Michael Shivers + mdshivers Creative Media » Blog

play me a melody, originally uploaded by mdshivers.

I recently got a Canon G9 as a little pocket camera, so I could shoot high quality pictures, but not have to carry my DSLR around with all the lenses and bags. I've been wanting to be able to have something discreet, but also something that can shoot RAW and can use my existing camera flashes. The G9 so far has been a really great camera. It's 12.1 megapixel chip with 6x lens, with an ISO range of 80-1600 and F-stop starting at 2.8 has been great. The micro-mode works wonders and beats out my big camera (20D). Also with the 12.1 megapixel and RAW mode, I can crop and do all sorts of stuff with the image and still have a high quality output.
To edit in RAW, you will need CS3, Lightroom 1.5 or Aperture 2.0. Or you can use the Canon software that comes with it.
It has a pretty high frame rate (obviously nowhere near my 20D, but still very fast. It's got movie mode, and panorama mode which already have come in handy.
so I defiantly recommend this little camera as your road warrior or the camera that you want to have without the difficulties of lugging around all your gear. I plan to take it with me on my trip to Chicago, and will be leaving the 20D at home to rest. I have used the G2 for several years too, and the G9 is a different beast. Smaller, sleeker and the controls are much more professional. So if you have a DSLR and are looking for a small compact full functional camera- this is the one.

This picture was taken with the Canon G9 in RAW mode with external 430ex flash. Post process in Aperture 2.0

Posted by Michael Shivers at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone on a flickr forum asked a question about how Aperture handles RAW files and if it was possible to send RAW files for RAW processing to another program. Also another question raised was comparing the two different programs in how they handle RAW processing.

@ Aperture handling sending RAW files to another program,

Yes, Aperture automatically handles all the RAW settings. When you open it with another program, you have to convert it to another file format. It can't send a native RAW file to another program. So you can't use ACR to change the settings of your RAW file inside Aperture. You could open the original file inside Finder, change your settings in ACR or Lightroom and then save it as another file format. ACR or Lightroom also doesn't let you edit RAW and save changes to that RAW file and then send the RAW file to another program. RAW conversion only happens once when you need to export the file. You can keep the original RAW with adjustments but it has to live in the native program that you editied with. (ACR,Lightroom,Aperture).

Hopefully in the future these programs can export RAW to another program and be able to reimport RAW.

hopefully this makes since :)

@ comparing ACR/Lightroom with Apeture Raw settings:

I have all three and I really enjoy Aperture's interface and auto tools. But when I need to get a specific look, I have to send it to photoshop.
One thing I love about Lightroom is the presets for adjusting RAW. It seems to be way advanced from Aperture and there are several settings that Apeture doesn't have. There are several websites now that you can download these presets for free or a small price. Excellent.

I am very happy with Apeture and it's file management and interface. But i really like Lightroom's RAW settings and presets. Guess I'll be using both and making sure Apeture mangages my files.

Posted by Michael Shivers at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've joined in on several discussions and blogs talking about the best way to backup your Aperture library immediately and long term.

Obviously you can use Aperture's great backup feature called the "Vault". That is smart actions that you take to choose a location to where you want to backup Aperture's files and when you update your photo library or make significant changes, the vault icon will turn red telling you to update. It's recommended to use an external hard drive or at least another hard drive that your main library is not on.

SO what if you want to use DVD's to backup? Well I've been mulling over this for a while. I want to have multiple backups and I want to have a disc based backup too. So the recently released Roxio Toast 8 for Mac came to mind. I just got it a few days ago and my findings are that it's a great upgrade from the older version. It does "Disc Spanning" for both Mac and PC on the same disc. So say my photo library is 100 gigs it would take about 25 4.7 gig discs to use. Toast will automatically embed the software needed to read the spanned disk and will restore your library.

Now optically what should you backup? At first I thought hands down just back up the aperture original library. Drag it into Toast and it will tell you how many discs it will take. Then after I started it, it was going to take about 30min on each disk with verification. Bah. that's a lot of time. So I canceled it and decided to think about it more.

If I backup my Aperture library in it's entirety, I need Aperture to read it when I want to recover it if something goes wrong. So what if I want just my photos and not all the data base stuff? I then thought it would be best to export all of my masters by Year/Month/Day and in a Folder called PhotoBackup. Then I could have all of my original photos backup (it doesn't do versions but it will export PSD files as masters). So i dragged the Parent folder "Photobackup" into Roxio Toast 8 and then do a cross platform disc span.

Now I have all of my photos in their original form backed up to Mac and PC format. Now I'm not swithching to PC anytime soon, but it's nice to know that I have the option. Also if I wanted to stop using Aperture for the next best app, i can just import my Photobackup with the Year/Month/Day scheme into another program. And then my photos aren't archived and be required to have Aperture to open them up. (I'm thinking long term here folks!)

Posted by Michael Shivers at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)