The Death of Steve Jobs

Glen Ellen, California


 The passing away of Steve Jobs today at the age of 56 years is a real loss to the country, and the world. Please take the time to read the story published in Forbes entitled "What We Owe Steve Jobs." Not a tribute to Jobs, but discusses the moral nature of his achievements. The more I learn about the humanities the more I appreciate the genius of Jobs. Hope all is well for him on the other side.

 

Apple's Aperture 3 Photo Management Software

San Rafael, California


Being a MAC guy I was pretty excited to see Apple open up the App Store, which basically mirrors the iPhone App Store, but is for the bigger machines. On the day the App Store opened Apple dumped the price of Aperture 3 from a smooth $199 to a cool $79..99. I had to have it.

This turned into a four day saga, where I spent hour upon hour trying to unsnarl the chaos that occurred in my hard drive while trying to move my photo's from iPhoto 11 to Aperture 3. Many including me, stay with Apple because up until now the MAC eco-system has worked really well across different platforms and gizmos. A really pathetic situation as Aperture 3's consumer hook is targeted toward iPhoto 11 users who are budding amateurs photographers that want to play with the big boys. Many professional photographers use Aperture to manage their work-flow. Apple is taking a run at the king of management and editing software, Adobe Photoshop. Briefly, here is what happened. Aperture didn't recognize some older video file formats that iPhoto had no problem with. This locked up Aperture over and over, resulting in me force quiting multiple times. Once I figured out a work around, Aperture completely choked on its much touted facial recognition software. Once I disabled that, the program then locked up over trying to generate the thousands of previews and thumbnail photo's. I eventually had to import all my photo's that were in iPhoto manually, and in a piecemeal fashion. 


All of this took many hours as I'm no computer expert. I had to spend time in the MAC discussion boards to learn work-arounds, and that I'm not the only one running into all these problems. The boards were on fire! I learned a ton about Aperture 3, and my MAC during this heinous time. The software upgrade is simply not ready for prime time. I can't recommend the software until Apple fixes all the bugs.


Here is the good news. Without the bugs, the software itself is awesome! I've now imported my library, and have figured out what locks the program up resulting in everything working smoothly. What a photographer can do with this software is really amazing. I almost bought it at $199, and consider it a steal at $79.99. So, for anyone who really wants the software, do some research prior to the purchase. Not everyone runs into problems. There are steps that you can take during installation to have things go smoothly, however it is more complicated than Apple would have you believe.

With all my excited over my Canon G11 and Aperture 3, I lit out and took some pictures while I was in Sausalito yesterday. Below is a sample. Enjoy!

Shot with a Canon G11

Shot with Canon G11

Shot with Canon G11

Blast From the Past 

USCGC Polar Sea WAGB 11

Big Red rolls heavily to port in the southern ocean in the fall of 1988.

CC

Apple Pro Training Series Update

As some may remember I've enjoyed shooting video with my Flip HD and then editing the footage in Apple's iMovie 09. Apple is genius at sucking in people incrementally. Usually, each product or software program, at first, has enough razzle dazzle to keep the user excited. But then, After a period the lower end software leaves something to be desired. So with mucho dinero you can upgrade to take your projects to the next level.

This is the way it has been with Apple's professional movie editing software called Final Cut. The two Final Cut Products are Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro I think is nearly a grand, but the Final Cut Express is $200 bucks. My understanding is the difference between the two is not much, in terms of editing movies. Final Cut Pro is what Hollywood uses and provides heavy duty encoding technology to prevent theft. I could be wrong, I'm not Columbo or a pro.

Several weeks ago I purchased Final Cut Express 4 to take it up a notch. I loaded the program and stared at the screen without a clue how to proceed. The leap from iMovie 09 to Final Cut is not simple. So I bought the Apple Pro Series training material and have been doing lessons almost daily ever since. The program is awesome and the training is cool to.

The going is slow, but I'm hoping to take some good footage while driving across the country and then of course score some sailing footage when I get out to San Francisco Bay. Then try and put something together in Final Cut Express. But the learning of the new software is going slower than I had anticipated. But could be my new calling.



Capt Chris