The Pirate's Den - © Copyright 2012 by William Beem

Before I start discussing Aperture vs. Lightroom again, I just wanted to share the photo of the Pirate’s Den today. If you wander back into Adventureland in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, you may not notice this little area as you pass it.  That is, unless you happen to find Captain Jack Sparrow out front.  He tends to stop in here when it’s time to recruit new pirates for his ship.  Odd, though.  No one ever asks what happened to the pirates he needs to replace.

Lightroom 4 (beta) Announced and Released

You may have heard that Adobe released an open beta of its next iteration of Lightroom at midnight on January 11th. I happened to be up at the time and grabbed the download while it was still fresh and hot out of the oven. Mind you, I’m an Aperture 3 user, but I’m also an Adobe Photoshop user. Either brand is fine with me, so long as the tool does what I need. Both Aperture and Lightroom are very capable products.  Each one has features that the other lacks, and it seems that new releases from either vendor try to close the gap where they lack and expand it so the other guy has to play catch-up.  There’s definitely a lot of that apparent in Lightroom 4 (beta), as there was when Aperture 3 was released.

Ultimately, my primary reason for using this type of tool is to manage my photographs. Why did I choose Aperture? It’s pretty simple.  At the time I chose, Aperture existed and Lightroom wasn’t announced. When Adobe initially announced Lightroom (with a very long beta period), I checked it out.  I’ve also checked out every other release of Lightroom and compared it to Aperture, trying to determine if there is a compelling reason for me to switch products to manage my photos.

Is There a Compelling Reason to Switch from Aperture 3 to Lightroom 4 (beta)?

Let’s start with the short answer.  No.

Is there a long answer?

Yes. Before I get into that, I want to share this video of a Google+ hangout that Matt Kloskowski conducted during the midnight launch.  I was lucky enough to join (like I said, I was still awake) to see some of the new features. Thanks to Keith Barrett for providing a live stream to those who couldn’t get in the hangout, not to mention recording it for folks to watch later.

Let’s take a look at this list of new features in Lightroom 4 (beta).

• Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
• Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.
• Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
• White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
• Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.
• Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
• Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.
• Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
• Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

From that list of nine new features, seven of them already existed in Aperture 3. The first item, Highlight and Shadow Recovery, really looks great on the demonstration.  It looks like Adobe broke the Recovery slider apart to tackle problems in different areas of an image.  Definitely a very impressive feature that Aperture doesn’t have at the moment. The White Balance Brush is another step beyond fore Lightroom, since it’s a global adjustment in Aperture.

I was actually surprised that some of these features didn’t already exist in Lightroom 3, such as e-mail.  That seems like a no-brainer to me.  However, software development often has a longer list of features than time allows.  It could be that e-mail wasn’t high on the list and never got completed before. At any rate, it’ll work in future versions of Lightroom.

Lightroom has some features that I genuinely like, including a great noise reduction tool, gradient tool and lens profiles.  None of those are reasons to switch, though. As I mentioned, I have Photoshop CS5. That comes with Adobe Camera Raw, which includes the same features in the Lightroom 3 Development module.  There is no reason to believe that Adobe won’t update ACR to be comparable with Lightroom 4 at some point.  Aside from that, I think that Aperture 3 has a better RAW conversion engine than Lightroom/ACR.  However, the differences between the two get into the pixel-peeping range and it’s not a substantial advantage.  Nobody is going to look at a finished photo and say, “Oh, dude!  You used Lightroom’s RAW conversion instead of Aperture.  You really blew it there!”  Not gonna happen.

The biggest reason I don’t think it’s worth the switch is because Adobe did nothing to improve the core competency of Lightroom as a Digital Asset Manager.  At least, not yet.  After all, this is just the first introduction of a beta product.  Adobe has included features in shipping products that weren’t in the previous beta releases. Maybe they have something in mind and don’t want to share it yet.

What Would It Take to Switch from Aperture to Lightroom?

Pay attention, my Adobe friends.  Here’s my list of obstacles you need to overcome to sway me from Aperture to your side completely.

• A Migration Tool – I have thousands of photos in my Aperture databases that are filled with metadata.  Keywords, GPS data, etc.  I don’t want to lose any of that information.  You need to provide a migration tool that takes all of my images (not to mention audio, video & PDFs) with its associated metadata, folders, projects, albums, smart albums, etc…and seamlessly translate it into your product.  I don’t expect you to convert the photo edits from Aperture Versions to Lightroom (though that would be nice), but the metadata and structure is essential and non-negotiable. It needs to be dead-stupid simple, too.  Magical.  Press this button and bibbity-bobbity-boo – you’re migrated.
• Provide a Managed Library – Your referenced catalog approach is quaint.  Aperture can also reference images in directory folders, but I prefer the Managed approach. It simplifies many operations.  If I want to backup my photos, I press a button in Aperture to save them in a Vault, right inside of Aperture.  It doesn’t waste time copying each file over and over – it makes incremental updates so backs are quick and convenient.  If I want to move my Aperture Library, I drag it and move it to another directory drive or folder and it’s good to go.  No rebuilding of catalogs or any other myriad of problems involved with separate files & folders held together by the twine of a catalog, XMP sidecars, etc.  If I want to merge a Library into another one, I can either import it in Aperture or just drag one on top of another in the Mac Finder.  Simple. I know some people actually like using a referenced catalog, but I’ve found that’s mostly due to their lack of understanding how a Library system can work.  It’s like they think keeping their photos in a Library are the photographic equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat.  Everything that someone has thrown at me explaining why their RAW files just have to be in a directory folder was bogus. They worry about database corruption and losing their images, and all sorts of imagined dangers.  Those fears are as likely as a directory corruption, which is why we all keep backups.  The benefits are plentiful & useful, and I’ve never suffered a setback.  Lightroom could benefit from providing a managed option to store data.
• Dump the Modules – What in the world was Adobe thinking when it introduced a modular digital asset manager? Such constraints are a thing of the past. An object-oriented approach in development should flow over into usability. I expect to be able to manipulate the properties and methods of any data object at any time. Again, Aperture does it.  I don’t need to be in a Library, Print or Development module.  At any time, I edit my photos. A slideshow, folder, book or print is just another container. The only variable is the selection of data objects (photos) in that collection.  I should be able to look at a book layout and decide that a photo would be better as a black & white image here, and then make the changes right there.  Hopping about from one module to another is tedious and obsolete. You could fix that issue.  You should fix that issue.
• Price Parity – Lightroom is no longer worth $300.  I think you know that, though.  I think that’s why we’ve seen so many price reductions to $150 over the past few months.  When you woke up one morning and saw that Apple dropped the price of Aperture from $200 to $79, I bet your jaw dropped.  I know mine did, because I paid full price & upgrade pricing over the years.  I missed out on all of that low-priced goodness, but no more.  Aperture 3 is a great tool, as is Lightroom.  So, why should I pay 3.8 times more money to switch to your product, particularly with the issues I listed above?  You have some stuff I like, but it’s not like you’re the only place I can get tools to manage my images.

If you want to sway me to abandon Aperture to use Lightroom, and to get those features that I truly do respect, then you need to make more of an effort.  Windows users don’t have a choice to use Aperture. Is the Mac market worthy of the effort I mentioned above?  I don’t know your analysis.  What I do know is that a lot of new users will look at the products and see price tags.  A lot of existing Aperture users will find that both price and migration issues stand in their way.  Only Adobe can address those issues.

Some Aperture users may look at other factors and come to different conclusions, and that’s fine.  For example, both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 4 (beta) now have templates for books.  There are 11 templates in Aperture.  There are 180 in Lightroom 4 (beta). Slideshows are another area of comparison with pros and cons on each side.  Aperture has a limited set of templates, but you have better options to time the slide transition to go along with music, or whatever timing you want. Lightroom 3 already had more flexibility for creating custom slideshows than Aperture, and the same is true of Lightroom’s print module.  By no means do I mean to convey that Lightroom is any kind of slouch compared to Aperture.  It’s just not compelling when I look at the core workflow, the burden of effort to migrate, and the price disparity.  I’m happy to peek fondly over the fence to see what Lightroom is doing, but it isn’t making me switch sides yet.

Endeavour Prepares for the Afterlife - © Copyright 2012 by William Beem

I didn’t plan on ever showing this photo. In fact, I didn’t plan on ever doing any processing of this photo. You see, NASA has this way of simultaneously exciting and disappointing me. For instance, I wanted to get a photo of the Space Shuttle on the launch pad. Being somewhat anal-retentive about preparation, I called up to inquire about what I’d see, since they enclose the orbiter to protect it while it’s on the pad.  However, I was assured that the orbiter would be in view on a specific day and I booked my tour to go take my photos.  The first announcement they made on the tour was that we wouldn’t see the orbiter itself, so I came home with this photo.

On the occasion of the last shuttle launch, I really wanted to photograph the rollout. Once again, I called and did my preparation in advance, filled out forms, etc.  On the day before the rollout, I called to confirm my application again and was told they gave me the wrong form.  I was very pleased to find a pleasant lady on the other side who was willing to work with me to get my application approved.  She asked me to gather some info and call her back.  I did, called back and someone else answered the phone.  I asked for the nice lady, but “someone else” killed my dreams that day by telling me there was no way they were going to approve my access for a photo., and then she hung up.

When Kennedy Space Center started including the Vehicle Assembly Building on a tour again, my friends and I signed up and went out with high expectations. The tour was, once again, less than we expected. I almost didn’t get this photo, but it worked out at the last moment before we had to leave and go to the area where you see the image above.

You could almost hear a collective gasp of disappointment. There we were in this great building with the Endeavour Orbiter before us as it was being prepared for display at New York’s Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. We were standing on a space geek’s hallowed ground with part of the holy trinity before us – one of the last orbiters…and our view was blocked by not one, but two fences.

NASA had its own trinity of protection.  First, there was a yellow painted line.  We were not allowed outside the confines of that line, and nobody went out of bounds on our tour. Just behind that line was a knee-high, bright orange plastic fence.  If you somehow got past the yellow line before one of the security people watching us could tackle you, then you had to also hop over that fence.  However, someone at NASA probably decided it was insufficient, so the next barrier was a six-foot high metal fence, as you can see at the bottom of the photo. If that fence wasn’t insulting enough, it was covered with plastic notices, signs, and other ugly obstructions of the view.  Kennedy Space Center touted that you could see one of the orbiters on this tour, but they never promised you’d get a very good look at it.

A recent news story showed the last time that Atlantis was powered down, just another step to the end of an era.  That got me thinking about these images again, and my curiosity was piqued as to how it would look after processing. I’m still heartbroken about that damn fence, but I’ve decided just part of the story.  You can go this far, no farther. Many other photographers can relate to that feeling. We all clamor for access, but only a select few can realistically achieve it. With that in mind, I was very impressed with Ali Elhajj. He wanted access and made it happen.  Check out his photos on Google+.

I’m still disappointed with my own efforts to photograph the wonderful stuff at Kennedy Space Center, but Ali gives me hope.  There’s a way to get inside, but we have to be creative and persistent.  Way to go, Ali.

Geordi's Office - © Copyright 2011 by William Beem

If I had a hard time getting a shot of the USS Enterprise’s bridge due to all the people strolling around, there was no problem setting up for this shot.  The place was practically empty. I don’t know if that’s because people didn’t know about this set existing in another building, whether it was due to an Original Series vs. Next Generation bias, or just the fact that this one didn’t have a Captain’s chair. Both of them seemed pretty cool to me.

Part of it is a geek thing, but the other part is just enjoying the colors and symmetry of the place.  I’ll never fly around the stars or fire phasers, but it’s a good place to pretend that I did – if only for a moment.

Despite the problems of updating my various iOS products to the latest operating system, I feel pretty good about something Apple announced. A new version of Aperture came out with iCloud integration.  You have to update your Mac OS before you see it in Software Updates (could be different if you bought Aperture from the Mac App Store). It’s a 1.04 GB download for iPhoto and Aperture, but it does what I’ve wanted – integrated offline backup of my photos.

Here are the prices for additional storage on iCloud:

• 5GB: Free (every iOS 5 user will get this by default)
• 10GB: $20/year (including the 5GB free, that’s 15GB total)
• 20GB: $40/year (25GB total)
• 50GB: $100/year (55GB total)

So, does this help me? Theoretically yes, practically, no. I have multiple Aperture libraries. Not a single one of them will currently fit in 50 GB of space. My largest library is 284 GB and my smallest (working) library is 192 GB.  I can squeeze a few gigs out of each one by changing the thumbnails & previews, but not enough.

At least, not initially.  You see, the reason I have such large libraries is because I have just about every shot in there. Most of those shots are never going to see the light of day.  Yes, I’ll immediately delete accidental shots of my foot, something blurry or technically unusable, etc.  However, there are always winners and losers in every batch.  Once I’ve processed the winners, why do I keep the losers?

It’s because I don’t process everything right away.  Oh, I used to be very diligent about trying to mark my keepers right away, but that fell out of my workflow.  As a result of dropping that practice, and also buying a 6 TB RAID array, I have a whopping load of images at my disposal.  It’s going to take a valiant effort to whittle them down to something usable.  Then, my library of keepers just may well fit in the space allotted by iCloud.

There’s another strategy that I’ll likely employ first, though.  Once I pick my keepers, I’ll export them to a new library and those lucky photos will be the ones that get uploaded to iCloud. That leaves me with some risk for the photos I haven’t examined yet, but it’s a start toward an integrated off-site backup.

Of course, I haven’t tried it yet.  Maybe it isn’t based upon Library.  If there’s any logic in the world of Apple, I should be able to use metadata to determine what goes in the iCloud. Building a Smart Album could be sufficient.  That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath until I see it.

With that in mind, I still feel pretty good.

What Can I Do to Improve Photoshop Performance?

As it happens, there are some very simple things you can do to make Photoshop run more smoothly. Some cost money, but many options are within your grasp without any expense at all. The first thing you need to do is visit your Performance Preferences.

A few simple changes here can improve your performance. Let’s start with your Memory Usage. By default, it’s set to use up to 70% of your RAM. Adobe claims that you can use up to 100% with no performance degradation if you’re running Photoshop in 64-bit mode and not running any other applications. Personally, I keep mine at 70% even though I have it running in 64-bit mode. There’s never a time when I’m not running another application.  I generally quit other major applications, but I need my iTunes music playing while I process.

The Photoshop Optimization section on MacPerformanceGuide.com suggests you would do well to keep your default settings, though, due to a bug on Mac OS X. Using a larger percentage of RAM could seriously degrade your performance. However, the site notes that adding more RAM is perhaps one of the best performance improvements you can make. That makes sense, since you want to eliminate reasons for the application to touch the disk. Surprisingly, too much RAM yields worse results. 24 BG seems to be the sweet spot, but 16 will do nicely. Even if you have a laptop or older system that won’t accept that much RAM, add what you can.

If you can’t add enough RAM to prevent Photoshop from needing to use a Scratch Disk, then make sure it’s using the fastest scratch disk you have. In my screen shot above, I have three disks available. The first one (checked) is my internal hard drive – a 7200RPM 1GB drive. The next is my RAID array, connected by FireWire 800, and the last one is a USB drive. While the multiple disks working on the RAID array may be faster than a single drive, the slow connection of FireWire or USB rules out those other drives.  Ideally, using a Solid State Drive to boot and use for a Scratch Disk would yield the best performance. Check your settings to ensure you’re using your fastest disk.

While you’re doing that, check how much usage is on that disk.  Hard drives give their best performance when they are less than 50% full. If your fastest drive is 80% full, it may not yield your fastest results.  Better to move some of those files elsewhere to get your best performance.

The History & Cache section has three buttons with presets to change the fields below them.  Ignore them. You can figure out the best settings by yourself.

History States are basically the number of times you can Undo changes while editing in Photoshop. 20 is the default, but it can go up to 1,000. Keep in mind that every one of those states takes up resources – reducing the amount of RAM you have available for other actions.  Use that RAM for 1,000 history states and you increase the likelihood that Photoshop will use your scratch disk – which is much slower than RAM.

Cache Levels also use resources, but it can help speed up redraw times. Think of it as an investment. If your resource is holding something that you’re working on at the moment, Photoshop doesn’t have to go back to load something from disk to redraw it.  According to Adobe’s Tech Note to Optimize Performance, this setting should be greater than the default value (4) for images over 10 Megapixels. If you’re editing images from a modern DSLR, that’s almost certainly the case if you load the full size image for editing.

Cache Tile Size comes with the lowest default setting (128K), which is almost certainly the worst choice for Photoshop. Mac Performance Guide notes that this setting is critical to performance. Think of your Cache Tile Size as a bucket that fetches bits from your Cache Levels.  A smaller bucket means the system has to make more trips to get everything it needs. Help it out.  Give it a bigger bucket and select 1028K.

These are just a few tips, but they can give you some interesting improvements.  You should check out the Adobe Optimize Performance note and the other recommendations from Mac Performance Guide for more ideas, even if you run on a Windows machine.

Happy motoring Photoshopping.

It turns out that he was converting his Canon sRaw files to Adobe DNG. Aperture supports DNG, but it seems that not all DNG is equal. That’s kind of ironic, because incompatibility between RAW files and software is exactly the problem Adobe claimed it was trying to prevent with the DNG (Digital Negative) file format.

The logic from Adobe sounds rational. RAW files from various vendors are proprietary, and some programs may not support all file formats. The DNG specification was supposed to be a public archival format for digital camera RAW files. What could go wrong?

Apparently, not all RAW file formats get converted to the same DNG format, and that’s what bit my friend in the ass. His Canon sRaw files were converted into something called Linear DNG. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but my research shows this problem has bitten people for a few years now when they tried to switch from one DAM to another. If you’re using DNG, which kind do you have? The difference seems to depend upon the type of sensor in your digital camera.

• Raw DNG or CFA DNG (colored Filtered Array): contains raw image data + added meta data and is not demosaiced. This Raw format is (usually) 4 channels coded with 12 bits (sometimes 14 bits) color depth.
• Linear DNG: contains RGB image data and is demosaiced. Linear DNG format is 3 (or more) channels coded with 16 bit color depth. Due to the bit depth coding, the size of a linear DNG is larger and much more important than a Raw DNG.

The good news for my friend is that his version Of DNG has more color depth than the other.  The bad news is that he’s stuck in Lightroom.  You see, this isn’t merely an issue of Aperture not supporting all aspects of DNG.  DxO users have also discovered that their DNG files aren’t quite on par with Adobe’s results.

How universal is a file specification if a number of programs don’t support it, or only partially support it? On the other hand, what incentive does a software vendor have to remove RAW file support that it’s already implemented? The theory of DNG is that we can’t trust camera vendors to be around to support their own file formats in 50 years or so.

• Nikon was founded in 1917.
• Canon was founded in 1937.

They’re still supporting their RAW files. Adobe fails to mention the different DNG file formats on its DNG page.  Of the choices before me, I think I’ll stick with the original RAW files. They seem to have better support than their supposed universal replacement.

Since my friend didn’t keep his RAW files after conversion to DNG (why would he?), he’s pretty much left to export as TIFF or PSD conversions if he wants to move to Aperture.  More likely, his old images will stay trapped in Lightroom and he can start working with his new images in Aperture using the original RAW format. At least that way, he has a better chance of migrating later if he feels the need.

Honestly, I just kind of wanted to watch to see how this worked out.  Trey Ratcliff & Lisa Bettany were at the SmugMug HQ and we got a wonderful tour of some art in the office, as well as some interesting conversation with other photographers. Since Google+ Hangouts are limited to 10 people, Keith Barrett simultaneously broadcast the video stream. 

I had my own minor technical difficulties. Trey introduced everyone and asked them to provide a little background. When my turn came around, my microphone apparently wasn’t kicking out enough juice to be heard. Gentleman that he is, he came back towards the end and I’d pumped up the gain, so I can only hope it was audible.

Now that I’ve had my first experience, I can see why others are talking about this feature in Google+ that seems unrivaled in other social media platforms. Most of my photography friends are spread out around the USA, so maybe we can get a few Hangouts going to catch up.  Twitter and Facebook still have their place, but they don’t fill the immediacy of a moment like a live video chat.

If you haven’t signed up for Google+ and would like an invitation, please let me know and I’ll send you one.  You gotta try this stuff. Our hosts were gracious, the other members were nice people and I found some talented new (to me) photographers to follow.

That was certainly a mistake.  My old machine is now on its knees.  While I have some new features, I’m disappointed to find that old features no longer function. Some are simple things, like keyboard shortcuts to move Safari to the top or bottom of a page.  Some other shortcuts that I liked now seem to perform different functions.  Using the letters J or K to move back and forth in Google Reader now switch me to different web sites in Reader, rather than different article.

I actually liked Spaces.  I kept four open all the time and I knew which applications resided where – meaning I could hit Ctrl-3 to go to Aperture, or I could use Ctrl-Arrow to move around in predictable fashion.  Mission Control still allows me to use Control-Numbers for spaces, but not for full-size applications.  Also, I can no longer use the arrows to move up and down, meaning that everything has to slide once space at a time from left to right.  It’s a step backward, in my opinion.

Some things just don’t seem to work.  Nik Viveza 2 launches, but they it won’t accept any input.  I couldn’t even cancel out of it, which meant that I had to Force Quit Photoshop.  You know that marketing speech that Apple gave about never having a need to Save your documents again?  Yeah, not true for Photoshop.  All of my work was lost when I hit Force Quit. Fortunately, Color Efex Pro seems to work just fine. There are other quirks, though.  Sometimes in WordPress the Media page won’t insert a graphic.  I have to quit that and start over, and then it may work (or may not).

You notice there’s no photo or graphic with this post?  It’s not that I didn’t try.  I downloaded a Mac OS X Lion image from Apple’s PR site.  It comes in a TIFF file, which I then resized and saved as a JPG.  It uploaded just fine to WordPress and I see the thumbnail in the media gallery.  It won’t show up in the post, though.  Instead, I just get a broken link.  Thinking that I made an error – since this has never happened before with an image – I deleted it and uploaded it again.  Got the same result.  Screw it, I’m not going to fight with it anymore tonight.

Multitasking has become the worst problem of all.  My iMac has 4 GB of RAM, and that was sufficient to run Safari, iTunes and Aperture before without any delay.  Not anymore.  Once I launched Aperture, my machine became very unresponsive.  I tried to quit Safari and Aperture – it took three minutes per app just to respond enough to quit.

If Apple’s intention is to make my machine suck so much that I have to buy a new one, they’ve succeeded.  It’s really sucking over here right now.  Mind you, I had plans to buy a new iMac and load it up with 16 GB of RAM.  It’s just that I didn’t plan on buying it TODAY.

There’s no doubt that an upgrade will come out sooner or later to fix problems.  Patches from Apple, patches from Nik, and probably some other software vendors are no doubt working their way through the process.  Until then, I’ll hobble along.

Learn from my mistake, though.  Wait a while.  This is not Apple’s finest upgrade at all.

Portfolio Page - © Copyright 2011 by William Beem

Some of you may recall that I decided to ditch SmugMug back in May and search for a better portfolio.  Today, I’m rolling out the solution to my problem.

To be fair, it’s a bit more of a Beta than a final release.  I’m still learning the software and deciding upon galleries and images.  Right now, I’ve added a gallery for People and Places.  Both have too many images, as I’m still finding it difficult to cut my own work.  I endeavor to be ruthless, but it turns out that I’m too charming.

Just to recap, I decided not to renew my SmugMug account because I felt that it wasn’t worth the money.  The renewal for my plan was $150 per year. When I looked at the way it displayed my images, I really wasn’t happy.  The standard themes were uninteresting, the user interface was cumbersome and inconsistent. It lacked the social features of Flickr or other photo sharing communities.  SmugMug offers a means to sell photos, but that isn’t one of my concerns.  Even if it were, I could use Fotomoto to integrate with my site with more control.

One of the most important factors to me was that I didn’t want to send people away from my site in order to view my photos. It just seemed like a bad practice, particularly if you’re in business. Why would you send people to another site where they can get lost looking at photos from thousands of other people, rather than keeping them focused upon your images? Some people are flocking to 500px.com now as a portfolio because it’s full of great images. That seems incredibly stupid to me. It’s full of distractions from your images.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the art that appears there, but 500px is pushing its own brand, not yours. The same is true of SmugMug or any other site.

Knowing that I wanted to host my own portfolio, the next challenge was to find something that would allow me to present my images the way that I want to show them.

It will be bold! Dramatic!  - Edna Mode

That’s exactly what I wanted – something bold and in your face. Although my current theme for WordPress has some gallery features, none of them were very satisfying to me. It essentially embeds your images in a lightbox or Flash gallery.  Neither is really bold, and Flash rules out folks who may visit my site on an iPad or other iOS device. I knew I’d need something else.

A plug-in seemed like a possibility, but I never found one that really worked as I envisioned.  There are plugins like FancyBox that create another layer on your screen to show large images.  However, I don’t find that interface compelling for a viewing multiple photos, and it also has issues for iOS users. Other plugins created galleries, but none of them had an interesting look.

The answer turned out to be a new WordPress site with a different theme – strictly limited to duty as a portfolio host. After searching through a number of options, I decided there were a couple of themes from Graph Paper Press that best suited my needs. Much like Elegant Themes, they use a subscription model.  You pay annually for access to any and all of their themes, plus support.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t just switch my current theme to Graph Paper Press, it’s because I find that this theme has more strengths for the blog. I’m picking best of breed tools for the job at hand.  Both can support words and images, among other blog tasks, but each excels in a given area.

In the future, I’ll add other categories, change out the photos, and perhaps make some other changes.  In the mean time, I’d appreciate your feedback. There are things that I don’t like – such as the Info page that shows right on top of the images when a gallery starts.  You can click a button at the bottom to hide it, but that shouldn’t be necessary.  I’ll have to work a bit harder to get those nits ironed out.

In the mean time, feel free to check it out from the Portfolio link on the main menu.

UPDATE:

There’s good news and bad news.  The bad news is that some problems developed because I created a new WordPress installation on a folder below this one, so that probably wasn’t a bright idea.

Fortunately, the good news outweighs the bad news.  I created a new subdomain for my portfolio (rather than a sub-folder of the same domain). It means my portfolio moved by address, and I’ve updated the links to get folks there.  That seems to have resolved my WordPress conflict.

The other good news is that I discovered my error that caused some translucent text to appear over the images, so that’s gone now. Now that the mechanical issues are out of the way, maybe I can start concentrating more in the images.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Welcome to Google+

I spent part of the holiday weekend trying out Google’s latest attempt at Social Media – Google+. To be honest, I had little faith that I’d be impressed because of my experiences with Google’s previous attempts. Google Buzz was downright repulsive to me. It’s not just Google, either. Other attempts at Social Media have failed so frequently that I often expect failure. On top of that, Google just seems like a creepy company to me. I like the search engine and blog reader, but I’ve never been comfortable with Google itself.

As it turns out, I’m pleasantly surprised with Google’s effort this time. Google+ seems to have some compelling features. It’s not perfect, but it has a good beginning. Most services generally start out with a core idea and add features as they mature.

Many other blogs are writing about the features of Google+ and how they work, so I don’t really want to review Circles, Hangouts and Sparks.  You can visit the site and see videos that show how they work. Suffice it to say that I think they’re all good beginnings and seem to work fairly well. What intrigues me is how the overall service may encroach on other Social Media sites.

Photo Sharing

Unlike Flickr or other photo sharing sites, you aren’t presented with an overwhelming collection of photos from strangers.  You see photos from people in your Circles – people that you’ve chosen to follow. I’m not sure if there is a feature to see photos from unknown people outside your circles, but I’m not missing that option right now.  To be honest, I’m tired of belonging to a plethora of groups on Flickr divided by topic.  I like this approach of seeing photos from people who I want to follow.

Photos displayed on Google+ are large and beautiful. The uploading process is effective & simple: Once you create an album, you simply drag and drop your photos and they automatically upload. Viewers can click on a tab to examine basic EXIF info to show the model of camera, exposure settings and histogram of a photo. You can tag photos, or if you feel like a snitch – report them as abuse. So far, I’ve not seen any photos that would fall into that category, but I try to choose decent people in my Circles.

Your initial view of photos shows a timeline of large thumbnails from your Circles, indicating who posted the photo.  There’s also a little tag indicating the number of comments on each photo. Click on it to see the much larger version – I’m guessing 1024px width, plus comments to the side and a filmstrip below. Either side of the photos show arrows to move back and forth in the film strip.  Click on the bar separating the photo from the comments and it will give you a larger view without the comments.

If you have an Apple Magic Mouse, be careful. More than once I’ve zoomed through photos as my hand accidentally brushed the mouse.  The photos react very rapidly to touch input. They don’t have an iOS app yet, but it’s already working on Android devices (no big surprise). If Google is smart enough to get an app for this service on all the major platforms, they could be a serious threat to sites like Instagram.

Instead of a “Like” button as featured on Facebook, Google+ has a +1 button.  The downside is that it’s only available when you view the photos in your Stream, and not in any of the specific photo views. That makes no sense to me at all.  I want to look at a large version of the photo before I decide to vote on it, but then there’s no +1 button in that view.  I hope that’s an oversight that gets corrected.

I read the Terms and it looks like Google understands that your photos are your photos.  Once you share them, other people can also share them, but there’s no big Copyright or Usage rights grab here.  Google obviously has a section that give it rights to display your images – it couldn’t operate the service without those rights.  Overall, I’m not terrorized by posting images there.

Circles & Suggestions

OK, I lied.  I’m going to talk a little bit about Circles. The concept is that you can filter people by putting them in a Circle.  People may belong in more than one Circle, since the people you know may fit into more than one part of your life. You start with a basic set of Circles – Friends, Family, Following & Acquaintances. I added one for Photography, since that’s a big part of my interest online. Maybe you want a Circle for co-workers, and another one for Former Co-Workers.  You get the idea – you can make up your own ideas of how to categorize the people you know and drop them in the right Circle.  It’s simple and effective.  If you want to make a change, you can delete someone from a Circle. You add who you want.  Others may add you, but that doesn’t mean you have to add them.  Think of it more as a Follow relationship like Twitter, rather than a Friend relationship of equals on Facebook.

That’s important, because you have the power to decide who receives the messages you send. It could be Public to Extended Circles, just your Circles, to an e-mail address, etc.  If I have something I only want to share with my Family, then I can just drag that Circle to the bottom of the box when I choose to Share something.  It doesn’t go out to everyone. Essentially, this means that Circles can act as a Distribution List. You can also click on incoming information by Circle, or by all of your inputs.

If you’re one of those folks who likes to add everyone in creation to your Social Media, you’re going to have a lot of input. I view it this way.  People who want LOTS of followers have a message they want to get out, but it’s practically impossible for them to keep up with all the input, which means it’s unlikely they care what you have to say.  I could be wrong, but that’s the way I see it.  My use of Social Media is mostly as a consumer.  Therefore, I don’t add every person I encounter. Some people have a message I want and others don’t. Sometimes it may be due to the fact that I’m at my limit. On Flickr, I have multiple accounts due to different interests, and I pay attention to a given account when I’m interested in input on that subject.  If I tried to manage it all on one Twitter stream, my head would explode.  Circles on Google+ may give me tools to manage those streams of input, but there’s still the collective whole that would be nothing but clutter if I went that way.

One thing I don’t see right away is how to manage something like a Facebook Fan Page.  I presume you’d just need a different Google account, but that’s a bit more cumbersome to use with Google than Facebook, in my experience.  I’ll have to play with it to see how it works out, though.

Google+ gives you a lot of suggestions of people to add to your Circles.  Some of them are very relevant, such as people who’ve been added to the Circles of people in one of my Circles. On the other hand, some are completely irrelevant to me.  For example, I have no interest in following Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg.  Google+ keeps presenting them to me as people to follow.  Fortunately, you can Remove them from the Suggestions.  Essentially, Larry Page is now hidden from my view.  If I want to find and add him later, I can do it.  It’s just that I don’t want to have to keep reviewing the same irrelevant people while looking for someone closer to my interest.

Closing Thoughts

The service is new and in limited release. One way to get inside is to know someone on the service and have them Share something to your e-mail address.  It doesn’t happen right away. In fact, sometimes the e-mail may not get to you until the next day because it goes through Google’s service.  Once you receive it, you may still have to wait a day or so before you’re included. That just seems to be the way it is.  If you’d like to find someone to send you an invitation, Trey Ratcliff has a great system on his Facebook Page – Just post your e-mail address on one of the comment threads where people are offering to help.  Once you get in, go back to the page and start a thread to help others get an invitation.  It’s a nice way to help the community and I’ve met some cool people by participating.

You have nothing to lose by giving it a try. It doesn’t cost anything. New people are coming on every day.  I expect many of the familiar faces, vendors and other folks you like to follow will give it a try.  Much to my surprise, Google didn’t screw the pooch this time. I’m willing to participate a bit longer and see how it goes.  If you’re interested in following me, just search for William Beem on Google+.