Noah Aboussafy

Seriously, what is a child going to do with all those pockets?

I’ve been dreaming about getting a pair of fast zooms (f/2.8) namely Nikon’s 24-70mm and the 24-70mm; and if I had some cash left over (hah) the 70-200mm VR II. But I’ve been doing some analysis of my photo library and I’ve made some interesting observations.

In the 75 days since boxing day 2009 (to avoid Christmas day photos) I’ve taken 559 Photos (that weren’t so bad that I deleted them). Of those 559 photos. 74% (415) were taken at apertures wider than f/3.5. Shockingly 70% (392) were taken wider than f/2.8! All of the that 70% were taken at f/2.5 or less.

I guess that means that if I’d been using the every so convenient fast zooms, I’d have compromised my photos in some small way. Of course in reality I’d probably have gotten many nice photos that I didn’t get because I was using a prime or a slow zoom. Sure a slow zoom with VR can take stable photos at a party, but the DOF is too large and doesn’t isolate people well.

It’s just some interesting food for thought.

I’ve been sorting old photos today and came across some of my old Mk II VW Golf “Charlie”, it’s feeling more like spring and I miss it quite a bit.

Charlie as he will always be remembered

Just after I lowered the suspension and replaced the grille.

The interior, 15 years old and as clean as the day he rolled off the assembly line in Mexico.

How he was when I got him, bone stock and automatic, but in great shape.

It’s been 19 days since my post about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 vs. Apple Aperture 3 and in that time I’ve changed my mind quite a bit. I’ll admit I didn’t want to like Aperture, let’s face it, 2 wasn’t great, and I didn’t find it intuitive and thus didn’t give it a fair shake. So I’m going to be a good sport and give it a complete trial, again and write a new article.

This change of heart has been primarily the result of being informed about some of Apertures paradigms and the location of options I wasn’t able to find in my short trial; and Lightroom (and I gave it a lot rope because it’s “beta”) being insanely buggy and having a frustrating user interface. It looks good, the workflow makes sense but under use it ends up being unpleasant. I don’t know if Aperture is better yet really, but given some of the things I’ve learned since my article, it looks positive.

Let’s hope Aperture is higher quality than Apple’s hardware. My hard drive is making noise, it’s not even a two months old. This better not be another lemon like my MacBook Pro was…

Update:

Two hours later, I’m not pleased with Aperture 3. I’ve been trying settings in Aperture 3 for two hours trying to get the same or better results as LightRoom (which is open and zoomed to the same level while doing this so I can flip back and forth.) The raw processing is brutal, resulting in muddy images with unnatural color and an indescribable “bad” quality. The noise reduction is little more than a masked blur, and doesn’t seem to do anything more than this to treat chromatic noise, which is the most unpleasant kind. Also it’s considerably slower than LightRoom at virtually everything.

Positive points of course are Faces, Places and everything else to do with asset management really. It’s not bad for organizing snaps of your life, like I said before. However I already have iPhoto ‘09 for that. Regardless of this, Aperture 3 is more capable than I thought and I will continue to work with it to better understadn it. It’d probably be fine if you didn’t actually care about the fine detail of your images. Which I guess I shouldn’t I almost never print my pictures and people only see them on Flickr and Facebook. Whatever, I do care, and some day I’ll print stuff to put on my walls.

Lightroom is still buggy in unpredictable ways and many interface element’s are way smaller than they should be. For example (this is just one) when picking what to import you use little check boxes by the images, the problem is the check boxes are very very small meaning you have to move your mouse very slow. I couldn’t figure out any kind of a key shortcut for this. This makes importing annoying. But this problem shows up in other places. They picked a good looking interface over functional, it’s easy to fix, just make the button’s hot spot bigger without making the graphic bigger. Although maybe their toolkit doesn’t do that.

Today I wanted to go take some pictures, but my Nikon D90 + 35mm f/1.8 wouldn’t fit in my pocket so I couldn’t just go wander around in the dark with it (I don’t live in the best neighborhood). I was quite sad.

I though, man I really wish I had a small high quality point pocket camera (something like a Canon G11), but instead of working towards that, tomorrow I’m going to buy a Nikon F75, because it’s a good deal, a really really really good deal.

Another very capable camera (it’ll even work with my VR lens) but it’s not really any more portable. Also I can’t change my mind now, the guy sounded really nice and I don’t want to tell him I’d buy something them not. Oh well hopefully I’ll have some fun new film photos soon.

I’m aware silver plastic cameras are lame, but it’s a good enough camera at a low enough price that I can overlook that.

Our last day, we spent the morning just walking around Canmore, looking at art, drinking some great coffee from Beamer’s Coffee Bar (the one on 7th Ave) and eating fudge from Black Rock Fudge And Gift.

While having lunch in a Rotary International park in Canmore by the Civic Center we discovered Canmore’s dark secret! Apparently they’re so into human sacrafice they have a public alter.

Here is Jill demonstrating the operation of the alter.

On day three we went to the Banff Park Museum National Historic Site, basically it’s an old building filled with a bunch of questionably lifelike taxidermy.

Jill particularly liked this display of Warblers.

The building is designed to be lit entirely with natural light as it was built before electricity. I suspect the soot from oil lamps wouldn’t do good things to the taxidermy.

This is one of the fine examples of crap taxidermy. Bears don’t look like that. Maybe the taxidermist had never seen a bear… regardless of the reason, this poor bear’s ears are in the wrong place, it’s hair has been cut, it’s eyes messed up, it’s brow is wrong and the mouth is a train wreck. I suspect the taxidermist took some liberties, and ended up anthropomorphizing the bear and portray it as the dim witted savage he he imagined it to be. Maybe he tried to make the bear look like a depressed and argumentative alcholic bear.

Jill really liked the bats too.

I’wasn’t impressed with Jill asking why she couldn’t zoom… while using a 35mm f/1.8 prime.In retrospect I’m even less impressed that the camera decided to fire the flash. It doesn’t want to go under 1/60s, regardless of the fact that it’s a 35mm lens, and it decided to use f/2.8 and ISO800 instead of using the distance information to determine that f/1.8 would have been fine, and if still too dark it could have gone as high as ISO 1600.

We stopped on the side of the highway to take some pictures, unfortunately none of them really turned out because the vantage point was terrible at the “lookout” and I wasn’t willing to stand in the middle of the highway; but we had fun.

Still the view was pretty good and I even enjoyed it while I was packing up. That’s an Induro AB2 tripod.

After our walk in the canyon we decided to go to the Cave And Basin National Historic Site. It’s the birth place of Canada’s National Parks System you know. They’re also working hard to protect cute little endangered snails there.

Taking pictures in dark places with a flash is funny. Check out the pupils! I think my face was like that because I was trying to hold the camera and aim the lens in the dark.

These are long exposures inside the cave.

In the main courtyard where the hot springs pool used to be (it’s now a pond) there was this great wringer on a brilliant turquoise wall.

There was this staircase to/from the boardwalk and I thought it was quite funny, apparently all the people use the same size.

Outside the main entrance was this ancient looking drain, it’s all corroded, mineral caked and growing moss.

On the second day we went for a little walk to the lower and upper falls in Johnston Canyon, as always we started by reading the informational display… as we always do. Check out that sweet walking stick.

Early on she was still full of energy and happy to be carrying two thermoses and lunch.

Awww so happy together.

Much like everything else on this walk, it was far more interesting in person.

This rock formation was very cool… in person.

Jill was getting a bit tired at this point.

Especially of having her picture taken.

But she carried on! Even letting me take a picture that would include the jeans she borrowed from me (to fit over her various long underwear and sweat pants.

Then something caused a fight.

So we stopped to take pictures of it.

That ended the fight.

It’s not really just two waterfalls there are a few on the way, I guess they’re the extra super duper lower falls.

They make a good excuse for a tired fat man to take a rest.

I find it very interestring the face of the falls stay frozen and the back melts.

I was done resting and wanted to contine on, but Jill was still tired so she used the camera as an excuse to wait longer.

So I took another picture of her.

Oh look more falls.

Then poof you’re at the lower falls.

Two years ago the vale of ice was so thin you could see all the water moving behind it.

Great, on to the upper falls, yikes that’s a lot of ice.

Something caused a little waterfall across the trail that froze over.

This rock formation was also very interesting… in person.

.We had some lunch, good thing we brought all that coffee.

Coffee goes well with lunch meat and cheese on hamburger buns.

Oh look, another rock formation, very interesting…if you’re actually there.

I have no idea why there is an anchor cemented to the side of the trail.

We got to the upper falls and I promptly hopped over the railing down onto the ice.

That’s the really great thing about being a grown-up, You can do all kings of fun things involving climbing on things. Getting down wasn’t so graceful and Jill didn’t want to try. In the end getting back up was pretty easy though.

It was so bright out that the longest exposure I could get was one second at f/32 ISO 100 in the shade.

The falls are very mineral rich, sometimes more rich than others, and this shows in the ice. We told a bunch of Brits that a gigantic Canadian deer peed up there, and they thought that was funny… Briton must not be very funny.

That’s a lot of ice.

There was a big ice hunk under an over hang.

Ice up close.

More rocks that you need to see in person.

The catwalk to the lower falls as seen from above.

Some parts of the trail were kind of snowed over, I bet this is easier in the summer.

This moss was neat, I look forward to seeing it in the summer.

I lagged behind Jill to take some pictures, when I got down she had hot tea and a snack when I got there.