I’ve been using Sony CycleEnergy rechargeable batteries in my speedlights at $20(CAD) a pair. These promise the same minimal loss of charge while idle, a 10 years lifespan and the whole kit costs $29 – charger plus six fully charged NiMH batteries. Hard to resist.

Oh… there’s some other new stuff as well ;-)

Nikon President Says Photography Needs Redefinition.

With a shoot coming up involving largish group shots and mounting insecurity regarding my flash vs ISO vs aperture capabilities, I decided it was time to start looking at some sort of big light kit. Amazing what fear can do to a wallet isn’t it?

Actually, I wasn’t thinking “kit” at first. Just  a monobloc to add to my current setup when more kick was needed. But as I’m sure a lot of you know, when you start going down that gadget road…

The fact is I’d been playing with this idea for the past year, reading about the subject on various blogs, following photographers I admire  - like Zack Arias and John Keatley – and the way they work with strobes. Upon my return from the road trip, I finally jumped in.

don’t fight the system

There are a lot of options out there but it soon becomes very clear that buying big lights is buying into a system. Yes, there are universal third-party accessories. But most companies offer complete lines of modifiers that just fit better and are made to work in tandem with the particularities of their lights. So it’s important to think about long-term use and versatility. If you’re interested in the subject I strongly recommend reading the Strobist’s in-depth look. It’s an amazing read that helped a lot in making my final decision.

I’m a big kid now

Light is light, but not all light is created equal. I’d been very interested in Alien Bees, mostly because of their pretty impressive price/performance ratios. They’re just incredibly affordable for what they do. Paul Bluff is very aggressive  - in a good way – and offers an innovative range of accessories at equally low prices. But a couple of things made me hesitate:

• Build quality: they’re apparently not the sturdiest units out there.
• Light consistency and refresh rate: most reports tend to be a little down on those points.
• No canadian distributor: they do offer shipping and service in Canada, but it’s not like you can go to your local pro photo store for support.

Mind you, some of those points might be completely off. But since I didn’t have the luxury of testing them out, I had to look elsewhere. So what were the options? For me, it came down to Elinchrom or Profoto. I based my decision on quality of light, longevity and ecosystem. Profoto was out of my price range. Period. But lo and behold: Vistek were having a sale on Elinchrom gear. Talk about timing!

So I’m now the proud owner of the BX500Ri To-Go kit and so far, I’m loving it. The kit comes with two Portalite softboxes (which are ok, not tremendous), two 500ws BXRi heads with built-in Skyport (radio receiver) and an El-Skyport transmitter allowing remote control of up to four groups of strobes from the camera. I added two 21cm reflectors with 20° and 30° grids and a light stand (I needed one). Came up to around $1700 canadian.

Biggest difference with the speedlights? Power baby. I can shoot at F18 ISO200 without batting an eyelash. And the light is beautiful.

shot with a 30º grid, 1/250 F22 ISO200

No more speedlights?

Not a chance. Each has its place. For portability nothing beats speedlights, and the fact remains that an SB900 packs a lot of punch it such a small package. With big lights you also lose TTL (natively at least) and FP Sync which means you’re down to 200-250 sync speed.

One huge caveat on this last point: don’t get fooled by Elinchrom’s claims of synced 1/1000s shutter speed. If there’s one disappointment with this kit this is it –  it doesn’t work. And I don’t think it has anything to do with the new ELS-Skyport SPEED transmitter either since the manual for the El-Skyport lists that speed as well. I called Vistek about this issue, googled left and right and so far I’ve got nothing. What I do know is that as soon as I hit 320 I get the curtain call – nice and dark at the bottom of the frame. Great for a mock-up density gradient. Not so great for cutting down ambient outside. I’ll let you know if I hear anything on this issue. One other thing: in my tests the flash speed doesn’t make up for FP sync when it comes to freezing motion. At least not at the powers I’m using in the studio.

Another place where speedlights will still be indispensable is for wide apertures. These 500ws lights are way too powerful to use 1.8 or 2.8 apertures, even stopped all the way down with my D300 at ISO100 equivalent. I’m keeping an SB900 in a softbox for that.

mixing and matching

What about mixing all these together? A few options available:

1. Use Skyport to trigger Strobes and SU4 on the speedlights.
2. Use CLS to trigger speedlights and optical for strobes.
3. Go all manual and optical.

I’ll be using options 1 or 2 depending on the situation. Option 1 is straightforward: just switch the BXRis optical button on and shoot. Everything syncs. Option 2 is a bit trickier and I’m still doing tests. The problem with CLS is that in order to communicate with all the remotes, the commander unit sends out pre-flashes (very short flashes milliseconds before the actual flash burst). If your stobe is set to dumb optical, it’ll trigger at the first flash it sees – a pre-flash – and you’ll be out of sync (meaning the strobe’s light won’t be part of your picture). To go around this problem, the BXRis have something called smart optical that allows the units to learn the number of pre-flashes and set themselves up accordingly.

Needless to say I’ve been going through a crash course in Nikon’s pre-flash language this past week. I was going crazy until I realized a few things:

1. The number of pre-flashes change with the number of groups the commander is controlling. Makes sense but not that obvious at first.
2. The strobes have no problem calculating the right number of pre-flashes when groups A and B were active but give an incorrect reading when adding group C.
3. Adding group C messes everything up, big time.

I’m not quite sure what’s going on with group C. Both groups A and B (or A+B) give out 3 pre-flashes. Once set, the strobes work every time. But for some reason as soon as you add group C, it changes to 5 pre-flashes but the strobes see it as 4. I had to set them manually to find that out since they simply weren’t syncing properly. And even after setting them on 5 I get random off-sync problems. So for now, no group C in CLS. The joys of tech…

a nice surprise

Elinchrom use 7mm umbrella shafts instead of the more standard 8mm. So I thought my 46′ Photek Softlighter II 8mm would be relegated to SBs, a pity given how much better the spread of light would be with a strobe head instead of a speedlight. Well, turns out it works perfectly – yay!

The 8mm model comes with a two-part shaft that can be unscrewed to allow for closer use of the Softlighter to the subject. But that removable part (the longest one) is actually 7mm (!). The trick I found works best is to unscrew the 7mm part, insert it in the strobe head from behind the unit and then screw the softlighter back on. The light is beautiful and much more even than with one speedlight.

46' 8mm Softlighter with BX500Ri head

a word about mobility

Elinchrom doesn’t make a battery pack for the BXRis. They’re marketed as studio strobes. To go mobile you’re supposed to go into the Ranger Quadra units, like a lot of big photographers are these days. But there are ways around that here and here. I’m thinking Vagabond II eventually. Obviously I won’t be getting Ranger performance but… we’re talking $2500 cheaper here (!). Of course, if I hit the big time…

Just to let you guys know I’ve solved the RAW Fine Tuning bug I was having.

After hearing about several users who didn’t have this problem on their machine, I decided to create a new OS X user and run Aperture from there: lo and behold, the problem was gone!

So it had to be something in my specific user folder. I took everything out of User/Library/Application Support/Aperture and started adding files back one by one. The culprit? A plist file called Raw Decode Presets.plist. What’s odd is that this plist contains specific information on every camera I’ve used since Aperture 1.5 but does not contain my RAW presets. It’s also not part of the new user’s folder so it’s either something that’s no longer used in AP3 or it’s created when importing with a camera for the first time.

Anyway, trashing this has solved the problem with zero ill effects; I even still have all my presets.

I think this version of Aperture might have a few issues with legacy files. It would certainly explain a lot of the seemingly random problems we’ve been seeing.

But after two pretty swift updates, things were starting to settle. I still had crashes here and there but they were becoming less and less frequent. I was slowly beginning to see light at the end of the Aperture 3 tunnel/mess.

Until yesterday.
Now, I just don’t know what to say anymore.

The latest chapter in the saga? With the 10.6.3 update Raw Fine Tuning no longer saves my changes between restarts. Sometimes. On some pictures. We’re talking same camera, same memory card, same lens (!!!!). Here’s a video of the  bug in action:

This is pretty huge. Especially when combined with another post-update incident where certain files from yesterday morning’s import session lost ALL adjustments I had made – brushes, crop, curves, everything. And they hadn’t just reverted back to their RAW state: the contrast slider had been set at -0.1, making the pictures completely washed out.

I have no words. I’m now scared and having serious trust issues with Aperture. And don’t get me started on print presets… I’m just too tired to get into that right now.

Anyone else seeing this bug? Or am I one of the lucky random few?

UPDATE: Another video trying to make sense of it all:

1. Current 32 bit plugins don’t run in 64 bit: this was to be expected but it’s a pain. Aperture needs to be opened in 32 bit mode to use the current crop of plugins. So if you use any sort of plugin on a day to day basis this means no 64 bit for you (me). It probably also means we’re going to need to buy new versions of every plugin we own.
2. Faces: I was never excited about this feature and I’m still not convinced. First, it needs to scan the entire library. This,  my friends, takes a looong time on a large library. After three hours it had gone through 4000 pics (from 65000) and had made some pretty odd choices. It also crashed my iMac to the point where my main library would no longer open and had to be rebuilt. Some 30 sweat-filled minutes later, I decided to disable it altogether. Not sure it’ll come back on.
3. Flickr: this is the exact same export module you get in iPhoto 09. I was hoping to at least be able to choose from my own custom export presets (size, watermark) but  can’t. This may be fine for a consumer product but I’d expect more from a pro app. And yes, I know Flickr isn’t geared towards pros. But these days social sites are a big part of marketing  - like it or not.
4. Web Pages: no change from version 2. Same templates and layouts. Not too hot.
5. Export: no sharpening on export. I was really hoping for this one.
6. Help: the user manual is no longer a pdf but a Help Viewer (html) doc. And for some reason it’s incredibly slow. Not only am I not a fan of the help viewer, but this means I can’t put the manual on my iPod for some night reading (tried: doesn’t work).
7. Skin Retouching: most brushes and bricks are smooth as silk but this one runs like molasses. It also tends to make the skin look like chalk. Maybe I haven’t found the right settings yet but the slow speed makes it hard to experiment with.
8. On the bug front: the Blank setting on my second display doesn’t stick. It keeps reverting back to Alternate even though the menu still says Blank. Annoying.

As I said, Aperture 3 is still a stellar upgrade and an absolute no brainer. There are tons of enhancements that are truly worth the price of entry. But as expected a 3.0.1 version will be needed.

It’s been a verrrrry long time coming. But having spent the past hour playing around with the new version of Aperture, all I can say is: thank you. My stubbornness feels completely repaid.

This upgrade adresses everything that was lacking and adds a ton of features, big and small. It’s as though Apple actually read every article, blog and  forum post about Aperture 2, made a checklist of everyone’s wishes and added them one by one. But the amazing thing about this new release is they’ve managed to add all these while keeping the UI just as streamlined and refined as before – in fact it’s cleaner and easier to read.

I’m not going to go through everything so I strongly encourage you to look at the new online tutorials and extensive feature list. But here’s a quick rundown of my favorite new stuff.

destruction be gone

Ok, name the key feature every Aperture user has been asking for since Lightroom 2′s release?  Yup: non-destructive local editing.

Well, every single adjustment brick in Aperture 3 now offers non-destructive local editing via the new Brush tool. You can paint an adjustment in or out using the same tools as the previous Dodge and Burn plugin (brush, feather and erase). Once you’ve applied localized editing, a new brush icon appears on the brick – clicking the icon brings the Brush HUD back for further tweaking.

Beyond the main adjustment bricks, you can also access brushes for individual adjustments (Dodge, Blur, Burn, Color etc). These then appear in the Adjustments HUD like any other brick and you can change the amount of effect applied. This is all in real-time, non-destructive and it flies.

The other huge change regarding adjustments? We can now duplicate any brick. Combined with the new brushes feature this means we now have something akin to layers within Aperture itself. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

Current plugins still require the creation of a TIFF or PDS file though. I don’t know if third-partys will have access to APIs allowing non-destructive editing – it would be pretty huge, but I’m not holding my breath. Still, I have a feeling my use of plugins or round-trips to Photoshop is about to diminish substantially.

full screen. all the time.

There are a lot of nice UI touches in Aperture 3 that give it even more polish than before. But the one I’m most excited about is the new Full Screen mode. I always loved full screen mode. But in my day to day workflow it was rarely used, mainly because I kept having to go in and out of it all the time – no longer. Apple have made Aperture 3′s full screen mode more productive than ever with new browser and project views, a navigation toolbar and a refined thumbnail view.

It is really, really nice.

real life printing

The print dialog has received a massive overhaul: picture packages, autofill multiple shots according to size, brightness, saturation and contrast adjustments, the list goes on. For instance, I can now skip the book tool and create a contact page template complete with logo, title, subtitle, watermark and my choice of metadata – all within the print dialog. This is going to be a huge timesaver.

it’s the little things

Small details count. Because little things tend to add up. I use a lot of Smart Albums but often find myself having to go back to a picture’s original project. In Aperture 2 I had created a metadata view assigned to Tooltips (T) that included the file’s path so i could at least find out where the picture was located in the database. Every time I used it I wished for a “Reveal in Project” command. Every single time.  So I was ecstatic to find out Aperture 3 now had a command called… yes: Reveal in Project!

This is just one little thing. But man, am I ever happy about it.

labels! flags!

Yes. We can now assign labels and flag photos. No more weird keywords meant solely for organizational purposes appearing on Flickr. There were workarounds (custom metadata views) but this is welcome indeed.

faces, places, movies, fast switching libraries etc…

All These are just the tip of the iceberg. I could write ten pages on the new features and possibilities in Aperture 3. I haven’t talked about Faces and Places, the new book plugins that allow the use of the book tool with third-party suppliers, tons of refined metadata tools, IPTC compliance, fast switching libraries, searchable project description fields, Flickr and Facebook integration, a slideshow editor that’s essentially a built-in iMovie complete with video and audio, refined import panel, and presets…. oh! goodness… PRESETS!

Needless to say this is a milestone release that  - in my humble opinion – leapfrogs Lightroom by several meters at least. I’m pretty sure Adobe are scrambling right now. If they aren’t they’re being complacent.

I for one am glad I didn’t jump the fence. Lightroom? What’s Lightroom?

P.S. My library has just finished upgrading. It took several hours but everything seems in the right place. It’s now performing a face detection operation. I’m going to let it work and see how it goes. Hearing my new iMac’s fan for the first time (!)

Everyone’s talking about the iPad right now. So I’m not going to pretend I have anything to add that hasn’t already been said at some point during the last 18 hours or so. But for what it’s worth, here’s my take:

• This past year I moved my reading habit to my iPod Touch. I’m the first one to be surprised by this because I’ve always been a book junky. You know, the kind that likes the smell of books. I like how they feel, how they look in a room. I’m a book addict. But I’ve now read over 25 novels on my iPod and I’m completely hooked. So I wanted a bigger iPod Touch so I could read more comfortably. Check.

• I also wanted a bookstore that felt right and was a pleasure to browse (sorry, the Kindle App’s not it). From what I’ve seen of the iBookstore: check.

• As a photographer I’ve often used my iPod Touch to show off my portfolio to potential clients. The iPad is going to be a serious asset for this task. Check.

And that’s it. Honestly, that’s all I was looking for. Everything else is icing.
Lack of Flash? Don’t care. I was a Flash developer for a long time and now I just want to move away from it as fast as I can. I don’t seem to be alone there. I love the UI in the new apps (Calendar anyone?), I love how everything seems to flow. I love that I’ll be able to use my iPhone apps (Bento, Soho Notes, 1 Password) out of the box.

Other notes of interest:

• The custom designed A4 processor. This is the first product to result from Apple’s purchase of PA Semi and, according to John Gruber, the payoff is gigantic. interesting move for the future. Maybe Intel’s days on the Mac are counted.

• iWork. I use Pages extensively. This is a very nice surprise. I like how they’ve de-bundled the suite too.

• The potential for enhanced gesture interactions. When demoing Nova, the guys at Gameloft showed off a three-finger rotation to open up a hatch on -screen. As noted by iLounge, this is very Minority Report and could hint at an interesting future as developers start taking advantage of the technology.

And of course the price point: $499 to get your foot in the door is pretty impressive as far as I’m concerned. I paid $650 for an iPod Photo some years ago – remember those? We’ve come pretty far since then.

So naysayers aside this device has me excited because it does exactly what I needed, both professionally and personally.

I’m now waiting to be notified.

Just before Christmas I received a new 27 in quad-core i7 iMac loaded with 8gb of ram. For those wondering about the performance gains in Aperture all I can say is: night and day. Working in Aperture 2.1.4 after the SL upgrade had become an exercise in frustration, making my work tedious and my temper… well… let’s just say my vocabulary was becoming limited to very short words.

I took my time with this new machine and decided to forgo migration and re-install everything from scratch. With a Time Machine backup available I did everything manually, one piece at a time, verifying each addition before going on. When you do this there are a couple of important folders to know about:

• Preferences and Application Support folders from the User library
• Application Support folder from the computer level library

The great thing about OS X is how logical the file organization usually is. All application resource files are usually well identified in their own folder in these directories, making it pretty easy to copy them over and keep old settings intact – a pretty important thing when you want to hit the ground running with a new machine. Everything user related is in the User folder, everything that affects the app as a whole is at the computer level. In the case of Aperture for example, all user custom settings (custom metadata sets, adjustments etc) are contained in the Aperture folder inside User-Application Support. Plug-ins are at computer level since they’re installed for all users on a machine. As I said, clean and logical.

Now some of you might be thinking: why not use Migration Assistant and be done with it? Because I’m a geek. And because I don’t trust Migration Assistant with pro level apps. I also wanted an absolutely clean install without four years of virtual grime coming over to my new computer. My two main applications are Aperture and Logic Studio and I’d been upgrading Logic since version 5 – that’s a lot of accumulated stuff all over the place believe me. Installing manually took a few hours (about 70gb of app files) but it now works perfectly and I know I don’t have redundant files messing things up.

Method

The method was pretty simple. To work faster, I bypassed the Time Machine interface and simply mounted its disk image in the Finder. This allowed me access to all my latest files (I had made sure to do one last backup before disconnecting my old computer) with quick and easy access. Basically, it was like having my old machine beside me – which was also available just in case. To do this you just click on the Time Capsule icon in the Shared section of a Finder window, open the folder and double-click the sparsebundle disk image. It’ll mount like any other image –  after that it’s just a question of navigating to the latest backup.

For Aperture it went like this:

• Install from the trial and authorize.
• Open the application to make sure it’s working. At this point everything is configured at default.
• Import a project to test further (before importing the whole library). Close the app.
• Browse my TMachine backup and copy over the prefs and settings from the appropriate folders into their corresponding destinations on the new computer (I also label them as a way to quickly identify what I’ve copied over).
• Open Aperture to check if it looks like home again (!): it does, everything is customized to my liking, just as I had left it on my old machine.
• Re-install the NIK plugins. Test again.
• Copy over my old library overnight.
• The next morning open Aperture while holding option and select the library.
• Done!

Performance

As I said at the beginning, Aperture flies on the new iMac like it never has before. There are no slow-downs. None. Even round-tripping to Photoshop – which was like bathing in molasses before – is now lightning fast. Every single task is now exponentially faster: importing, editing, exporting. I did encounter the stalling export bug at the beginning but for some reason it hasn’t re-appeared… fingers crossed. I’m sure the amount of RAM is a huge asset on its own. And I have to mention that when I did my first tests using an imported project on a trial managed library, performance was much less impressive. So much so that I was disappointed  and dreading importing my main library. This means I/O is also a very important factor in AP’s overall performance (my main library uses referenced files stored on external FW800 drives). Every little bit counts.

Future

The elephant in the room is obviously the lack of a new version of Aperture, something that is becoming very serious for many –  myself included. But this new iMac has extended my patience a bit. The performance is that good. And I can’t help but dream about an Aperture X version fully optimized for this multicore beast.

Magic?

A word about the Magic Mouse: I love it. It took me a few hours to get used to (my first reflex was to get rid of it to be honest) but I now wouldn’t dream of using anything else. The only problem I have with it is in – you guessed it – Aperture. It tends to be very sensitive to side swipes and scrolling gestures. This is not the case in iPhoto 09. Sigh. Another thing that needs fixing.