Absurd Singularity

Recently Apple upgraded Aperture to version 2 which is supposed to pack a significant performance increase as version 1 was, to put it nicely, dog slow when working with a large library. However, the one factor that kept me an iPhoto user was the lack of "film rolls" (relabeled "Events" in the newest iPhoto) as an organizing structure in Aperture. I absolutely love this feature in iPhoto. It basically keeps all my events in order based on time automatically upon import. Newest photos/events were always at the very top. Aperture, with its folders and projects and albums seemed more complicated than it was worth.

However, I decided to finally just bite the bullet and migrate over to Aperture. It makes more sense workflow-wise since I'm mainly a RAW shooter and with the built-in RAW tools, I can probably do most of my post-processing in Aperture unless I really had to use some of Photoshop's plugins. What got me over the organization hump was this informative blog post and handy screenshot of how he was organizing his photos by date. So I'm basically using the same structure but I'm also adding the day to the names of my projects so that even they are sorted somewhat in date order.

When I first played with Aperture many moons ago and was trying to figure out the film roll issue, I had a feeling that it would have to come down to this. There's a lot more manual work involved with this style of organization in Aperture but I guess I can live with it. I'm also trying to actually add keywords and ratings to my photos from now on but it's just such a time consuming process. I'm sure it'll pay off in the long run but damn I wish there was a faster way.

So starting from 2008 I'll be organizing my photos with Aperture. Slowly feeling around in the program to figure out its full capabilities. Prior years I'll leave with iPhoto. I'll still need to use iPhoto occasionally as Aperture doesn't recognize movie clips (as taken with our Powershot TX1) though.

For those that may be mulling over the Canon 40D or Nikon D300 issue, here's a recent article on the matter that I fully agree with. The D300 has more features (which it should since it's $600 more) but the 40D gives you more bang for the buck. Having used both cameras within the past few months, I can authoritatively say that they're both great bodies and any bad photos you get from either camera will most likely be from user error rather than something wrong with the cameras themselves. I just ordered the 40D again to more fully test AF performance when compared to the 5D as I'm finding the 5D's AF system rather lacking when attempting to keep up with a high-performance toddler.

And finally, wow, I never thought I'd ever see this lens actually available on Amazon. Someone's going to trigger a big terrorism scare when this hits the field. =p