google Earth, move around the the right location and send the edited location data back to the image Version in Aperture. Alternatively, use Google Earth to visually pick a location and add it to Versions that had no GPS data in the first place.

Note - GPS2Aperture makes changes directly to Aperture's SQLite database as the interface gives no way to alter GPS or other EXIF data. It's been tested on multiple computers and multiple Libraries without problems, but make sure you backup first, just in case!

Jason Kerner has some examples of photos with GPS buttons that take you to Google.

Tags: Aperture, GPS, Google

BorderFX is a new Aperture export plug-in from Reinhard Uebel. It's a beta, and it's free, but you can donate on his web site. You can leave comments on his blog as well.

BorderFX comes with an installer that appeared to freeze when I ran it, but apparently it was just waiting for my disks to spin up so it could display them, so give it a little time. The installer puts the plug-in into the system's Application Support/Aperture folder hierarchy, so it requires and Admin password, but is consequently available to all users on the machine.

The window looks like this with a preview of one of the selected images on the right:

The cog menu saves and restores the settings as presets so you can define different borders for different uses:

The Output Sizes menu can also be customized:

The main part of the controls is tabbed and has settings for the image:

And for the border:

I found the controls a little quirky. It was quite hard to get what I wanted and I never did fully figure out how everything interacted. With no scaling option it was hard to see what was happening. I could drag the image around, but I could not figure out what the horizontal yellow lines meant:

It's a beta, so I expect some rough edges. It certainly looks useful.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins

DPReview now has a full review of the Canon S5, the successor to the S3 that I have. I've played with the S5 in a store, and I'm not impressed, especially since the S3 costs half what the S5 does right now. The big turn-offs for me are the card access (in with the batteries), and the slower burst speed. There are plenty of comments going up right now in the Canon forum.

Tags: Canon, S3, S5, Review

Übermind continues to crank out new Aperture plug-ins. The latest release is Aperture To Picasa Web Albums. It automates the process of uploading from Aperture to Picasa.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Google

I am very frustrated when I go into aperture and look at my pictures I look at the previews on the bottom and there are a lot of preview photos are the wrong photo. When I click on the photo a different photo comes into the view screeen. What can I do to fix this I tried holding option and command while I started aperture and it said it was regenerating. Afterwards still the same result. Any other suggestions? Also when I click on library now nothing displays in the view window? THanks

It looks like your thumbnails have been corrupted. Rebuilding the database won't fix that, so you'll need to delve into the affected library. It's easy to fix.

Another symptom of corrupted thumbnails is that they look like this:

To fix, quit Aperture and locate the Aperture library with the problem. Control-click on the library icon and select Show Package Contents:

A Finder window will open. Navigate down through the folders (they correspond to the blue folders in your Aperture library) until you get to the project with the problem thumbnails:

Open that project with a control-click Show Package Contents and locate these three files:

Drag those to trash, or select them and hit command-delete.

Close the windows that you opened, and launch Aperture. Aperture will immediately start regenerating the thumbnails, and that could take a little while. To see what it is doing, click on Window > Show Tasks List and you'll get a count-down of the number of images still to process:

When it is done, all should be well, at least with that project. You'll need to repeat this with each affected project in the library.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Thumbnails, Library, Corruption

Screaming beans. We assume that Simon Panrucker is responsible.

Tags: Fun, Beans, Screaming

Primate Labs has a page of Mac speeds measured with Geekbench. It's a simple combination of memory and CPU performance.

I still have one of these running at home:

It comes dead bottom of the list. A little slow, but fine for kids games, email, and web browsing.

Tags: Macs, Speed

Two new sites have appeared recently: CocoaTraces and CodeBeach that fit something of the same need. They are both repositories for pieces of working Cocoa source code, stored in such a way that it should be possible to find it if you need it.

Tags: Cocoa, Site Focus

This is the last in a series of short articles about how to protect referenced masters from one of their worst natural enemies: bone-headedness. From Part 1: The best medicine, then, is prevention. So how do you go about protecting referenced masters? They could be stored anywhere and called anything -- what kind of barriers can be constructed to protect them?

Part 4: Write Protect

For maximum paranoia against accidental modification or deletion, write protect the master image files. This can be easily achieved from the Finder.

From the Finder I select the top-level folder of the folder structure to protect and press command I to bring up the Info window. I open up the permissions part at the bottom, and it looks like this:

By changing the Details pop-ups to Read Only and applying it to all enclosed items, the settings are propagated to all the files and folders:

Now if I try to modify a file, I get a dialog like this:

I get an opportunity to override by authenticating, but usually I would not want to, just accepting the OK button. If I drag a file to the trash, I get the same dialog.

To change everything back, I use the same procedure, this time setting the permissions to Read and Write for myself.

Tags: Aperture, Masters, Referenced, Reconnecting, Bone-Headedness, Library

Ken Huth has published ApertureCast number 11: Workflow part 2: Six Ways To Edit on his HuthPhoto media page. Ken publishes an image-enhanced Aperture podcast every month or so.

Tags: Podcast, Aperture, Workflow

This six-minute piece from a long-running BBC science show called Tomorrow's World tries to predict the future of special effects for rock concerts. Of course this is 1968, so pretty much everything to do with rock concerts had still to be invented. Pink Floyd went on to be the band to beat when it came to live shows.

Tags: Pink Floyd, BBC, Music

[Update: Aperture 2.0 kills this workflow dead. Apple has changed the behavior of album picks so that creating a new album from non-pick images no longer automatically makes those images the album picks in the new album. Send feedback to Apple if you want the old behavior back]

This article shows a powerful technique for managing adjustments to large numbers of images. It brings together stacks and albums and shows how they can be used as part of an efficient workflow. It was prompted by a posting on the Apple message boards for Aperture:

Here's the conundrum: I have 800 event photos in an Aperture project. I stamp adjustments to all of them. So, now I have 800 stacks, each with a master RAW image and an adjusted version. In each stack, the unadjusted master is the default pick. If the stacks are closed and I Export Versions, I get 800 JPEGs rendered from the unadjusted masters. If I open all stacks, select all, and Export Versions, I get 1,600 JPEGs rendered from both the masters and the versions. How in **** do I select the 800 adjusted versions for export without having to command-click on each one? Is there no way to automatically export just the versions?

The only approach I've found is to select the versions and make them the picks in their stacks, one by one. Then I can close the stacks, select all, and Export Versions. This is painfully time-consuming. I can't even just select the versions one by one and then batch promote them to pick status. I not only have to select the versions one by one, but I also have to promote them one by one. Argh! Am I missing something here? Please help.

Here is a project with some images that I am going to adjust. There could be thousands: the workflow is the same.

Before I start adjusting I select the three images I want to work with and create new versions by pressing option V:

This creates duplicates of the three and puts each duplicate into a stack with the original as the pick. This is where the difficulty lies as the person with the problem found. Since those new versions are in stacks but are not the pick then Aperture will not use the adjusted version for exports.

To turn this to my advantage (without clicking anywhere else so that the duplicates are still selected) I control click one of the new versions and select New From Selection > Album:

Pressing command L has the same effect. The new album is created and displayed and I can rename it to something meaningful, such as Adjusted:

The new album shows the stacks just as the project did, but this time there are check marks on the duplicates showing that these are the album picks:

An album pick is the image that will be on the top of the stack for this album only. Look what happens when I close all the stacks with option semicolon:

Just the album picks are left showing. That's the preparation complete. I have an album which will show me all the new versions, so no changes to the original project are needed. Now I adjust the images. For this example the changes are rather radical, so the difference is obvious:

I could have adjusted just one image and used lift and stamp to process thousands.

Selecting the original project shows that the adjusted versions are still in the stacks, and are not the picks as they are in the album:

Closing the project stacks will show me the originals. Closing the album stacks will show me the adjusted images. So by selecting either the project images or the album images I can choose which I export, print, or continue to process.

This technique can be used any number of times with any number of selections and albums and should be part of your standard workflow.

Tags: Aperture, Stacks, Album Picks, Adjustments, Workflow

From the Hide-a-pod site:

You love your iPod. It’s a great product. You take it everywhere and you use it every day. But owning a device so desirable and fashionable as an iPod comes with one major drawback . . . the iPod has become a target for theft. So how can you take your iPod out of your home without fear?

Looks like a terrific anti-theft device. It's compatible with the iPhone, and I could use it to stop people stealing my chocolate at work as well.

Tags: iPhone, iPod, Fun

This is a series of short articles about how to protect referenced masters from one of their worst natural enemies: bone-headedness. From Part 1: The best medicine, then, is prevention. So how do you go about protecting referenced masters? They could be stored anywhere and called anything -- what kind of barriers can be constructed to protect them?

Part 3: Organize Masters For Growth

Relocating and renaming masters imported into Aperture helps to ensure that they will not be accidently altered, misplaced, or deleted as referenced files.

But when they are relocated, where should they be put? Everyone has a different system for doing this. Often that system arose from a need to either find images or process them, but these are requirements that Aperture does not have of disk storage: the library and its tools take over that organizational role.

What is left to organize? There must be some logic to the folder structure. My answer is to organize around change and minimize risk. What can change?

Adding Storage

The first thing that changes is that the disk fills up and more is needed. Unless you have a RAID system that can be transparently expanded, you must either add a new disk to your computer and split the masters across both, or replace the old disk with the new one and copy everything over. Which is the better approach depends on how the masters have been organized, so ideally your master organization is planned according to your plans for expansion. Do you have any plans for expansion?

If you are storing referenced masters primarily chronologically, say by month, then you add a new drive and all the new images get put on the new drive and the old ones stay on the old drive. It's a quick upgrade and you are unlikely to accidently delete or damage anything. Further, you can stop backing up the old drive: it will never change. Just keep the old off-site back up until you get rid of the smaller drive a few years from now. One small catch is that the addition of the new drive will happen mid-month. So do you have two July folders, one on each disk, or move the July folder to the new disk and then continue adding to it? I recommend the latter, and will be looking at how that can be achieved in this article.

If you are not storing referenced masters primarily chronologically, then the approach is different. Masters organized by client and then by project cannot be handled the same way as the strictly chronological system because any client could ask for another project and overrun an already-full disk. In this case it makes sense to copy everything over and stop using the old disk. Copying between disks can take a little while, even with fast disks -- about an hour per 100GB -- so this is something that may take some planning. The catch with this method of storage expansion is that backing up will need to include both drives now, so don't forget to change your settings or procedures to do that.

Both method of adding storage require copying, and Aperture can do it for you. In fact you should always use Aperture to do the copying. In that way Aperture always knows where its library masters are at all times and reconnecting is never needed.

To move referenced masters to another drive using Aperture, relocate them using exactly the same system of organization that was in use on the old drive. You already have a preset for this because the current organization or referenced masters was built with it.

Archiving

In deciding how to organize referenced masters there is more to consider than just storage expansion. The other change that occurs is that archiving is needed: some images no longer need to be at-hand and can be stored more cheaply or in a place that is not immediately available. These are not back-ups (copies stored short-term as insurance that you hope to never need) -- they are archives (originals stored long-term with the expectation that they will be needed).

I described one folder systems based primarily on date, and another based on client and project. But there are others. Which one is best? In my mind the best folder system is one that Aperture can create and maintain and that can be adequately backed up incrementally.

That may sound restrictive because you may not want to look at a library organized that way, but remember that the folder organization on the disk does not have to follow the library organization at all. For instance your library may be organized by client and then city (both using blue folders) and then by project because your work involves travel to different locations for each client to shoot vacation accommodation. But since renovation is common, you almost never need access to images that are more than three years old. So you organize your referenced masters on the disk by year and project (using Finder folders) and archive a whole year at a time to DVDs or a hard drive each time you start a new year. Note that the library still contains the thumbnails and the metadata for all images, allowing you to view, tag, and find those other images at any time.

Organize masters to reflect how you archive images and manage storage. Organize the library to reflect how you find and work with images.

Part 4 has been posted.

Tags: Aperture, Masters, Referenced, Reconnecting, Bone-Headedness, Library

Going back to 1985, Peter G Neumann's RISKS is billed as a Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems. And that it certainly is. Here are the contents of the current issue:

• Remote physical security for air traffic control center (Rob Slade)
• Beware of the fine print (Peter Mellor)
• The risk with the Mac OS X 10.4.10 version number (T Yip)
• The Athens Affair: Greek Cellphone Caper (Roy Stehle)
• Lightning bolt blamed for NYC power outage (PGN)
• Voltr Risks, Glitch - Fire Alarm - International Space Station (Robert J Perillo)
• Wikipedia, It's Time to Grow Up! The Benoit Murder/Suicide Case (Lauren Weinstein)
• Wikipedia and Responsibility (Lauren Weinstein)
• Re: Transport system complexity presents insurmountable risk? (Mark Brader)
• Re: Gripen: Risks of safety measures in military jet aircraft (Matt Jaffe, Peter Mellor)
• N-version programming -- the errors are in ourselves (Fred Cohen)
• Secure Programming with Static Analysis (Brian Chess)
• Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

RISKS contains a great deal of background to events that are reported in the news and other media. There are many knowledgeable contributors who locate and analyze technical details:

On 2nd February 1989, the first prototype was coming in to land after its sixth test flight. On its previous five flights it had shown a tendency to lateral instability. This time, it showed longitudinal instability, pitching down, then sharply up, then down again to the extent that the pilot could not recover control. The aircraft hit the runway, shearing off the left main gear, bounced, skidded off the runway, turned through 180 degrees, struck the ground with its right wingtip, flipped over, and came to rest on its back. Amazingly, the test pilot, Lars Radestrom, walked away from the wreck.

The investigating committee concluded that the crash was due to a software fault. The chairman, Olaf Forsberg, stated:

"The accident was caused by the aircraft experiencing increasing pitch oscillations (divergent dynamic instability) in the final stage of landing, the oscillations becoming uncontrollable. This was because movement of the stick in the pitch axis exceeded the values predicted when designing the flight control system, whereby the stability margins were exceeded at the critical frequency."

I subscribe to the weekly digest delivered by email once a week, but you can also read all the issues on the web.

Tags: Risks, Technology

From the press release:

The relationship, announced in conjunction with Microsoft's launch of the new Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Sales solution and Microsoft Dynamics Mobile Development Tools, paves the way for Motorola PartnerSelect members globally to port their existing enterprise mobility solutions to the Microsoft Dynamics platform. From direct store delivery applications for manufacturers to point of care solutions in the healthcare sector, Microsoft Dynamics AX customers can now empower their mobile workers with innovative Motorola enterprise mobility solutions that can improve productivity and decision-making at the point of activity.

Goodness, what appalling drivel. Certainly not staggeringly good news as can be seen by the stock prices after it was released at midday:

It continues with a quote from a person that nobody has heard of:

Anthony Julien, CEO of Spectra Interface, already both a Microsoft Dynamics and Motorola ISV partner, said, "By leveraging the tools and applications from Microsoft Dynamics Mobile and Motorola partners, we are now able to provide complete solutions to Microsoft Dynamics customers at a much faster rate than we could have done previously and has helped us to extend our geographic reach."

That's some wacky grammar. Dilbert's Mission Statement Generator ("Our goal is to collaboratively coordinate market-driven technology and assertively utilize unique content") is just as meaningless and gets the English correct.

There is no real information in the entire release. Even the explanation needs an explanation:

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of financial, customer relationship and supply chain management solutions that helps businesses work more effectively. Delivered through a network of channel partners providing specialized services, these integrated, adaptable business management solutions work like and with familiar Microsoft software to streamline processes across an entire business.

But don't all supply chain management solutions work this way and provide the same benefit? What is unique about it? What is compelling about it?

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Drivel

What if Apple distributed Leopard on silicon?

A DVD, and particularly a DVD drive, is a huge thing compared to the size of everything else that goes into a computer or computerized device. If Apple wants to make its laptops much thinner and smaller it has to leave out the DVD drive -- but then how do customers load software, or even boot a new version of the OS?

I believe that all the computers that are supported by Leopard have USB 2.0, so that would be the preferred method. Shipping and storage are a large part of the costs associated with software distribution, and much of that could be saved if a USB key instead of a disk and box were used. So although the silicon solution may appear expensive in raw materials the hit may be much less than imagined once the whole picture is taken into account.

Silicon distribution also has some other advantages. USB sticks can be stocked empty and programmed locally -- in-store for instance. Unsold sticks can be reprogrammed. Customers can recycle the sticks as well or just use them for their own purposes. Take them back to the Apple store once they are out of date for a refund so they can be reused.

Third party software that's sold on a DVD is a problem. But that can be solved with another computer that does have a DVD and a network link.

Tags: Crazy Ideas, Silicon, Apple, Leopard

This is a series of short articles about how to protect referenced masters from one of their worst natural enemies: bone-headedness. From Part 1: The best medicine, then, is prevention. So how do you go about protecting referenced masters? They could be stored anywhere and called anything -- what kind of barriers can be constructed to protect them?

Part 2: Manage, then Relocate

Always import new images into the library as managed masters as a first step. Then edit, cull, rate, tag, stack as usual. Then finally move the masters out of the library using the Relocate command to a reserved area of your disk and add another prefix to show that they are referenced, such as "REF". Finally, possibly much later, delete the rejects.

You can relocate masters in two ways: either by selecting individual images and from the File menu going to Relocate Masters For Library... or by control-clicking on a project and selecting Relocate Masters for Project to relocate an entire project full of images at once:

Relocating the masters also has the ability to rename as it moves. To relocate and rename at the same time, set up a new Name Format preset from the Relocate masters sheet:

By clicking on the Name Format drop-down and selecting Edit... Give the new name format a name and set it up something like this:

Then select that new name format and do the relocate. As the files are moved, the names will be changed. Here is a referenced master on the disk after it was relocated (I used a slightly different prefix than above in this example to show this image is referenced, omitting the dash):

The original image was called 6830-1.JPG. Importing added MAS-2005-04-20 and relocating added REF.

Why work this way? This workflow keeps all the images that are still being worked on in one place so they can easily be found with a smart album that shows only managed masters. This workflow means that if it's managed, then you're not done with it. The library becomes a staging area. Once relocated and renamed, the master files are immediately identified as being referenced from their name and you know that they have already been processed and so are ready for use or to be archived. And, since importing into the library makes a copy, the originals are still on the card or disk they came from and another layer of corruption insurance has been created.

Creating a smart album to show only managed files is straight forward. Create a new smart album by clicking on the magnifying glass next to the library (so it will apply globally) and add a File Status filter:

Then filter on Managed status and check the Ignore stack groupings box so that stacks don't hide any images:

Part 3 has been posted.

Tags: Aperture, Masters, Referenced, Reconnecting, Bone-Headedness, Library

Some of you have iPhones and are using them to read this site. Since I am using Google Analytics, I have only limited access to the access data. So how to create an iPhone visit report? It's actually quite easy. Select Visitors > Browser Capabilities and click on Screen Resolutions:

Find a line that claims 320x396 as the screen size and click on that:

Then add it to your dashboard:

Tags: iPhone, Blogging, Google

I spent a brief ten minutes playing with an iPhone in an Apple store this week -- and remembered that it was a phone only after I had left the store.

In conversations since with people who have only seen the marketing and not the real thing what struck me was their disbelief that it really is as easy to use and as responsive as it is made out to be. Apple still has a credibility gap, but with the iPhone that will be narrowed considerably more than has been achieved with the iPod. There are a ton of non-iPod people out there who are phone buyers and those people, even if they only drop by an Apple store to kick the tires (or just know someone who has), will have that gap closed considerably.

So just what is iPhone?

It's a new word, created for the world to absorb and enjoy.

That's all it is: a new word. iPhone is less a thing, or even a family of things, than it is a word to symbolize an experience. Apple did this already with the Mac. It's Welcome To Macintosh, not Welcome To The Macintosh. And with the iPod. Always iPod, never the iPod. It's the press and you and me that gets this wrong.

Here's a diagram I published in March 2006 in a posting entitled Possession, Function, Access, and Emotion.:

It was about the iPod at the time, but look how well it fits the iPhone. iPhone is all of these elements, as is the Mac. This is why Apple is so hard to beat in the marketplace. iPhone (the object of possession) will change. iPhone (the functionality) will change. iPhone (the emotional connection) will change. iPhone (the access it offers) will change. But iPhone as a whole will not because it is all of these expressed as one. iPhone is not just a glimpse of the future, it's a glimpse of the now.

Tags: iPhone, Fun, Apple Store, Possession, Function, Access, Emotion

A number of people I have given advice to or helped with Aperture-related problems have tried to find ways to reward me for the experience. But alas, there was no simple way to do it.

Now there is a Store page for sending donations. Go to the store or click on the link at the bottom of each page, and follow the instructions. The funds will go toward paying for the site's hosting and for the software tools I use to create and maintain the site.

Tags: Donations

Hello, I stumbled onto your page looking for help with Aperture., I'm new to digital photography and I think I accidentally moved my, master files to a removable hard drive and then deleted them, thinking, that they were saved in a vault somewhere else. Obviously I don't know, what I'm doing, but is there anyway to get aperture to let me work, with the library images that it has on my hard drive? All of my, pictures are there, in good enough resolution, but aperture won't let, me do anything with them because I don't have the masters. No, exporting, no emailing, no editing, nothing., Am I stuck with looking at these pictures forever and that is it?, Thanks a bunch for any help.

I see a quite a few postings on message boards and get emails from Aperture users who have done disastrous things to their referenced masters because they didn't realize that the files were still part of their Aperture library. Referenced masters are master image files stored outside the Aperture library. This feature allows a small internal hard drive, such as on a laptop, to maintain a very large image library where the originals are stored on a separate removable drive or central storage system. In the other kind of master storage, managed masters, the masters live inside the Aperture library itself. While not impossible, damaging managed masters takes some persistence and the barrier formed by the library protects them against most bone-headed errors.

That referenced masters live outside the library leaves them prone to several kinds of abuse. Moving them by hand is harmless, unless the move goes to another volume. That will break the connection with the library and require a reconnect. Aperture's Referenced File Manager does this well, but it is very fussy about restoring the connection. If the image has been edited, for instance, it will likely not reconnect. If the pixel dimensions have changed, it will not reconnect. If the file size has changed, it will not reconnect. And this is where the big problems start. Since Aperture only checks these things when reconnecting, problems can go undetected for a very long time. A reconnect is needed and suddenly many masters (and hence their versions) are effectively lost.

The best medicine, then, is prevention. So how do you go about protecting referenced masters? They could be stored anywhere and called anything -- what kind of barriers can be constructed to protect them?

This the first of a four-part series on protecting referenced masters.

Part 1: Name Defensively

When you import, rename the masters in such a way that all of them can be seen to be masters. Prefixing with "MAS" or an equivalent short word will make masters instantly recognizable and you will no longer feel compelled to trash them in haste.

The input screen allows a selection for the version name and can optionally rename the masters:

Above that setting is a block of information that gives confirmation of the change if an image is selected:

Another recommendation is to rename the masters in such a way that all of them have unique names. For instance, add the current date to the name given by the camera. This will ensure that as the camera or card numbering rolls over, the images still have unique names. While not critical, this defensive step may help in the future when it is necessary to list or index all of the images. Ensuring unique naming now will obviate managing duplicates and messing with hierarchies later on.

At the bottom of the Version Name drop-down the Edit... option allows the naming schemes to be edited. Here is how MAS prefix used above is defined:

Part 2 has been posted.

Tags: Aperture, Masters, Referenced, Reconnecting, Bone-Headedness, Library

I shot some great photos of July 4th fireworks last year with my Canon S3. You can see them via the gallery page (pages 3 and 4 of the Canon S3 gallery).

The Canon S3 IS has a fireworks mode. Turn the dial to select the scene setting and then use the left/right button to select Fireworks. Hold the camera steady and snap away. It does noise reduction, so one picture every five seconds is about as fast as you can go. There is nothing else to set. The exposure time is fixed at 2s and the aperture is set to f8.

I found the best shots came from pointing the camera where the fireworks were not and then hoping that they came into the frame. If you simply accept that fireworks are faster then you are and that you will never actually "take a photo" of one going off that looks any good, things go better. I generally kept the camera zoomed quite a long way in and that worked well to eliminate lights and background objects.

Tags: Canon, S3, Fireworks

Terry White has a long and interesting review of the iPhone on his blog.

The iPhone is a huge step forward in the right direction. The more I use it the more it makes me smile and I catch myself thinking “this is so cool!” The iPhone is not perfect by any means. Show me a smartphone that is. Some of the missing features just make me smack my forehead and say “how in the heck could they have left that off?” However, the iPhone is the most interesting phone I’ve seen to date. Like it or not, the iPhone HAS changed the world of cell phones forever. Apple has raised the bar and everyone else has to now step up. This is good for us all. I’m pleased with my purchase and my gauge is, “would I buy it again?” The answer is a resounding YES! Sure I want iPhone 2.0 with all the missing features that I’ve stated above and then some, however, for a 1.0 product this phone lives up to the vast majority of the promises and even most of the hype. Oh how far Apple has come since the Newton 1.0.

Terry is the Director of North America Creative Pro Core Business at Adobe.

Tags: iPhone, Review

It's a documentary about the Mac, and it's coming. That's about all the web site will say about it. There are two teasers posted.

Tags: Fun, Macs, Movies, Interesting Stuff

There have been 900 downloads of the audio recording I made of the Cocoaheads meeting at the San Francisco Apple store during WWDC 2007. That's a lot of interest! Ten days after posting, there are still about five downloads made each day.

Tags: CocoaHeads, Apple Store, WWDC

First off I want to thank you for your website it has been very very helpful to me, since I am a beginner to using Aperture and I was getting fed up with the master files and organizing, but know I understand all of that completely. My only question is that in your screenshots for your library section for Aperture, next to all of your projects it shows how many pictures are in every one. I was wondering how did you do that?

Turn on the display of the number of versions in the Aperture preferences:

When you have it turned on, the library shows the number of versions in each project like this:

That version count includes all versions, including those in stacks. So you may have 100 versions in a project, but only 5 images that are really different, the other 95 being the non-pick stack items.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Projects, Versions