Saturday, March 22, 2008
I avoided some out-of-travel this weekend in order to spend some more time at home. Earlier today Julie and I went up to her brother's house for our niece's 2nd birthday party. I was looking forward to taking pictures of the kids because they're so animated and lively. They find excitement in almost everything they do and as a result they make for excellent subjects in photography.
I played around with using motion to isolate my subjects and liked how it turned out.
After Cassidy's birthday I headed home and did some post processing. I've been growing more and more frustrated at my laptop's performance as of late. I recently installed Time Machine and despite claims from Apple that it "only runs in the background" I've found that backups frequently zap my computer of any responsive behavior. I constantly get the rainbow spinny ball while the Time Machine runs and my kernel waits on I/O.
Aperture has also frustrated me lately. I upgraded to version 2.0 and my Automator script I use to caption everything has gone from taking about 30 seconds for 30 photos to taking over 20 minutes. It seems to apply each individual IPTC tag on each image as a separate transaction rather than doing a bulk update. I adapted by using the Lift and Stamp tool in Aperture but come on Apple - please don't give me the finger after I paid you $200 for Aperture. I'd like my v1.5 Automator script to function with the same (if not better) performance after an upgrade to v2.0. Is that so unreasonable?
Aperture itself has irritated me as well. They have made some good performance upgrades and fortunately it no longer takes me 5 minutes to start up the application and get to work. But the import is still extremely clunky as are copies/moves of masters and versions from one album to another. I copied one set of photos from Album A to Album B and was able to delete the photos in Album A without any change to Album B. Then I came along and did the same thing but found the photos in Album B were gone. Fortunately I had a backup but still... Stop giving me the finger Apple - I gave you $200.
I went to the Maryland baseball game this afternoon to get a few shots for my own personal use. Dave Lovell was there on a DCSB assignment so I got to just enjoy myself and shoot and not pay much attention to what was going on from a reporter standpoint. It was very refreshing and I can definitely get used to it. I got a LOT of action photos from the game today and I was very pleased with my results. Oddly enough I caught 3 or 4 players with their eyes closed in the middle of an action shot.
Usually I don't quite catch the exact moment of an event because my timing isn't very sharp and I only use a D200 or D2H. But today I caught the exact moment where a player swung on a pitch, an outfielder caught a fly ball, or a first basemen reached out and caught a ball to record an out. In many of those photos the player has his eyes shut. It was really odd to see!
I can't link you all over to a DC Sports Box article just yet because we're waiting for Game 3 to be played tomorrow before we post our story. But once it's up I'll come back and update my post with a new link.
I also started taking photos for Julie's blog tonight. She'd like some more pictures to use in it so I offered to be the photographer she can use for free. Well maybe not free... I did ask her to bring me up a Coke from the basement as payment for tonight's piggy bank photo.
