Deadly Bloody Serious

Taking automatic stitching to its extremes, Photosynth combines hundreds of photos into a 3D environment you can navigate somewhat as if you were playing Quake. Microsoft Labs released a jaw-dropping video of this a while back, but now have released the software as a technology preview. I’m tempted to shoot a few dozen shots around the house just to give it a shot.

• When importing CDs, iTunes keeps warning me about over-writing stuff. Weird. Maybe it’s ejecting, then sucking it back in whilst I’m out of the room.
• DO THE METADATA!
• Apple category

The easiest way to get a group photo in which nobody is blinking is to take a lot of shots; but how many?

According to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the CSIRO in their 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics winning research, summarised in Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed, Velocity, June 2006, the answer is:

For groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there’s good light, and two if the light’s bad.

Once there’s around fifty people, even in good light, you can kiss your hopes of an unspoilt photo goodbye.

It’s not quite that bad for large groups: you could always cheat with PhotoShop or Group Shot. For smaller groups, however, dividing by three or two is pretty easy — and with 16GB cards available and 4GB cards cheap you can easily afford to shoot five at a time. That’s good for ten to fifteen people, depending on the lighting, and probably about as much as your camera can do in one burst without slowing down.

For those of you with science or geek backgrounds, I thoroughly recommend having a listen to the Oct 14 Science Show. The recordings of the Ig Nobel prize ceremony are a hoot.

I’ve experimented with moving masters to solve my dumb albums problem, and have both good and bad news.

The good news is: you can move masters from one project to another. The cursor won’t change to let you know what’s about to happen (unlike, say, adding photos to an album), but a black border will appear around the project name. When you let go of the mouse button, you’ll be given the opportunity to cancel. There’s no way to tell Aperture to not warn you next time. Thankfully, you shouldn’t be moving masters to other projects too often.

Any albums in the old project will survive: as the Move alert tells you, their references will be updated. It might seem weird to have an album in one project pointing to masters in another, but it makes sense when you consider an album named “Portfolio”, in which you’d really like your best photos from any and all projects.

The bad news is: “smart” albums will break. My “Mug Shots” smart folder, for example, no longer found photos with the tag — even after I moved it to the new project. I had to re-create it from scratch. I thank the gods I’m not moving a year’s worth of pictures to another project, losing all twelve of my by-the-month smart folders and any other date-constrained special event folders.

Can anyone recommend a good resource for using Automator with Aperture?

Aperture has made it to version 1.5 without the ability to exclude pictures based on keyword. I want to have my screen saver display this year’s pictures rated *** or better, but without those I took for work. I suspect I’ll have to export the masters and import them back to a new project.

Speaking of the screen saver: it’s wonderful that Apple have Mac OS X automatically treat Aperture albums as screen savers in their own right, but I find the behaviour of the Crop slides to fit on screen feature somewhat bizarre when it encounters a photo in portrait orientation.

When I shoot in portrait, the most interesting part of the photo is usually in the top third or so. I’d like to see that third, but for whatever reason OS X feels compelled to show me my subject’s feet or crotch instead. Oops.

Update: I’ve found more smart folder breakage. Lucky me!

It’s time to come out of the closet.

I use a Macintosh at home.

At first, it was just a Mac Mini used for the occasional build and test of Juice. Then my PC started flaking out, and I had to pull half of the memory out. Its performance became awful. Unfortunately, at three years old it was too hard to swap out just a few bits: I was going to have to get a whole new machine.

I spent a few months locked up in analysis paralysis over the four digit upgrade whilst also wrangling a five digit kitchen upgrade, planning a six digit forced rebuild on the back of the house, and helping customers figure out seven digit upgrades to their IT environments.

I eventually decided that if I had to choose two items out of good, cheap, and shipping before 2020, I was going to compromise on the price.

That, in combination with accidentally subjecting myself to three contiguous hours in a reality distortion field chasing down a friend’s recommendation that I find out about Time Machine, made for a decision I hadn’t anticipated.

I ended up getting a Mac Pro.

To my surprise, I’ve taken to Mac OS X quickly. I thought I’d be switching back to XP under Parallels a lot, but so far it hasn’t been necessary: I spend all my time in Aperture and Firefox. I’m already trying to use Expose on my XP based work laptop and wishing it had the Dock.

A Mac Pro might seem overkill for browsing the ‘net, but photo management is already making good use of my investment. Video might even make the beast seem slow, which leads me to another reason I bought the Mac Pro: I don’t want to get painted into another architectural corner like last time.

One of the claimed benefits of the Mac Pro’s more expensive server chipsets is extended system life: server manufacturers would much rather upgrade parts in an existing production line than start from scratch with a new motherboard. It looks like I’ll be able to upgrade to eight cores pretty soon, I can quadruple my memory whenever that becomes affordable, and I sincerely doubt my gaming requirements will stress 16 lanes of PCI Express anytime soon. Bwa ha ha. Which reminds me:

My other important use case was being able to run PC games. Boot Camp has turned out better than I’d hoped. Half Life 2 is so smooth (with full detail!) I’m getting motion sickness if I play too long. I’m looking forward to Portal turning my guts inside out.

Overall, I’m happier with my Mac Pro than I expected to be. A lot of that is thanks to Aperture, about which I’ll definitely be ranting soon, and the rest is due to a solid and easy operating system on some kick-arse hardware I won’t have to fuss with for ages. Life is good.