Todays Picture of the Day title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I shoot all of my pictures in RAW format. I then import them to my laptop and run them through, Aperture, a RAW processing application. For those of you who don't know what that is, its to digital SLRs as a darkroom is to film. All that I do with most of my images is adjust the colors and contrast until the pictures look how I want them. I usually don't do any touchups or alterations to the images. They are pretty much what the camera saw when I clicked the shutter button. Nearly all of the pictures I take, are run through photoshop only to add my watermark.
This picture shows what I see while editing my images. I used to run all of my pictures through Photoshop, until Adobe released Lightroom. Around the same time, Apple released Aperture and I really wanted to try it out, but I was running an older G4 at the time, my machine could not run Aperture. Adobe had Lightroom in a free beta, so I installed it and started learning. After the beta trial ran out, I decided that I liked the workflow so much that I bought it. About 10,000 pictures later, I bought a MacBook Pro. It came with a trial of Aperture 1.5 (I think). I used it but wasn't really impressed, so I kept on working in Lightroom. In February, Apple released Aperture 2 to much fanfair. It seemed that Apple had redone a LOT of the application and a lot of reviewers were touting many of the features to be top notch. They were offering a 30 day trial and I had a wedding coming up so I decided to give Aperture 2 a trial by fire(actually the same way I learned Lightroom). When I finished the wedding shots in half the time as it took me in Lightroom AND the pictures were just as good if not better than the output from Lightroom, I decided to move over to Aperture.
I bought the laptop because I needed a newer machine that I could take with me and actually do some graphics work on (unlike the 12' PowerBook G4 it replaced). I never meant for it to become my main machine. It isn't really great for working on the amount of pictures that I take, but it gets the job done. I can't wait until I can afford to buy a MacPro and a pair of 24' LCDs. Then I will probably be able to shave off another 15-20% of the time it takes sorting and editing the pictures. I think that being forced to sit down in front of a pair of big screens will help cut down on distractions, not having to hide what I am working when someone sends me an IM, and getting sidetracked.
Wow I wrote a lot tonight. I have no clue why I just went on like that but I guess since its a pretty boring picture, I need to justify it by going ON and ON about stuff most of you won't even read. Hey if you have read this far, put a comment on the picture so I won't feel like a complete loser for having wasted about 20 mins writing all of this crap.
Anyways, thanks for hanging in with me this long, and thanks for viewing my Picture of the Day. Thanks for all of the great feedback I have been getting from you all!
Don't forget, I am available for hire...I do portraits, weddings, events, shows, pretty much anything that you want!
