A couple of sites now have examples of coding under Leopard: a quick Objective-C 2.0 tutorial from Scott Stevenson, a bound NSCollectionView from Kevin Hoffman.

A good place to start exploring what's new in Leopard development is in the release notes at the Leopard dev center. You'll need an ADC membership to get it, but now the free membership works.

Tags: Leopard, Programming, Documentation

John Nack's blog at Adobe has some interesting discussion on the results of a survey carried out by InfoTrends. I can't find the survey on the InfoTrends web site, but it shows about 4:1 Lightroom to Aperture use overall and 2:1 among Mac users.

Most pros use just Photoshop. Hard to believe, but I suspect that their workflow is simple. Also this only surveyed pros in North America. No word on the many users like me who have outgrown iPhoto and other tools.

Tags: Aperture, Marketshare, Lightroom

Displaperture rounds the corners of the desktop. Leopard no longer does this, and some people want that feature back.

Tags: Aperture, Applications, Leopard

I agree with Gruber. Ars has an excellent behind-the-scenes review. Leopard has a lot of polish and great tools under the hood as well as a nice shine coat on the bodywork.

Tags: Leopard, Mac OS X, Cocoa, Review

There are many changes in Cocoa beyond the obvious XCode enhancements and brand new Interface Builder. I have had scant time to delve into all of this, but Matt Gemmell has, and he has posted a long list of improvements that have been provided for us behind the scenes.

Behind the scenes views must be his forte because his about page reveals every last detail about him, down to the color of his underwear (well almost -- but it does mention socks).

Tags: Cocoa, Leopard, Socks, Xcode, Mac OS X

Los Gatos Apple Store In The Dark: 1/160s f/1.8 ISO1600 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

Buying Leopard at the Los Gatos Apple store yesterday was not quite the smooth experience I had been expecting. I arrived about 45 minutes before the opening and found about 50 people in line. By 6pm there were a couple of hundred waiting, and the doors were flung open. Lots of cheering, clapping, and all that.

But not a lot of light.

The power for much of downtown Los Gatos has gone out about ten minutes to six, and there was no light in the store except the emergency lighting and the glow of iPods and laptops. And no cash registers, mobile credit card scanners, wireless networks, all the usual equipment needed to carry on business. So we were herded in in batches of about 20 while employees imprinted our credit cards by hand and wrote out receipts on paper.

I installed Leopard and the developer tools onto a spare partition on my internal drive. I ran into the problem of internal drives not showing up in the installer (fix: just wait -- it's checking the volumes. Or do what I did, fritz with Disk Utility trying in vain to make it appear). The first impression is that Leopard is smooth and fast. Animations have a snap to them. Things happen without delay.

I've been going through all my important applications looking at what needs updating and what is OK. SuperDuper isn't quite there yet. Nor is Transmit. M-Audio drivers are, as usual, way behind (and probably still buggy). My Wacom tablet is supported. Printers worked right away. I have to update Quicken, and I will update iWork and iLife. Photoshop Elements 3 is very old and may or may not work, but there are alternatives to that. OmniGraffle has a beta. Aperture has an update. NeoOffice is ready. Snapz Pro X is ready too. I'll probably move over to Leopard in a week or so.

The developer tools are greatly changed and I have a lot to learn there.

Tags: Leopard, Dark

Apple warns against using Time machine with Aperture running: "may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database". You can exclude items from Time Machine, but then even if this works, Aperture images will not get backed up.

I'm sticking with Tiger for a while and running Leopard off another partition to test things. One problem with doing this I have found is the Spotlight indexes are incompatible: each reboot will cause Spotlight to reindex all my drives.

Tags: Aperture, Backing Up, Time Machine, Leopard

Apple has just released an update to Aperture 1.5.6 (130MB):

Recommended for all licensed Aperture customers, the Aperture 1.5.6 Update addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.

• Resolves some minor compatibility issues with iPhoto 7.1, which organizes images by Event rather than Roll.
• Addresses issues related to metadata and sort order when sharing previews with iLife Media Browser.
• Improves reliability of queries based on Import Session.
• Addresses reliability when recovering an Aperture Library from a Vault.

Update: Later today Apple will release the Aperture Export SDK 1.5.5. This provides only minor changes. Notably there are no new APIs provided. I am seeing reports that Aperture is fast on Leopard. I'll get a chance to try it out later today or tomorrow when I have Leopard in my hands.

Tags: Aperture, Leopard, Updates, iPhoto, Vaults, Plug-ins

I have seen reports that the 40D RAW format is supported by Leopard. Get the Aperture 1.5.6 update as well for the best experience.

Tags: Leopard, Canon, 40D, RAW

A short Knowledgebase article from Apple:

Referenced images from cameras that are newly supported sometimes cannot be connected after you update to a version of Mac OS X that supports them.

Another good reason for using managed masters, or just not dealing with unsupported cameras at all.

Tags: Aperture, Referenced, Reconnecting

Many people have been waiting for DPReview to write at length on the Canon 40D. It's a big review -- 30 pages.

Tags: Canon, 40D, Review

Chris Hanson has announced NSCoder Night: every Tuesday 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Anyone who is interested in Cocoa/Mac programming can show up at Orchard Valley Coffee in Campbell to get help, give help, show, write, debug, whatever. Scott Stevenson has an announcement that features a Google map.

The first meeting is of course after Leopard's release, so the NDAs will no longer apply and there will be much rejoicing.

Tags: Cocoa, CocoaHeads, Coffee, Programming, NSCoder

I'm reading that Leopard has leaked. Those who are reporting on it say it's fast. Very fast. Maybe that was Steve's super secret feature? Blazing speed would certainly be a good one, and you can keep it under wraps for a long time.

Update: I have seen one report that says Lightroom is very slow under Leopard. That could be because the machine was busy doing things in the background, or it could just be slow because of the way Adobe coded it.

Tags: Leopard, Apple

If your workflow involves stacking before keywording then you have probably found that the keywording part is either inefficient or incomplete. Adding keywords to a closed stack only adds to the pick, so those non-picks remain without metadata.

There are consequences to this. For example, if I change the pick after keywording, the new pick (and hence the stack) no longer has the keywords:

The water keyword will not find the pick and so will not find the stack. And unless I specifically select to ignore stacks, any smart album that filters on the water keyword will fail to find this image.

The choice I have is either to live with this behavior, or keyword every image in the stack when I do the keywording. But how to keyword every image in a stack without going crazy?

The obvious way is to select the pick, click the number to open the stack, then click drag, click drag each keyword to each image:

This is very slow and error-prone. A faster way, but still with too many keypresses, is to open the stack and select all the images in the stack at once with command E. Then each keyword can be dragged over from the HUD just once to apply it to all the images:

I can apply multiple keywords at the same time by command-clicking on them and then dragging, saving even more time. And if the keyword buttons are set up on the keyword bar at the bottom of the window, I can press them or their keyboard equivalents to quickly apply commonly-used metadata.

I actually use an even faster way that goes straight to the next stack and opens it all in one step. First I select the top image in the project or album, then press option page down. That single key-press seeks forward to the next stack, opens it, and selects all the images it contains. Now I simply add keywords to all the images in the stack, as before. I press option page down again to go to the next stack and repeat. Once done, I close all the stacks with option semicolon.

Option page down also works in list view, but in list view the images are to small to be recognizable.

The option page-down method for dealing with stacks skips all the intervening unstacked images and that can be inconvenient. I have to go back over my images picking out the ones that are not in stacks among those that are in order to keyword them. I can make this a little easier by sorting the display by Keywords:

Once I do that, all the non-keyworded images are together at the bottom of the browser ready for keywording.

Tags: Keywords, Aperture, Stacks, Workflow

Scott Stevenson has encountered what I call the Knowledgeable Novices Syndrome. One of his very helpful and beautifully illustrated tutorials on Quartz garnered a very revealing comment that exquisitely expresses the challenge (and the frustration) of this kind of learner:

Why is it impossible to find a tutorial on how to write a jpg or bmp etc file from an nsview? surely this is basic bread and butter programming. I have finally got through the IB barrier, I can delegate, i can use a timer, i can draw paths with mice but i cant get to write a b****@@@@ view to file! I've been googling for 4 days now, i have "programming with quartz" in front ofg me as i write, i have "cocoa programming for os x" i have "vermont recipes", i have wall to wall bookmarks to the cocoa drawing guide and yet i still cant find a single example to get me on my way!!!!!!
And everyone is telling me how wonderfully simple it all is.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's not as if I havn't programmed most of my life!!
I write c, perl, pascal, prolog, cobaol, algol, fortran name ive programmed it. why can't i jkjlskadjlsajdljsdlsadflkahjsjdkalj

I replied thus in the answer to this conundrum:

I have a name for this: it's the knowledgeable novices syndrome.

Ignorant novices feed fine by nibbling on the tasty morsels of code that Scott and other serve up. Ignorant experts need help with the unfamiliar utensils and spices, but are otherwise great code cooks. Knowledgeable experts make entire code meals table-side from raw reference materials in real time.

Knowledgeable novices are a challenge. They just want to make and eat a sandwich, but are having the darndest time doing it. Their knowledge is actually an encumberance, since they must unlearn what they think they know about sandwiches in order to make one the Cocoa way. There is no cutting of bread and spreading of peanut butter as they are sure there must be; just lamination, repitition, and bounding polygons applied to a couple of raw materials.

I'm one of these knowledgeable novices -- not as frustrated as the quoted poster -- but still encountering the same kind of issues.

Tags: Ignorance, Knowledge, Novices, Experts, Cocoa, Learning

With all the excitement about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in the air, it is easy to forget why we have computers in the first place: applications.

Once Leopard finally gets into the hands of mere mortals on October 26th, the application marketing dam will break. Finally all the developers who spent an extra four months polishing and tuning their recent creations will be free of Apple's NDA shackles and be showing off the fruits of their toil. It should be very interesting, and I believe will cement my belief that Leopard demonstrates OS X nearing a mature state. There will be many apps that are Leopard only. Why? Because Leopard apps can be written so much faster than was possible on Tiger. Certainly anything I write from here on out will be for Leopard.

Scott Stevenson has a sneak peek at Delicious Library, but for a few more days, we cannot see any more.

Tags: Apple, Leopard, Applications

Fifty minutes about the making of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon can be found on Google Video: Part 1 and Part 2.

I had seen bits and pieces of this before, but not all of it in one place. It goes through the whole album track by track, talking to the people who made it, describing and showing how it was done. There was no mixing automation in 1973, so mixing an album was, as they say in the documentary, a performance in itself. Many people were needed to manually move every slider and change every effect at exactly the right time.

Tags: Pink Floyd, Music

By selecting which metadata is displayed with thumbnails I have two useful sets of information at my fingertips. One set consists of information I have added to the image: star rating, adjustments, keywords, captions, so it is blank if I have done nothing. The other set is full of numeric data that came with the image: its size, name, shutter speed, aperture, etc. I switch between the two of them with shift U.

But Aperture limits the display to a single line, so unless the thumbnails are displayed at an enormous size I can only see the first part of the metadata:

And that is a problem. Are those words captions, keywords, or what? And how can I see what else there is?

There are a couple of ways to get information on individual images. The metadata pane (capital I) will show everything I have set up in the metadata view selected:

But that uses up screen real estate all the time. I can also press the T key and have the metadata tooltip come up:

That saves the space used by the metadata pane, and I can just move the cursor to any image that interests me, but it still displays information for only one image at a time.

A better solution, and one that is available with a keypress, is to look at my images in list view. I can click the button at the top left of the browser, or more quickly, hit control L:

The thumbnail images are replaced with a dense display that shows one data for one image on each line (shift W is sometimes needed here to "rotate" the display for extra width). The currently selected images are shown with a white background, so it is easy to identify them. The list can be quickly sorted by clicking on a column, and the columns widened so that the whole caption and keyword list is visible:

And if I go back into grid view (control G) the sorting column I selected stays and the thumbnails are displayed in Caption order, grouping all those with no caption at the top:

The list view columns can be reordered, to put the caption on the left for instance, but unfortunately that change does not stick. To change the order of the columns permanently, a visit to the metadata pane is required -- the order of the columns in the list view is reflected in the order of the items in the metadata view that is applied to the list view. That's a mouthful, because there two steps needed to set this up.

To customize the list view, first press command J and select metadata views for the two list sets:

The set that is displayed can be switched on the fly with shift U just like the grid views. Here I am using List - Basic for one and List - Expanded for the other. I can use any metadata view I like, including new ones I have created.

Now by closing the View Options window and selecting one of those List views in the metadata pane, I can edit it to choose what it displays and in what order. I'm going to modify List - Expanded:

I can rearrange the items into the column order I want. I put the caption first by dragging the Caption field to the top:

And then move the Keywords field to the next spot. To end the editing, I deselect the button at the bottom of the metadata pane:

and the set-up is complete.

Looking at the list view I see that the Caption and Keywords are on the left, or at least as far left as they can go, since the Version Name column is always shown on the left:

I can create any number of different column arrangements and select two of them up at a time to be toggled with shift U.

Finally I can see all my captions and keywords in their full glory just by pressing control L. Control G gets me back the grid view.

Tags: Aperture, Metadata, Metadata Views, Thumbnails, Captions, Workspace

As everyone who has not been unconscious for the last few days knows, Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard will be available October 26th at 6pm. [Update: A 380MB 30 minute Guided Tour is now available]

I plan on getting a copy just about when it comes out at the Valley Fair Apple store in San Jose that evening. I'll probably have my camera there to record the insanity as well.

I have a new firewire drive on its way that is destined to replace a now too small drive that I use for daily SuperDuper back ups. That older drive will become free and available as a play pen for my new cat friend. I plan on getting familiar with the beast for quite a while before I am sure that everything I need will run OK.

I'm expecting new RAW processing abilities to appear, either with Leopard or shortly after, but don't expect to see another version of Aperture for a while.

Tags: Mac OS X, Leopard, Apple Store

Thorne sent me a great tip for creating stacks: the order in which the images are selected is reflected in their order in a stack.

For example, I select these three images in the order right, top, bottom:

I hit command K to make a stack from them:

This can save time, since if you want to create a stack with the images sorted into rating order, there is no need to create the stack and the reorganize it. Just click on the images in the order they are rated and create the ordered stack immediately.

Tags: Aperture, Tips And Tricks, Stacks, Order

A short thread on Apples' Aperture discussion board gives a possible solution to the problem of vaults that will not update due to errors on specific images:

Aperture is not letting me update my vaults. I am receiving update vault error messages when trying to back up to Vaults. I have three backup Vaults on external firewire drives, formatted Mac HFS+ (not MS-DOS) and not partitioned. My Aperture library is also on a dedicated external drive. I get the same message for all three vaults, so this seems to be an Aperture problem, not a disk problem. The error messages refer to NEF (raw) image files that do not exist in my Library (or anywhere else, for that matter). Message reads:

update vault error:
The following error occured:
Couldn't create/Volumes/LaCie/ApertureV2.apvault/Library/....

Any insights would be appreciated.

Another reader with a similar problem found a solution:

I managed to fix my problem by making an adjustment to the photo that the error message referenced.

This and the fact that all three of the poster's vaults fail to update implies that the problem is not with the vault, but with the library: there is something about the information that Aperture stores about that image that causes an error. When the image is adjusted the bad file is overwritten and the problem goes away. Vaults don't contain thumbnails or previews, so it can't be those. The master in this case is referenced, and in any case is never updated. So it must be with the sidecar files.

The original poster can't apply this fix because the image that is causing the problem apparently does not exist, so I'm investigating this with him. Update: We traced the problem to "something bad" about the folder or its contents that was being reported. By opening the library and the vault with control-click Show Package Contents and navigating down, it was possible to trash the folder. Not only did the vault update complete once that was done, but it worked many, many times faster than before. The bad news is that I think this is due to a bad spot on the disk, indicating a drive that is on its way out. If you have vault problems: back up carefully and consider that you may have a bad disk.

Vault problems can be caused by using the wrong disk format, typically FAT32, because the drive arrived that way and was never reformatted. FAT32 cannot support the characters used by Aperture in folder names and so causes errors. Another cause of problems is that the ownership of files and folders in the vault may be at odds with the current user. This can be fixed by checking the box for Ignore ownership on this volume on the information window for the volume (command I):

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Updates, Adjustments

Birthday Cake: 1/800s f/1.8 ISO800 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, cropped, unadjusted

It appears that the retro photo equipment fetish is in full swing. Fraser Speirs is posting about his experiences with the 50mm f1.8, and commenting about John Gruber, Dan Benjamin, James Duncan Davidson, and Bill Bumgarner.

I have this very inexpensive lens on my Canon 30D (1.6 crop factor), it's really an 80mm lens to me.

How do I find it? It's very light, almost non-existent compared to the other monsters I have. I use it when I need to take pictures in little light and have the freedom to move around, like in the birthday cake example above. The only light is from the candles, and I exposed that at 1/800s. I used a high ISO to get a high shutter speed because I wanted to make sure that the blowing out would not be a blur. I was taking pictures before and after in room light and ISO 800 was good for that too.

I can get my 52mm polarizing filter on this lens that I have tried to use on my Canon S3 (it's very hard to use a polarizer on a camera with an electronic viewfinder since I can't really see the effect). I find that darkening the glare with a polarizer does more than that: it increases the the ambient light by compensating with a slower shutter speed. Compare the image below (no polarizer):

Table No Polarizer: 1/50s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

With this one with the polarizer fitted and turned to remove the glare:

Table With Polarizer: 1/15s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

The table looks entirely different since the shutter is now three times slower.

The depth of field control is something I am still learning. It's much more pronounced on large images because the difference between sharp and fuzzy is more easy to see. Here is a photo taken in a restaurant, focussing on the table by the window:

Noodle House: 1/1600s f/1.8 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

One catch with the 50mm f/1.8 is that it has no image stabilization like my other lenses. That means I have to take faster exposures than I would normally and/or hold the camera extra steady. This photo was taken in a dim corridor and I was able to get an image without any shake at 1/160s:

Fall Leaves: 1/160s f/1.8 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

I can easily see the difference in sharpness between pictures taken at f/1.8 and other apertures, so if I'm thinking about it, I stop it down for the best image. But I'm usually not thinking in terms of sharpness when I take pictures: I'm concerned more with depth of field or removing movement blur. My other lenses are much more costly and very sharp, so I don't marvel at the sharpness of this lens, though I know some people do. There is plenty to learn.

Tags: Canon, Lenses, Photography, Fetishes, Polarizer, 30D, S3

Ben Long has a great article at O'Reilly that explains how to use a folder action and Automator to launch Photoshop actions from Aperture. I plod along with PS Elements 3.0, so none of this applies to me.

Tags: Aperture, Photoshop, Automation

Cocoaheads this month is Thursday 11th, and the subject is Google APIs for Cocoa. Scott Stevenson has a page with more information. I'll be there.

Tags: Apple, CocoaHeads, Google, Cocoa

Early in 2006, I predicted privately to friends and family that AAPL shares would close north of 90 at the end of 2006. In December 2006 when it was clear that my Wild Guess was correct, I made another Wild Guess, this time publicly:

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Earlier than I thought, AAPL has crossed 160. Today it closed at 167.91. Here is my currently absurd-sounding guess, made in August 2007:

I'll make another wild prediction, now we have the iPhone to play with: $225 by the end of 2008. Again that sounds like a lot, but I figure on continuing large gross margins and 20% growth, plus an extra 20% "look out here they come" factor. That will make AAPL seven tenths the size of MSFT, assuming MSFT stays static. And how could that assumption possibly be wrong?

It will be interesting to see how I do. Of course Microsoft is playing a huge part in Apple's current success. The market for computers, phones, PDAs, music players, and stores that actually work for their customers is huge, and only Apple is filling the demand.

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, Microsoft

I quite often do searches for pics by keywords etc.. but when I do find an image through the search I would like then to look at the other images from that project, so how do I find out what the project is and where it is in the Aperture Projects view, I could do with something similar to the 'Show in Finder' feature... am I missing something obvious somewhere?

You are not missing anything obvious. The features for doing this are somewhat limited, but it can be done.

Here is an album that displays some images. I want to find out which project the dog photo comes from:

By selecting the image and bringing up the metadata panel of the information pane I can look at the Master Location:

The Master Location is the name of the project that contains the master, so I can just go look there. If the project is in a blue folder or two, then those folder names will be given in a bread-crumb style list: Outer folder > Inner folder > Project.

A more specific method that will locate the master image more uniquely is to copy the File Name, and do a search on it. Start by creating a filter on the entire library:

And then either paste the file name into the text box:

Or use the + pull-down menu top right to add a new search term (Other Data) and specifically choose the File Name option.

The former can be very slow because it may search all the text in the library in a linear fashion. The latter takes longer to set up, but is more precise, matching only file names, and much faster. In either case, check the Ignore stack groupings box if you want to look inside stacks. More than one image may be found because, depending on how you have your master files named, there may be duplication. In the example I show here, the name that the camera gave me has the date appended, so I will only find a single image.

The same technique can be applied to the caption. I caption everything I keep, layering captions onto many images at a time. To find "similar" images, usually from the same project, I just search using part of the caption.

A fast way of finding images taken with the original (and usually part of the same project) is to note the date it was taken and filter the library on that date:

Using the calendar uses very few clicks and uses indexed information, so can often be the fastest.

None of these methods will show which albums contain a particular image. Nor is is possible to find out how many time and image has been used in albums. The best workaround I can think of is to delve into the library and search for image UUIDs, but this is messy.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Filtering, Projects, Metadata

Justin Quinnell takes photos with his mouth. Or rather with a pinhole camera in his mouth. He'll even sell you one from his website.

Tags: Photography, Teeth

Übermind has a number of Aperture export plug-ins available. They have just updated Aperture To Picasa Web Albums to 1.3, increasing the upload speed.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Google

Fraser Speirs, author of FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto and Aperture, is intimidated by keywording:

I’ve never really known why I couldn’t get into it, but last night I realised: Aperture’s beautiful hierarchical keywording system paralyses some part of my brain.

I made a reply in the comments that I reproduce here:

Better than keywording is captioning. The problem with keywording is that there is a temptation to worry about creating consistency, planning for the future, not duplicating things etc. It’s like trying to organize a chest of drawers when you have more kinds of things than you have drawers and you know that you will have to accomodate more things in the future that you’ve never even heard of. Keywording really exists to help other people.

So caption instead. Aperture allows you to layer captions. Caption everything with “Beach trip with Brian and Jan”, then add “In the car”, “On the beach”, “In the sea”, and “Evening bonfire” as appropriate. Then caption some of those with “Down the winding path” and others with “Falling into the water”, adding “Silly face”, “Too much beer”, and “Not enough beer” to others.

Captions are far richer and will capture much more of what is going on. Do you really have keywords for Silly, Face, Beer, Beach, Too much, Not enough, Winding, Path, etc.? They’re not noun-bound as keywords tend to be. And there is no structure. Why should there be? No use for it. Captions are there to help you. Think of them as evidence, not proof.

Really. Don't go overboard with rigidity. The takeaway is simple: keywords are for other people; captions are for you. Ask yourself why you are applying metadata.

Tags: Captions, Keywords, Intimidation, Aperture, Plug-ins, iPhoto

Dog With Toy: 1/1250s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, unadjusted

Gary Voth is telling everyone to ditch the zoom that came with the camera and use a 50mm prime instead.

If you are like most photographers just starting out with a new 35mm SLR, chances are it came with one of those ubiquitous 28-80mm (or similar) "consumer" zooms. In the last 15 years these inexpensive lenses have all but replaced the traditional 50mm prime lens as the starter optic for 35mm photographers. The 50mm lens, once the mainstay of 35mm photography, has been all but forgotten by today's photographers.

I'm going to keep my zooms, but I am learning about the primes as well.

Tags: Photography, Lenses

I am in the process of moving most of my work with photos to Aperture from iPhoto. I have been working with referenced files in Aperture with the master files staying in iPhoto. How can I move the master files to Aperture without de-stabilizing iPhoto?

You can do this very easily using Aperture's Consolidate command. Select the images and go to File > Consolidate Master... or for an entire project control click on the project and choose Consolidate Masters for Project...:

While consolidating usually moves the master files into the Aperture library (so causing iPhoto grief), there is an option to copy the files instead. This leaves the originals intact:

Of course now you have two masters on your disk, one in iPhoto and one in Aperture. Once you have confirmed that Aperture has the photos in its library as expected, you can delete the iPhoto copies.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, iPhoto, Referenced, Consolidate

I recently had the opportunity to play with two 50mm Canon lenses: the very cheap f/1.8, and the more expensive f/1.4 (no chance for the f/1.2 yet). The 50mm f/1.8 is mine. The f/1.4 I borrowed from a reader who was kind enough to lend it to me and give me some shooting tips.

Two things struck me immediately: the very bright viewfinder, and the lack of weight. I'm used to zooms, one a very heavy one, so these small primes feel like they don't exist. Being used to zooms means that I tend to frame my shots from one location. With the prime lens I found myself moving all over the place to get the shot I wanted, and of course my shots all had the same perspective, more expressive of a point of view than of a photo of a thing.

The f/1.4 surprised me with the amount of purple fringing it had when wide open -- I guess that's what the f/1.2L is worth the money for. And the shallow depth of field was interesting to experience and something to learn how to use. I can see how people get addicted to its isolating ability.

Here are some examples shot with the 50mm f/1.4. You can see the purple in this one of water shooting out of a grate. This one was intentionally over-exposed.

Water grate: 1/2500s f/2.5 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.4 unadjusted

I can blur the foreground very nicely with the f/1.4 and leave the store sharply in focus:

Le Boulanger: 1/6400s f/1.4 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.4 unadjusted

And I can pick out just the dog I want to in this confrontation:

Big dog: 1/4000s f/1.6 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.4 unadjusted

Another think I liked about the f/1.4 was that I could leave the ISO set at 100 and still be able to shoot in many situations. With my other lenses (f/2.8 max) I have to boost the ISO when the light gets low, and that's just another control to fiddle with. The f/1.4 has good color too.

The 50mm f/1.8 I have now used more extensively. The focusing is slow and not USM, so is noisy. But it is accurate. More about that lens later.

Tags: Canon, Lenses, Photography

I have a website where I post my photos and with every photo a "saying". When I manage my photos in Aperture I add the "Saying title" in the metadate "Byline Title" field and the saying in the metadata "Byline" field. So far so good. Now I want to make a book but when I add a "Metadata Box" I´m not able to pick the Byline Title or Byline in the "Set Metadata Format" option. Can this easily be fixed or what?

In a word, no. The choices given are the only ones available. Your only practical option at this point is to move or copy the metadata to one of the available choices before you import into Aperture. There are no capabilities inside Aperture for moving or copying metadata between fields automatically.

When laying out a book, metadata boxes can be added and linked to images. Having selected the Edit Layout mode and clicked on an image, the Add Metadata button (center) creates the box:

The metadata box is linked to the selected image and includes the data shown by the tag:

There is a drop-down menu that allows the contents to be changed:

Only this small selection of possible metadata can be displayed. The only way to get more data is to move it into the available fields.

But I have never been able to get anything to appear for the Title, Author, or Copyright selections. It's as though Apple has simply missed something out here.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Metadata, Books, Bugs