PigPog

Don’t get me wrong. On the whole, I’m pretty happy with Flickr. It does a decent job. But Thomas Hawk got me thinking recently with his enthusiastic (Is Thomas ever anything but enthusiastic?) promotion of 500px. It does a nice job of showing off your photos, but one of the things that’s different about it, at least for now, is the focus on top quality photography.

There’s plenty of top quality photography on Flickr. But there’s also a lot of mediocrity, and quite a lot of complete rubbish. I try not to post too much complete rubbish, but I sometimes do, because I want to show something I saw and just didn’t get a good photo of. Much of the photography I post would come under the heading of ‘mediocre’. Not bad, but not really ‘portfolio’ stuff. I’m happy posting it to Flickr, but would feel bad about uploading it to 500px. It would lower the tone of the site, and I don’t want to do that.

It would be good to have somewhere to point someone who doesn’t already know my photography, to show what I have done. The best pictures I’ve taken. Like a portfolio, rather than introducing someone to my most recent photos, which may happen to be a bit, well, crappy.

It’s certainly good to have somewhere to share the photos I’m taking day-to-day. Some are better than others, but I don’t want to only share the very best. I want to show people the reasonably decent stuff too.

I also sometimes want to share photos that really aren’t very good. I may have spent an hour trying to get a shot of a swift flying past our window, and failed, so I want to share the blurred black shape that was the best shot I managed to get, to tell the story. Maybe there was an interesting bit of street art, and I want to show it, but screwed up the one photo I took. I still want to be able to show these off, but perhaps don’t want people thinking I’m actually happy with this sort of shot.

500px is pretty good for that first category, for showing off those portfolio pieces that you’d want to show anyone while modestly saying “Well, you know, I dabble a little in photography – never really taken anything good. What these old things? Well, that’s very kind of you, but…”

Flickr is good for the second category. It doesn’t show the photos off well enough for the first category, though, and the default view is just your n most recent photos. Sometimes, my last few photos weren’t very good. It has a bit of a work-around for the final category. I’ve seen some people who will post their single best photo from a set as an actual public photo, then post several more as private photos, so other users don’t see them. They then add comments to the public photo, with small versions of the other photos. People can see all the photos if they want to, but the photostream only contains the very best. Neat trick, but only works in some circumstances, and it’s extra work. It also means people you can’t link to many of your photos, and people can’t comment on them.

For the third category, the really rather bad photos, I just upload them with the rest, but I don’t really like to.

The obvious answer would be to use 500px for what it does well, and Flickr for what it does well, and either compromise Flickr with the bad shots, or stick them somewhere else – maybe even leaving them on the hard drive, tale untold. One problem with that is that I’m lazy. I can export a batch of pics to Flickr quite easily. I can upload there directly from my iPhone for pics taken there. Adding another step to send a couple of the best each time to a different site is likely to get put off, and never done. If I also upload them to Flickr, they’ll be in more than one place, which doesn’t feel right to me. If I don’t, then the majority of people, who will only look on Flickr, won’t ever see my best photos.

I think the more practical answer for me is to keep using Flickr, and live with its faults. Maybe something will come along that beats it firmly enough to take over, but the number of users Flickr has causes a lot of momentum. Maybe Flickr will get the work put into it at some point to sort out its problems, and really bring it up to date. Unfortunately, the former is looking more likely than the latter these days.

I recently wrote a post about my photo workflow – how I get photos from my camera to Flickr » [ | : UK, US], etc. I admitted in the post that it was a bit over-complicated for me, and that set me off rethinking it. I now, a week later, do something quite different.

If I was taking pics that I really thought needed more processing, or were going to be used for something special, I’d still go the old route. It has lots of redundancy, and gives the best quality results. I don’t intend to do a wedding again, but if I did, that’s how I’d do it (actually, I took even more precautions that day, but that’s another story). For day-to-day stuff, though, it was taking too much time and effort.

The first thing to reconsider was the quality of the captured data in-camera. I was only ever using RAW images, with the camera set to take RAW along with the lowest quality jpeg. I decided I could make do with just jpegs. The camera is faster that way, and I get lots more images on an SD card » [ | : UK, US]. They copy to the computer quicker, too. I decided to try an experiment. I shot roughly the same pic (of a cuddly zebra called Z9) on each of the three jpeg quality settings, then opened them all up in Aperture, zoomed in 1:1. I couldn’t see a difference. The lowest quality looked just as good as the highest, and was under 800kb rather than over 4Mb. So for most stuff now, I’ll use the lowest quality jpeg setting.

As for copying to my Mac » [ | : UK, US], I won’t create a folder, copy the pics, then import them into Aperture. I now plug in the camera with a cable sitting on my desk ready, run Aperture, turn on the camera, and import the pics directly. It means the pics are stored in the Aperture library, but I’m ok with that. I’m letting go of a bit of control for a lot of convenience and speed. They can be moved out again later if I want to. Also, because there’s no RAW conversion to do, Aperture doesn’t seem to take anywhere near as long to process the images once they’re imported.

I’m also making a bit more use of some Aperture » [ | : UK, US] presets I’ve downloaded from various sources, which gives me some of the fun of quick filter effects that I’m used to in iPhone » [ | : UK, US] apps. Exporting to Flickr still takes a while, but it’s just left to run, and the results do look good.

In the end, I’m paying almost nothing in lost image quality, at least as far as I can see; and I’m gaining a lot of time and ease. I’ve only really tried it once with a real day’s photos, so it might all change again next week, but so far it feels quite liberating.

Update: See Part 2, where this all changes a week later.

This is what I do with my photos, from originally taking the shot with my DSLR (a Nikon D90 » [ | : UK, US], though this pretty much all applies to any camera using memory cards), through copying the files to the computer (iMac » [ | : UK, US]), to importing them into my editing and cataloging software (Apple Aperture » [ | : UK, US], though much of it would probably apply in a similar way to iPhoto, Lightroom » [ | : UK, US] and others). It may not be the best way to do these things, though it works for me. I suspect, if anything, it tends towards a bit too much safety, and puts too much time and energy into doing things the ‘right’ way, making it all too time-consuming. I’m photographing as an amateur, though, and losing a day’s shooting won’t cost me in real cash. It might be too little safety if you’re shooting weddings for money.

I’m not saying anyone should copy all this, but there might be some ideas here if you’re interested in this sort of workflow geek-out.

Camera

I use 8Gb SD cards. They’re big enough to fit all I’m generally likely to shoot in a day, but still fairly cheap. I shelled out a bit more for a reasonably fast branded card this time, though I’m never entirely sure how much difference it makes. Figures from DPReview suggest it’s worth it if you value performance – my D90 can take pics faster with a faster card. I’ve only once ever filled an 8Gb card and had to move on to another, when shooting a wedding. For any normal day or outing, one card is way more than I need, even shooting RAW all the time.

I use a single card, to avoid the inconvenience of having to stop and change. My dad has always preferred to use two or three smaller cards for a day of shooting, so one accident or faulty card can’t lose everything. I’ve never had such a loss, so I don’t worry about it. I’ll probably regret that the first time I do lose a card full of images, but I used to hate having to stop and swap cards around back when cards were low-capacity and expensive.

Reading the Card

My camera mounts as a camera, not a mass storage device, which I don’t like. For that reason, I prefer to take the card out, and use a separate card reader. If the camera mounted like a card reader or USB memory stick, I’d probably just plug it in and use it that way. The card reader I use is the one built into the front of my printer. No reason: it’s just there, and it works ok.

Folder(s) for Images

I have a Photos folder. Inside this, I create a new folder, named for the date, and a very short description of the ‘event’, in the format ‘yyyy-mm-dd ‘. If I took a few pictures whilst wandering around Tiverton today, the folder would be called ’2010-05-07 Photowalk Tiverton’. The dates mean the folders can be sorted easily by when the pics were taken, and the short description means I can have more than one folder per day, if there’s more than one ‘event’. I used to just use the date, but a few occasions came up where I did two very separate shoots, and didn’t like throwing them all in one folder.

Events

Events? I use the term in a similar way to the way iPhoto uses it – any collection of photos taken around the same time. ‘Photowalk Tiverton’ is a pretty common name, as is ‘Canal’. It isn’t usually much of an event. I’m not overly strict on dates. A trip with an overnight stay might still be one event to me, so I’d probably just use the date of the first day.

Why Folders?

I could just import photos straight into Aperture, and let Aperture store them in its library. There are a few of reasons why I don’t.

• Matches older folder structure – this is how I’ve kept images since before I started using Aperture.
• Performance – I can keep the Aperture library on the internal HD, which is faster, while the images are on a slower external USB drive. Aperture’s work is spread over two drives, on different busses, too, which may give some performance gains (I don’t know if it really does). I don’t have room to keep all the photos on my internal drive.
• I can have some of the same images imported into iPhoto. I don’t use iPhoto much now, but have at times. This way, the same images can be in more than one program, without duplicating the images themselves.

If you’re looking at a new setup, have plenty of space on your internal drive, and won’t use other software for the same images, you might want to just push the pics straight into Aperture, and let it handle them. I may yet move the Aperture library to an external drive, and bring the photos in to it, at a later date.

Time Machine (Backups)

Once they’re in the folder, Time Machine handles backing them up. I don’t wait for this, usually, but unless they’re ‘scrap’ images, I don’t wipe the card until I’ve let Time Machine do its thing.

Wiping the Card

Often doesn’t happen until later, or even the next time I use the camera. My D90 can format a card using just two buttons, so I generally format it rather than just deleting the images.

Aperture

I import the images into Aperture, choosing the option to leave the images in their current location. Generally, I try to leave this to finish, then leave Aperture alone for a while afterwards; preferably leaving the Mac pretty much alone, too. Aperture is memory-hungry. Importing takes a while, and Aperture can be busy building thumbnails and previews for quite a while after that. Trying to start working on images before it’s finished can be frustratingly slow. Check the status bar at the bottom of Aperture’s window to see if it’s busy – you can click there to get a window showing you what it’s up to, and how much it has to do.

Tagging and Rating

I’ve been far too lazy recently, and skipped tagging all but the best images. I’ll really regret this later, I know. The best way is to tag all the images with relevant keywords before starting to do anything else. Don’t edit, don’t rate, just add keywords. Doing a lot at once is quicker, as you can usually apply the same keywords to lots of images at once. If you do this, you’ll be able to find images much easier later – rate first, and tag only the best ones, and all the others are pretty much lost for good. In practice, I often only end up tagging the ones I consider good enough to use, which means I’ll have great trouble finding any lower quality shots later.

When I export the images later, the tags I’ve set get carried over, so they’re important for Flickr’s use as well as my own searching in Aperture.

I generally rate anything as ‘reject’ if it’s really bad – out of focus, badly exposed, or just generally bad. I also usually reject all but the best of a ‘set’ of the same image. If I took five shots in a row of the same duck, I pick the best of them, and reject the rest. I then base the stars-out-of-five rating on this rough idea:

1. Competent, or worth keeping for some reason, but not good enough to share. Also, I often give one star to images I’m going to use in a ‘Photo Construction‘ or panorama.
2. Nothing special, but worth sharing – will be uploaded online.
3. Good image.
4. One of my best.
5. One of my very best. Rarely used – I only have eight images with five stars currently in Aperture, though I haven’t gone back and rated all my old images (yet).

Exporting to Share

I switch Aperture to only show two stars and better. It’s easy then to select all, and export them together, creating a new ‘event’ set in Flickr at the same time. I use the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to do the exporting. For the little it cost, the ‘pro’ version of the plugin has been worthwhile. I believe the current version of Aperture exports to Flickr without needing a plugin, but I bought the plugin for a version that didn’t, so I haven’t really used Aperture’s own exporting feature.

Sometimes, I’ll export a few separately to add to Facebook. I usually do this with any shots containing people who I know on Facebook, or for any establishments/products/etc I ‘like’ on Facebook.

Aperture Vault

At the end of all this (or sometimes before the exports, depending how paranoid I’m feeling), I update the Aperture Vault. This is a backup copy of Aperture’s database held on another drive. There isn’t really any good reason to do this when Time Machine is backing Aperture up. I’ve always done it, though, and when I lost the contents of my internal disk, and Time Machine turned out not to have been working for a while, I was glad I had. So I keep doing it.

Current Usage

I use my D90 much less now than I used to. Most of my photos are now taken with my iPhone, often using Hipstamatic. The main advantage is that it cuts all of the above out of the process. I take a photo, wait a minute for it to process, and if I like it, push it straight up to Flickr. The phone gets backed up when I plug it in to sync. Every so often, I open Aperture while the phone is plugged in, and pull the new images into one big folder in there.

It’s a lot less organisation, less backups, and lower image quality. In return, though, it’s quicker, easier, and more immediate. That counts for a lot.

The Future

Eye-Fi have just announced that their cards will soon be able to connect to an iPhone app, and push photos from a ‘real’ camera to your phone in a few seconds. That would combine the performance, flexibility and image quality of the D90 with much of the speed, convenience and immediacy of the iPhone. It could be a winning combination for most day-to-day photography.

I switched from Flickr to using SmugMug for hosting my photos a few months ago, and it’s been a mixed experience.

The Good

• I now have all my photos on my own domain. I’m contributing content to my own site, rather than one owned by Yahoo!.
• I can run ads on photo pages. It doesn’t bring in a lot of money (barely anything, actually) but at least the money is coming to me.
• I can make the photo part of the site look like it’s really part of my own site, not just a link to someone else’s site.
• The photos are presented well, with nice big views, taking advantage of bigger screens well.
• It’s nice to be supporting a small family-run business, rather than a division of Yahoo! that could potentially get sold again any time.

The Bad

• It’s taken a lot of work to get things organised as I like them, and it’s still a bit odd. Every photo has to be in a gallery, and because I don’t think of photos in galleries, I’m ending up with lots of tiny galleries, often with only one or two photos in them.
• I can set up ‘smart galleries’, which pick up on keywords, and fill themselves automatically. I’ve used this for gathering pictures of specific things, or taken in specific places, and it’s really nice and flexible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work reliably. Photos rarely appear in the galleries they should straight away. Sometimes they never do, unless you edit the gallery settings, and save them again. It means I can’t set this stuff up then just forget about it.
• Searching works well. Sometimes. Other times, it’s frustratingly slow. At the moment, I’m looking for a picture of a cup of coffee, but every time I search, I get a ‘gateway timeout’ error.
• Although SmugMug does have some social features, it lags a long way behind Flickr. There aren’t as many features, there aren’t as many users to interact with, and the users there tend not to use the social aspects. Even without taking part in Flickr recently, I’ve had photos ‘favorited’, and had comments posted. Not a single photo has been given a ‘thumbs-up’ (or down) on SmugMug. I’ve had one comment, but that was just a stream of abuse that I deleted straight away.

The Ugly

• Since ditching Flickr, they’ve released a beta version of their new photo page, and it works much better than the old one. It solves most of the problems.
• When returning to Flickr, it’s quite startling just how quick everything is, and how it all just works.
• Flickr is cheaper. By more than any ad revenue is ever likely to bring me.

The Conclusion

I haven’t reached one yet, but ditching SmugMug and returning to Flickr is feeling increasingly likely. I like SmugMug, and there are features there, but not on Flickr, that pros probably need. I don’t. It’s making uploading photos feel more like a chore.

I’ll probably start uploading all my recent photos to Flickr again, and see how things go from there. Unfortunately, my Mac is currently out of action, waiting for a new hard drive, so I’ll have to wait until it returns.

I used to use Aperture 2 for all my photos. Recently, though, I’ve taken to only using it for pics from my DSLR (Nikon D90 » [ | : UK, US]), and using iPhoto for shots from my compact (Panasonic Lumix FX-550 » [ | : UK, US]). I’ve found myself taking many more shots with the compact, and don’t normally carry the Nikon any more.

That means that for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively used iPhoto.

When Aperture 3 appeared, it seemed to mix the benefits of Aperture with those of iPhoto, so I grabbed the trial version to have a go.

First impressions were quite good. I imported my iPhoto library, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Then I imported my Aperture library.

Except I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to now for two weeks. Each attempt means leaving it to work all day, or overnight. Every time I return, Aperture has crashed part way through. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to continue from where it left off.

There’s been an update from Apple, which addresses just the sort of problems I’ve been having, but it hasn’t helped matters for me.

I even decided to give up on that, and just import the original images again from scratch, losing all the metadata and edits. That crashed somewhere in the middle, too.

This morning, I wanted to post a picture of my breakfast. I opened Aperture 3. It decided it had to process some images and face data in the background, and wasn’t usable while it was doing that. I opened iPhoto and imported the images. Aperture finished it’s background jobs, so I told it to close. I was most of the way through editing and posting the images in iPhoto before Aperture actually got around to closing.

I gather there are some really nice improvements in Aperture 3, but so far, I can’t get to the point where I might care.

Noticings is an interesting idea for a web site. It’s based around the excellent Flickr photo sharing site. Imagine Flickr crossed with an open-ended treasure hunt. You spot things – any things – and take photos. Sign in at Noticings so they know to check for your pics. Post the pics to Flickr, and tag them ‘noticings’. They also have to be geotagged – added to the map on Flickr. Depending on how you took them and got them there, that may happen automatically, but I had to do it manually after uploading.

You then score points for the things you notice. There are a set of rules, and various ways of scoring bonus points, but they’re changing all the time as they work out what works and what doesn’t. You also have to have a little patience – things you notice are only added to the site the next day at 15:00 UTC. That also means you don’t find out about a problem until it’s too late to fix it – I tagged a photo as ‘noticing’ instead of ‘noticings’, and it cost me the points.

I’m hitting the problem that I’m not often out during daylight at the moment – winter isn’t great for photography when you have a job with ‘normal’ hours. Even when I am out, I don’t walk much during a normal weekday, but anything that encourages me to walk more has to be a good thing!

I’ve only had one ‘noticing’ so far, but it’s making me look for ‘things’ more when I’m out, and I like that change.

I’ve had my Nikon D90 for a while now, and I like it a lot. I have Nikon’s 18-200 VR lens, and both SB-600 and SB-800 flashes. I carry all of these with me every day. I use a LowePro Slingshot 200, which makes it all quite easy to carry, and keeps the camera quite quick and easy to get to. Even so, it’s a lot to carry, especially when you’re just nipping to the shops, or going to work and back.

There’s a camera in my phone (Nokia E71), but it’s awful.

I’d been thinking for a while that I’d really like a compact camera, that I could take everywhere, without needing the weight and size of my usual kit. My birthday is coming up, and my parents kindly said they’d send my birthday money early so I could spend it when I had time off work.

My first thought was a Canon Ixus. I’ve had an Ixus before, and loved it. I’ve had other Canon cameras before, and never been disappointed. It was the safe choice, and the most likely choice, but I was going to take the chance to have a look around and read some reviews.

I wanted some decent zoom range, especially at the wide end. The more zoom range the better. I also wanted it to be small. The bigger the zoom range, generally, the bigger the camera. I had some trade-off issues to work out.

The front-runner for a while was the Canon Ixus 120 IS » [ | : UK, US]. It had a reasonable zoom range, 3x, starting from 28mm. It was very small, and very nicely designed. Like almost all Ixus cameras, though, it had no manual control, and the zoom range still wasn’t great. I was finding some good recommendations for Panasonic’s Lumix range. Their ‘travel zoom’ cameras had an amazingly good zoom range for their size, but still seemed a bit bigger than I wanted.

I had a look at what our local camera shops had in stock. I really like Cameras Plus, but they didn’t have anything much of interest. J&A Cameras had a few brands in stock, and opened the cabinet for me to poke a few. I really liked the feel of the Panasonics, but didn’t quite like anything they had enough to go for it.

After a little more reading online, I was starting to feel a little frustrated. There were plenty of reasonable options, but nothing stood out. The Ixus 120 was still the best option, and I loved the way it looked, but it certainly didn’t stand out on features.

Then, I happened on a review of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX550 » [ | : UK, US]. It had a 5x zoom, starting at 25mm, which improved a bit on the Ixus. It wasn’t much bigger. The styling wasn’t quite as nice, but still looked pretty good to me – brushed metal is always a win. It had full manual control. I also wanted to use pics straight from the camera as far as possible, and it had two ‘rough’ modes that looked like they might take the sort of pics I like.

I really wanted to go somewhere and just buy it, but that didn’t seem to be an option. Nowhere seemed to actually stock it at a store. Amazon had it, though, and could deliver it the next day, so I ordered there.

It arrived the next day.

So far, it’s doing just what I wanted. The Film Grain mode takes wonderfully ‘dirty’ low-res mono shots. The Pinhole mode takes nice low-res, low-saturation shots, with lots of vignetting. In its normal modes, it takes decent quality shots.

It’s nice and small, fits well in a pocket, as well as in a very small bag, and it makes pics I’m happy to throw straight at Flickr, without processing first.

This post is part of a series of posts about switching to a Mac – here are links to all the posts:

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

Latest Update: See the ‘Update’ section at the end – a useful extra feature in DoubleTake makes it even better.

One thing that struck me as a bit odd about the whole process of switching to the Mac was that there didn’t seem to be an obvious choice for photo editing. On Windows, I’d happily used The GIMP, and loved it. I didn’t see any reason to change, until I tried actually using The GIMP on the Mac. It doesn’t run as a native app, it runs under the X11 interface. That means it doesn’t get a real menu bar, and it doesn’t look or feel like a real native app.

Things that look and feel a bit crap aren’t so jarring on Windows. On the Mac, though, it’s a different matter. The machine is beautiful. Most of the software is beautiful. Running The GIMP under X11 in the midst of all that just didn’t feel right.

Photoshop is available, but it’s expensive. Really expensive. The vast majority of the editing I do is pretty simple, so there’s just no real need to spend that much. There’s Photoshop Elements. That’s a much more reasonable price. It’s a version out of date on the Mac, I’m not sure I like the direction it’s going anyway, so a step behind isn’t a problem. The feature set isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough for me.

A while ago, I ran a little test. I had trial versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, along with a couple of good Mac native photo editors – Pixelmator and Acorn. I took an image that wasn’t very good, but worked out a few steps that would make it usable. It was a mallard. I selected the duck, inversed the selection, and desaturated the background. I then reverted the selection to the duck, and over-sharpened it to make it pop.

• In Acorn, the selection was really hard work. Feathering the selection seemed to be ineffective. The adjustments didn’t turn out well.
• Pixelmator was better, but still not great. The results took some work still, but less, and looked ok in the end.
• Photoshop was great – easy to make the selection, as if it was doing most of the work for me – and the result was nice and smooth.
• Photoshop Elements was harder than Photoshop, but not much harder. The difference was probably due to it being based on an earlier version of Photoshop.

I concluded that Photoshop Elements was the one for me.

I didn’t get around to buying it.

This weekend, I started trying to work on photos again, and happened on an article that listed some useful Mac apps for photographers.

The main thing I like to do with my photos that requires anything beyond what Aperture can handle is making what I usually call ‘Photo Constructions‘. Think of panoramas, where you take several photos of a scene, with the camera setting locked, and then stitch them together to make one big image. The usual aim is to make the joins invisible. After seeing an article in Practical Photography magazine about Michael Hallett, though, I didn’t want to hide the joins. I loved his style of rough panoramas, or Constructions. I loved his habit of including his own shadow, or even a foot, in the final work. I’d always thought that the last thing I needed, then, was software designed to seamlessly stitch panoramas together.

The article mentioned DoubleTake, though, and I decided to give it a go. It was very quick and easy to use. I threw a pile of images at it, intended for one of my Constructions. It seemed to have a pretty good idea of what to do with them. It did try to stitch them together, but seamless stitching wasn’t possible with such a rough heap of photos. I rather liked what it did with them. I rearranged them a bit, and liked the result even more. I put a few images from the same set around the merged result, and liked it a lot.

The only problem was that it tried to merge any image added to some extent. I couldn’t layer another image over an ‘empty’ part of the original (like an area of grey sky), which I like to do. I realised that I needed two things – one panorama maker, and one more general photo editor. Pixelmator was pretty good at the image editing, and DoubleTake was pretty good at making the base panorama.

I had some doubt, though. Photoshop Elements had a routine for making panoramas, and could certainly do the rest of the job perfectly well. I wanted to try it out again, but installing a new copy still knew my trial had expired. My gut feeling was that Photoshop Elements was the final version I’d get for the money, and it wasn’t a good well-written Mac app. Both Pixelmator and DoubleTake were nicely written, and felt very Mac. I installed the latest version of Pixelmator, and it gave me another chance to try it out.

DoubleTake did it’s job perfectly. Pixelmator is very fast and does it’s job well. It isn’t perfect, but a new version is due soon, free to owners of previous versions, with more features. And, it’s from a small independent developer, not from Adobe. It’s written from the start as a Mac app, not something derived from a bigger app, written primarily for Windows.

I bought licenses for Pixelmator and DoubleTake. Using the SmokingApples coupon code, I saved 20% on Pixelmator, which helped a little. DoubleTake was more expensive than I’d expected, as they seem to have decided that UK VAT is 25%, not 15%, and the Euro exchange isn’t as good as I’d remembered, but even at £20, it does a job that’s otherwise a lot of work, with ease.

I’ll know better when I’ve spent more time with them, but I’m pretty happy with my choice at the moment. They both work very nicely with Aperture, too. I can select the images I want in my basic panorama, and drag them straight from Aperture to DoubleTake on the dock. It attempts to fit them together, so I just need to tweak what it’s done. I then just click the Aperture button on DoubleTake’s toolbar to send the image back to Aperture at full resolution. From there, I can open that image in Pixelmator as the external editor, drag any further images to layer over it straight from Aperture, and save the result straight back. Aperture just shows the final image as a new version of DoubleTake’s original export.

Update

It’s a week later, and I’ve learned a little more. The developer of DoubleTake, Henrik, contacted me to let me know that it actually can build constructions without merging at all – just hit ’0′, and it stops merging images. I’ve tried it out today, and it works. I’d hoped it would let you turn off merging, and drag another image or two into place, leaving the rest still merged. What it actually does is just turn off merging completely. All the merged images un-merge themselves. Hit 0 again, and they all go back to how they were.

For doing constructions the way I always have, it can do it very quickly and easily, so it’s an even better buy than I’d thought. I may well still play with its merging functions, though, as I do like the results.

Henrik also explained about the VAT calculation. As I really should have known, EU states collect VAT at their own rate, and Danish VAT is much higher than UK VAT. PayPal displays it badly as ‘UK VAT’, but it’s being collected correctly.

I wanted some pics of a few things I’d bought while we were in Birmingham. I used the black paper the mug was wrapped in, set the camera to control a remote flash, and hand-held my SB-800 flash. I used an Apple Store bag wrapped over the flash head to diffuse the light, and left the built-in flash to fire, but at -2.0 stops so it only filled in a little. Turned out reasonably well:

For some reason, I ended up taking a few self portraits over the weekend, using handy reflective surfaces.