Faces in Apple's Aperture 3.1

Wow, I have read a few negative comments on this feature and only turn it on to update when my machine is not in use, so I thought it was about time some positive was fed back.

Faces is a feature of Apples Aperture software that analyses every photograph for faces and then categorises them, allowing you to tag people and then have it find more faces that it believes matches your tags. It takes a fair while for the software to analyse the images and fair enough, I mean I have some group photographs with 50 plus people in them.

Well twice within the last week I have been saved hours by the faces feature. One company I shoot for, 44,000 images over the last 6 years, contacted me asking for all the images of two of their exec's that I have.

Now to manually go through each image looking for faces, including groups, general shots of audiences and so forth would take forever. Faces allowed me to find all the images, and I do mean all, from the portraits to the out of focus and side on in the background. Awesome, especially that I was able to do each within three hours, manually to do this in three hours, I would have had to view 244 images per minute!

From the obvious where the name is in the shot...

To the not so obvious...

The nice thing is that next time I need an image of either of these people, the metadata is now embedded and the search only two or three seconds!

I am impressed, okay it may take a machine with some serious grunt to achieve this, my guess though is that in another two generations of computers this task will be even quicker and achievable on the most basic of new computers.

Portrait shoot

Last Friday I had a full day location corporate portrait shoot with Just Group, always good fun working with these guys, they to have an amazing culture and attract high energy people, people who are always great to work with.

AGM's

Part of what we do is Event Management and last week was the AMCOR Annual General Meeting at the Park Hyatt Melbourne.

Co-ordinating the venue, presentation, staging, lighting, audio, auto-cue, webcast and video, this is the area of the business that Wayne most enjoys. Events like this bring together most areas of our business, graphic design, multimedia design, photography and video production, and event management, all good for business.

For me the day was some stills for the record and to set up two cameras for the webcast, a wide shot to cut to and a close up of lectern and the Chairman during Q&A.

Mornington Volunteer Marine Rescue, VMR

I have an uncle, Tim Warner, who is involved with the Mornington Volunteer Marine Rescue, a couple of years ago he asked if I could do a shoot for them with the idea of populating their website and to improve their promotional and sponsorship materials. This seemed to work well enough for them, and recently they asked me to do some more with them. Sunday 17th Oct, I headed over to their base and photographed all their committee groups, all the members and some portraits of the exec. Whilst there I picked up some abstract shots that they will be able to use on their site and in other places.

I enjoy supporting these guys, they make a great contribution to the community, check them out on their website.

Hockey Photographs

This Saturday saw the Mornington Peninsula Hockey Club, MPHC, have their presentation day, the afternoon for the juniors and the evening for the seniors. Both of my boys, Josh and Loch, play for MPHC and as I do not have the skills to coach, my way of supporting the club is to shoot group and action photographs of each team. These images are used in the year book compiled by Matt Haysom and on the website, managed by Harley Freeman, I then also run a basic slide show from Aperture of each team whilst they are on stage handing out their respective awards.

Some-one asked how much time I have to put in to do this, some quick sums.
I photographed
• 28 teams at 34 games, each game including before and after shots,
• about 12,000 21MP images
• travel to games
• sorting and process images, allowing 1 hour processing for every hour of shooting.
• exporting images for the designer and website

How much time, yeah it takes a bit, but then so does each of the other roles in the club and I enjoy mine.

Tunnel Breakthrough

Cool shoot today, 65m down filming a Tunnel Boring Machine, TBM, breaking through after travelling nearly 4km under the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Not my pics this time as I was shooting video, rather pics of me working.

Shooting again

I have spent the last few days in the studio, reviewing vision, sorting stills and managing the Melbourne Water Image Library so it was nice today to head out for an impromptu shoot.

On of our clients, Melbourne Water, are always on the look out for images that they may not have the opportunity to commission, an example being floods or water over the road. Last nights down power in Melbourne gave us the opportunity to head out and grab a couple of shot for them. Nothing special, but images that will be called upon to illustrate flooding.

Also in the process of prep'ing the video gear for a shoot tomorrow, heading back out to the Melbourne Main Sewer Replacement, MMSR. I will be shooting pipes being lowered into the Yarra river crossing, the overview we have been given makes it sound like an interesting process. Shooting on the Sony EX3 as the prime camera and our little baby Sony MC50 as a second camera for those tight and uncomfortable places where you do not want to take an expensive camera.

We purchased the Sony MC50 specifically for the filming of this project, MMSR and the Northern Main Sewer Project. Both require vision to be shot down in the tunnels in hot, wet, dark and dusty conditions, my feeling was I would rather trash this little camera than the big one. Having shot for a day in one of the tunnels I was blown away by the quality of vision from the MC50. It is pin sharp, the image stabiliser works beautifully and the audio which I was dismissing due to the noise levels is actually quite usable.

These pics are from the MC50, the vision has been transcoded to ProRes 422 and exported from FCP as a png. They are all available light, handheld.

 The first is shot from a moving train in the tunnel, very little light, lots of movement, the stabiliser shone here.

This second image is in the front of the Tunnel Boring Machine, it is about 45 degrees Celsius, 113F, it is humid as they have been spraying everything with water to try and cool it down enough to touch.

Again available light, notice the intensity of his head torch and handheld.

This last image was shot on the EX3 and a tripod.

Discussion Forums

At some stage in my life I was introduced to the adage, "the more you put into something, the more you get out of it," I try and use this all the time and often look back realising that it is when I have put the most into something that I have got the most out of it. This applies to everything from being on School Councils, Sporting Committees and surprisingly the Apple Discussion Forums.

I have become a regular on the Aperture  forum, not because I have specific questions I want answered, rather I find that it is almost selfish, I learn so much from the others on the forums. Questions are asked that I often look at and think "basic", but there are many which I look at and think I have not got a clue, reading the answers giving an insight in to the application and the trouble shooting process. I have found a few times where an issue has cropped up and it is only the reading of the forums  during my down times that has kept me operational at the critical moments.

Shooting for annual reports

I recently spent a day on location at the Australian Synchrotron shooting material for their annual report, a full on day and great fun.

Our studio does quite a but of work with the Synchrotron across disciplines, print design such as posters, banners, annual reports and newsletters, web and presentation design, video production and corporate photography. It is this cross over that works well with our clients, our graphic designer was able to go through my image library finding suitable material for the annual report and then also brief me on style and content for the photographs I needed to go and shoot on location.

It is interesting what gets used from a shoot and working closely with our designers gives me an insight to what is needed, an example being abstract imagery such as these ones of lighting panels. Our designer took these images and incorporated them as backgrounds and standalone items.

The original brief was for specific people in their work environments, working with our designer Sara on location we were able to find additional material to supplement and enhance the Annual Report.

 

I learnt the lesson about picking up closeups and shots such as these whilst shooting video, in video production the need for cutaways is paramount, print and web design is not different, close ups and abstracts add an enormous amount of value.

 

Science Fiction & Technology

I love the speed that computer and related technologies are developing, we are living in an era where we are seeing science fiction become reality within a lifetime.

The standard people expect on television is high definition, yet industry is struggling to adapt and keep up with the demand for content. Not just the production industry, also the Computer manufacturers, TV's have jumped ahead, we can view, but playing back and creating bluray discs is still not a standard, what is more it may get left behind.

3D is being pushed so hard and making in roads to the consumer markets, even before the ROI can be realised on High Definition. We have been shooting and editing HD for a while now but the majority still either output to DVD or a digital files, these are the formats clients are demanding. Now all of a sudden we are being asked for 3D and it is great! The transition will have to be quick and those that can make it quick will certainly have the edge, even more so than the move to HD.

3D HD requires a whole new mind set in the pre-production; story boarding and planning is even more important, it is not simply enough to hire a rig and point it in the general direction of the action or to shoot from the hip. Then their is the matter of data management, two streams of HD needing to be backed up and archived, the need for a computer powerful enough to handle these two stream and the need to allow more time, where the transition to HD saw us having to allow 4x the amount of edit time for rendering and fx, 3D, sees the need to allow a lot more time again. Thankfully we know that the computers will catch up and eat 3D for breakfast.

The iPhone 4 illustrates this point beautifully, where 15 years ago it was science fiction, now shooting, editing and distributing HD video on your phone is a reality.

Today though I felt like I stepped in to a science fiction moment, we got an iPad in the studio! Awesome, find one, have a play and experience for yourself a moment where you think, wow, this is science fiction in my hand.

Fun shoot

On location today at Horizon Studios in StKilda shooting video for Dotti, good fun.

We are putting together the backgrounds for a series of fashion parades we are staging and for this one we had a group of dancers shot in silhouette . This will need some work in post but the stills I shot give you a feel for some of the look.

I must admit I am looking forward to the finished product, our Choreographer Alana Scanlan has a great vision for the finished product and the interactivity between the dancers on stage and the silhouettes should be very effective.

Shooting the video today on the Sony PMW-EX3, great camera, just takes a while to remember where everything is on it, which is always the case when going between cameras, the stills on the Canon 5DmkII, 1600iso.

3D Editing in FInal Cut Pro

I wanted to discuss the details of this, but as it is a project still under wraps I can only talk about the technique.

We have been researching the shooting and editing of 3D for a client of ours, one of the articles I found was this one by Eric Cosh on 3D editing on the Ken Stone website. All very basic.

Well today I received some vision from an earlier using a 3D camera rig and have had a chance to play with it, sensational, I got it right first time around, thanks have to go to Eric for making his article so easy to follow. OK this is using the anaglyph technique, but for our end use this is actually what the client wants. The wow factor of 3D with the 5 cents a pair red and cyan glasses, fairly cost effective.

Not shooting

So a client brings me a hard drive with 340GB of images, some 12,000 of them, various stuff that different people in the organisation have had shot by other photographers in 2009. The issue, only one folder of images has any metadata, the rest are simply in a series of 38 folders with generic names.

The job, for me to sort the images so that they can make sense of them, catalogue, add as much metadata as I can glean from the images, without going over the top, then upload to Photoshelter.

The tool I use, Apples Aperture 3.
The process
1. Copy the entire contents of the drive to one of ours so that the original is safe.
2. I create a new Aperture library on the drive and import all 12,000 images by reference in to this library.
3. I go through each folder look for any obvious generic description and keywords that can be applied to all of the contained images.
4. I sort each folder in list mode by date to see if there is a way of breaking the images up by the day they were shot on, for a number of folders Ii can do this.
5. For the folders that have been shot over one or two days I sort by grid and the create albums based on separate themes/topics within the days shoot.
6. Based on the albums that have been created I then look for descriptions and keywords that I can apply across all of the contained images.

After sorting I have 266 separate albums, an average of 45 images per lightbox.

From an archiving and historic perspective suddenly the images are of far more value.

I have to export each album separately rather than being able to just export all 12k images in one hit. The images we upload to photoshelter rather than being the high res are only 1400pixel, enough for a comp, word doc or presentation. The reason for this is that each high res image should be processed, colour corrected and retouched. Processing every image is just not feasible, so the client chooses the ones they want and they are then uploaded as high res. This allows for many more thousands of images to be stored online for the client to readily access. OK in the ideal world all the hires would be processed and stored online for the clients to access as necessary, the reality is though that the clients will only ever use some 10-20% of images shot and that they are not prepared to pay the premium involved in having all the images process or the additional costs associated with the extra storage and bandwidth.

For me the process has been very interesting, I am getting to see some great images from other photographers and to understand my clients needs a little more.

Being organised

I take it as a compliment when a client says that I am very organised as this is something that I have had to work very hard on. Yes the  Digital Asset Management, DAM, applications available now make it much easier, but one still has to take the time to use them.

A common perception seems to be that creative types are typically very unorganised, while there is no doubt an element of truth in this, we "creative" types cannot use it as an excuse, at least not for our professional side of life.

Of course there was the subtle suggestion by my client that another of the photographers she uses must be more creative as they are "so unorganised" and could never have their images sorted with descriptions and keywords. I actually resented this implication as it takes lots of work to deliver these additional benefits to my clients, whilst the additional info with the files may not be appreciated at first, over time the value is significant.

Now if I can only get the rest of my life sorted!

"We adore chaos because we love to produce order."
Dutch artist M. C. Escher, 

the power of computers

As I write this my laptop is chugging away exporting 223 hires jpgs, (21 megapixel). In the time of film the finished product was either a transparency or a print. Now most clients just want a digital file for use in documents or posters.

This does not mean that it is necessarily quicker now though, a one day shoot will see a least one day of sorting and processing images, whether the photographer does it or has an assistant do it for them. What is quicker now is doing this, when digital first came inmost of this work was done in photoshop or proprietary  software that was slow and cumbersome. Now with applications like Apples Aperture and Adobes Lightroom the process of working with camera RAW files is greatly simplified.

There was a time where people thought that computers would make life easier and give us more time, whilst we lost that vision for a while, I believe that time dawning. Certainly for photographers computers are making our life much easier.

the more you put in the more you get back

I love the on line forums for software and equipment support, these are a great example of the more you put in to something the more you get out of them.

I regularly visit the Apple discussion groups and see what questions there are I can have a go at answering. OK typically theses are the basic newbie questions I have a go at but not always. I seem to be moving up in the level of questions I am answering. Watching the guys who have been on the discussion groups for years, those with thousands of posts behind them they typically let the newbie questions through to those who are getting started in the forum, gives the newbie a sense of achievement and saves the others from repeating themselves again and again and again. I have actually book marked a few relevant pages so that I do not have to repeat myself, just cut and paste either the content or the link. I am beginning to understand the pain and frustration of the forum gurus with those who will not read the manual or do a tutorial.

Still I support these guys, why, well I have had to ask a question on more than one occasion and yes like the others I ask them when something is going wrong and seed support quickly, and it is always there, how cool.

Me I am a Mac user so the forums I frequent most are the Apple discussion forums which are here;

http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa?categoryID=1

Metadata in photographs

I manage the image library and image approval site for a client based here in Melbourne. Sitting and discussing how other photographers work and the need for each image to have some specific data describing it led to some interesting thoughts.

I can remember when this was hard work, like really hard and I avoided doing it myself. Earlier in my career, late '80s, I was out doing surveys of locations, photographing every aspect of an area and recording the details of where each image was taken. The idea was that I came back to the studio, printed out every image and wrote the details for each image across the bottom, now with 10 or 20 rolls of film this meant a lot of work. This process was labour intensive that many of the images just never had this information written on them, thinking that it was easy enough to cross reference the prints with my original written notes.

Even then I was able to see the potential for databases and being able to search for a specific location and recognising that this information would still have to be entered.

Well in that time many products have come and gone, each building on the other. Today the landscape for photographers is quite different and it is very easy to add metadata to photographs. Using a product such as Apples Aperture or Adobes Lightroom the process has become extremely streamlined. All photographers need to get their images from camera to end use and these two products fit very neatly in to that gap.

As the photographer we are quite often best positioned to add information to the images we shoot describing what we have captured. Why do we want to do this for our clients? Whilst a photograph may tell 1000 words, where is that river, where is that person standing, who is that person, you and the person commissioning the job may know, everyone else in the company who finds out about the shoot and visits your online gallery is desperate to know if they can use the image as well. If the answer is "Yes", you get a request for a hires version of the image and another sale, "No" and people will not bother coming back to your site.

My client was amazed at how little data most photographers were adding to the images uploaded to phototshelter.com for them to review. In one instance three days worth of shooting at a variety of locations and all of the images were lumped together with the one generic description and in the one gallery. No one had any idea where the images were actually shot, my client was very frustrated, these images were stunning but how could she use them for anything other than a generic landscape shot without caption.

Using one of the current crop of tools available to process our raw files is logical, they make it easy to batch process, well the same is true of adding descriptions and keywords, it is easy and adds value to your work.