Seen on the way in to work this morning. Only had my Canon Powershot with me… so, it’s just another reminder to always bring the big camera with big glass at all times.

I’ve done some more work on the Aperture Importer (background here), and the latest is attached below. It now does some reformatting of keywords that get split (e.g., “San” and “Diego” can be merged to “San Diego” as a keyword.) It’s hacky and ugly. You’ll have to set up your own keywords for this kind of merge.

I’ve found a couple of apparent Aperture bugs.

If I tell Aperture to import an empty directory from Applescript, it’ll stall and lock up Aperture.

Worse, I find that if I do a large import (more than, say, 5,000 images), Aperture grabs a bunch of memory that never gets released. Well, Aperture itself doesn’t grab the memory, but it causes the kernel_task “process” to allocate a big pile of real memory, which it seems to hold on to until reboot.

It’s a cumulative thing: if I import 5,000 images, the memory gets grabbed. Then, if I do another 5,000 image import, the memory usage doubles. Thinking it would be handled by swapping, I didn’t worry, and continued. This was a bad idea. Aperture locked up, but so did the whole OS. The last thing I could see from top was that 100% of my real memory was allocated, that less than 256M of swap was in use. I had at least 50GB of disk free, so that wasn’t the problem.

Anyway, for safety, if you use this import script, I recommend rebooting between import sessions. Yeah, it’s voodoo, but it’s guaranteed to work.

Aperture Importer Update

Ever since I saw a “how to” in Popular Photography back in the early 80s, I always thought it would be cool to make my own super-macro lens by mounting an ordinary lens backwards.

So, on Saturday, using 58mm skylight filter, a dremel tool, hot glue gun, and camera body cap, I created a reverse mount. Into this contraption, I inserted the kit lens (28-70mm) that came with my Nikon N-80, and, tried it out on the Nikon D-70. Obviously, autofocus and automatic exposure are out of the question (although it might be interesting to run wires across from the lens’ connector to the camera. Hm… maybe it’s not out of the question!), so it entails a lot of manual twiddling of focus and looking at histograms.

It’s too much magnification (even at 70mm) to hand-hold, and, even with my old tripod, it’s hard to get a sharp image. Also, with this kind of macro, there’s not a lot of depth of field to play with. I started by taping the aperture lever at full open, and didn’t get dramatically different results when I allowed it to stop down somewhat. I tried to figure out the optics of the situation, but quickly realized that with a variable aperture and a collection of lenses, I would need to go back and hit the books to understand the physics.

Here’s the stinger of a wasp, who was found dead on the driveway:

Saturday was the Grand View Krewe’s annual Mardi Gras extravaganza at Venice Beach.

I took close to eight hundred pictures. I’m currently sorting, refining, color-correcting, cropping, etc. They’ll be available in the webbwerks.com gallery soon! You can see pictures from 2003 and 2004 there now … If I get my act together, I’ll post up pictures from not just this year, but the last three years…

While you’re waiting, check out some music by The Gumbo Brothers.

Well, it’s an impossible problem. My digital cameras all have high-speed “spray-and-pray” modes, which are the only reasonable response to the challenge of taking candid pictures of children. One shoots a buffer full of pictures, and in one of them (if one’s lucky), all of the kids will have their eyes open, there will be no fingers stuck up noses, and, if one’s really lucky, there will be nice expressions on all of the visible faces.

But the downside is the proliferation of pictures. One develops a certain Tommygun mentality, and, hey, disk space is cheap. Composition’s easier in Photoshop than through the viewfinder.

In short, I have a digital picture management problem. Apple’s iPhoto is a good start, but it can’t handle the quantities of images I’m throwing at it. Recently, I’ve been using an evaluation version of iView Multimedia’s iView Pro. It seems good, with lots of options and configurability. I’d rather not spend $200, but if I can learn to use it adequately, it’d be worth it. And I certainly don’t have time to write my own (witness the moribund Samuel’s Last Attempted Gallery [SLAG] web application that’s never made it past the schema design phase).

I’ll report here eventually what I find.