Just A Summary

I would love to be able to run a slideshow on a second screen based on a ‘live’ album in Aperture. So, when I drop an image into an Aperture album on my primary screen, it shows up when appropriate in the secondary screen slideshow.

I can live with having to take an explicit ‘publish changes’ type step from within Aperture, but I’d rather not, and I certainly don’t want the secondary slideshow to stop.

Remember the new camera I ordered back in December? It finally arrived last Friday, about a month after I expected it.

It’s lovely. Nikon seem to have addressed almost all the things that were really starting to piss me off about my D100. Most importantly (for me) I’ve not yet run out of image buffer while taking real photos; something I used to do all the time when I was shooting with the old one. 21 frames isn’t quite a whole roll of film, but I don’t want to shoot a whole roll of film in 7 seconds very often…

So, rather than fill my Flickr stream with pictures of the box it came in and my office (which seemed to be the common theme of many of the early photos in the flickr D200 pool…) I gave myself a little project which I call:

Sage People

I wandered down to the Sage Gateshead and photographed and talked to the people sat in the atrium. I had a great time; I’ll probably do it again and soon. Part of the brief I gave myself was that I wouldn’t simply take photographs, but I’d get everyone’s permission first and find out why they were in the Sage that afternoon.

My D200 didn’t arrive on the 15th of December. Jacobs are blaming Nikon, Nikon are probably blaming Jacobs. To compound my error, I took the D100 down to the Mill for Christmas, but forgot to take the battery charger. So, no Christmas photos from me.

Which is a good thing. The problem with taking a camera to parties is that the camera turns me from a participant into an observer. Sometimes, being an observer is great; other times, not so much.

So, a cracking Christmas was had by all and there will be no embarrassing photos. (Although there were a couple of moments when I wished I could have pulled my trusty Ricoh GR1 out of my pocket and snapped the kids who continue to be exceedingly cute.)

I wonder if the ground state of the photographer is ‘dissatisfied’. When I bought a D100 two years ago I loved it. But it didn’t take long for disenchantment to set in; the frame buffer was too small, I couldn’t use old (and wonderful) manual focus lenses on it, digital noise was horrid at high speeds, white balance was dodgy and it didn’t feel as good in the hand as my F100.

Some problems could be alleviated by shooting in RAW mode and ‘developing’ the images with Photoshop, but for all Photoshop’s undoubted excellence, this is awfully labour intensive.

So, when I went to EuroOSCON this year, I left the digital camera at home, taking the F100 instead. Amsterdam has an excellent pro lab which did dev and scan, so I managed to have several of my photos online before the conference was over.

While we were there, Apple announced Aperture, their new pro photographers’ workflow tool. Like James Duncan Davidson, the official photographer, I was excited by the announcement. According to the information on the website, it addressed most of what pissed us off about other tools for managing photos. I think James placed his order that day.

Then, at the beginning of November, Nikon announced a replacement for the D100: the D200. As with Aperture, its list of features seemed to have been specifically written to address all my annoyances with the D100.

I ordered a D200 couple of weeks ago, and Aperture last night. Right now I’m in an excited state. Hopefully, once the kit arrives I’ll manage to stay here for a while. Until the next shiny new thing comes along…

Photos by Piers Cawley. CC Licenced,
though I bet he didn’t think I was going to do this with them.

— Photo Credit at Love Perl

Too right I didn’t expect anyone to do that with them. I’m awfully flattered though. I look forward to St. Valentine’s day.

It’s a shame there’s no Perl Advent Calendar this year though.

My new combined laptop and camera bag arrived yesterday, a Crumpler December Quarter. It’s a little snug for my 17" Powerbook, but it’ll serve. The question now is, what cameras do I pack?