Brett Gross Photography

Here is a simple AppleScript to use in an Automator Service to get LaunchBar to show the selected text in big type (like LaunchBar will do with phone numbers):

on run {input, parameters}

	set theString to ("x-launchbar:large-type?string=" & (item 1 of input)) as string
	log theString

	open location theString

	return input
end run

Just set up a service to take text from any application and have the sole action be an AppleScript. Easy!

Technorati Tags: Automator

Yep, I’m now a mariner. Well, I have a kayak… and as soon as I shake this pneumonia I’ll be putting it into the water. More to follow in a few days. Hopefully.

Technorati Tags: Kayak

Rock on Audible! Got some Repairman Jack ‘books!

Workflow seems to be a hot topic for Aperture users. Everyone seems to have their own particular way of doing things and I think that it is a testament to the flexibility of Aperture that it can be made to suit so many peoples’ needs so well. Since I may have never blogged about my method before, here it is:

I always import my images into my Library. This allows me to keep them backed up via Vaults and keeps things neat and organized. On import I rename images by adding a prefix to the filename. I don’t like changing the filename beyond this as I don’t really see a point to it.

I use 2 styles of prefixes:

• Camera Model with a letter suffix followed by an underscore: 40Da_, G10a_, SD700a_
  I added the letter suffix after I ‘flipped’ the counter on a previous camera and ended up with 2 350D_IMG_0001 images. The letter suffix prevents this
• For other people’s pictures (I keep track of my mother’s photos) I use first initial followed by last name and an underscore: JDoe_, AAdams_

On import I also add copyright info using a metadata preset. If possible I also add as much of my ‘essential metadata’ as possible.

I consider the following metadata to be essential:

• Sub-Location, City, State, Country (it is rare that I can’t get most of these filled!)
• Event (where appropriate)
• Credit and copyright info
• Caption and headline for anything that will get posted or put into a book

I’m data-paranoid. I will not apologize. I don’t erase a memory card until its images have been verified in Aperture and backed up into a Vault.

For my first pass through newly imported images, I will bulk add keywords if possible. I find it easy to select a series of photos and add keywords for easily visible attributes like people, pets, animals, and geographic features. I try to ensure that every image has at least one keyword associated with it, but try to avoid going image-by-image.

Not every image needs white balance correction, but when they do it is usually easy to correct one and Lift & Stamp the adjustment on subsequent shots.

My second pass is where I will rate images, fine-tune corrections, and keywords. If I am in a hurry to get photos posted to Flickr or Zenfolio, I will do a quick pass and only perform ratings.

As Aperture hides images rated as Rejected by default, I use that rating sparingly. That said, any image that is obvious junk will get a -1 rating. I still won’t delete the master, though. As I do my detailed pass I leave any unremarkable image unrated and give any image that I want to share in any capacity (Flickr, Zenfolio, book, or print) at least 1 star. Most only get that one star, but anything that I find to be particularly striking may get up to 4 stars here. Rarely do I give 4 stars anymore and 5 stars is reserved for my very best.

Any image rated as 1 star or more is a candidate for printing, inclusion in a book, or online posting. I use the excellent FlickrExport plugin and have a pro Flickr account. If you use Flickr, I would suggest that you do so as well. I’ll leave the details of Flickr up to you, but I do recommend embedding a visible watermark in any image you post online.

I am trying to get photos sold and am starting to get content posted to Zenfolio. I don’t have much more to say about this yet except that I really like the service so far.

I usually produce a couple of photo books through Aperture each year. The books usually come in 2 varieties: annual book and event book. I like the annual book idea as it gives us a photographic remembrance of a year. Given how many pictures I take, it is easy to fill a book each year.

An event book is usually actually a trip book that records our travels. Depending on the year I can generate a few of these. I have a customized book theme that I use as a starting point. Sometimes I’ll also do a book’s layout in Keynote.

Once I am done with my edits, publishing, and sharing I will offline my master images. I store my offline masters on a portable hard drive (I live off of a MacBook Pro so disk space is sometimes at a premium). This hard drive is backed up to a drive at my desk as well. Both drives hold Vaults of my Library.

For day-to-day shooting I create a Project for each month. It lives in a folder for each year and is named in the YYYY-MM format (the current Project is 2009-06). If there is a special event that gets lots of photos I will give it at least 1 Project and keep the naming scheme adding a 2-digit day if appropriate as well as the event’s name. I’ll then store those Projects as well as the month’s general Project in a Blue Folder named in the YYYY-MM format. I strive to keep my Projects at under 4GB in size including master images. That allows me to export a Project and burn it to DVD for safekeeping.

To give an example of what I’m talking about, here is what my Library would look like with a hypothetical road trip to Voyageurs National park:

• 2009-01
• 2009-02
• 2009-03
• 2009-04
• 2009-05
• 2009-06
• 2009-07
• 2009-07
• 2009-07-10 Outbound
• 2009-07-13 Ely
• 2009-07-14 Voyageurs
• 2009-07-16 Homebound
• …

I’m sure that I’ll update this as my workflow changes, but until then, that’s it.

This is a repost of an old article I’d had on a previous site. It is in need of updating, but until that happens I’ll post the old version here:

A Keynote/Photo Book
iPhoto/Aperture books are great. I love photo books. I make a photo book for every big trip that we take. I’ve seen the discussions about improving the print quality of the books, but what I really wanted was a way to get better control of the layout of the iPhoto books.

I originally wrote this article about iPhoto, but the same applies to Aperture-created books. Although Aperture books are much more flexible than iPhoto books, you still can’t do a lot of things that you might want to do.

I should say here that what I’m about to outline is not for the faint of heart. Most people are probably quite happy with the available iPhoto book layouts. If you choose to follow my lead and head off of the beaten path you do so on your own.

iPhoto Book Layouts
The only thing that I don’t like about iPhoto books are their lack of layout options. Sure, each book style has several options for number of photos per page and many page designs have customizable text– but none of these layouts have the exact layout that I may want to best present a collection of images.

The Travel theme has some nice options, some with creative text options (I particularly like the option for 2 photos per page), but you’re still limited as to what you can do. Want more than 7 photos per page? Sorry. Want text with six pictures? Sorry again.

Enter Keynote
Eventually it occurred to me to try using a tool that I’m already intimately familiar with: Keynote. The new version of Keynote that is a part of Apple’s iWork is an extremely capable and flexible layout tool. You can choose the slide size to correspond nicely to the size of any of the book formats available through iPhoto. Just pick a book size (large hardcover is 11″ by 8.5″) and a target resolution (the iPhoto book default resolution appears to be 200dpi) and you’ve got your Keynote slide size (2200 x 1700 for my example).

You can use one of Keynote’s included themes or make your own. If you make your own (which I did) I would recommend delving deeply into the Keynote package to get some of those great backgrounds. Note that each of those .kth files is also a package so you’ll have to Control-Click them to view the package contents. Icon view with large icons can be helpful here. I copied every image that I liked into a new folder in ~/Pictures/

Take those backgrounds and set them as slide backgrounds. Use Inspector -> Slide Inspector -> Appearance -> Background (I had trouble finding this myself).
The great thing about Keynote is that you have nearly complete control over image layout and can use all of Mac OS X’s amazing typographic capabilities.

Speaking of amazing typographic controls, you can use Mac OS X glyphs as vector-based clipart. This means that you can scale and rotate to your heart’s content and don’t have to worry about jaggies.

So, with your pictures from iPhoto (remember the media browser is built into Keynote), some nice and free vector clipart, and a collection of nice backgrounds in hand you are all set to make your presentation/book.

Tying it Together
I’m not going to pretend to even suggest to you how you should lay out your presentation/book– so I’ll assume that you did your Keynote magic and are ready to convert from presentation to book. If you’ve made it this far, you’re done with the difficult part. Just choose File -> Export… and save your slides as TIFFs (or JPEGs if you’re drive space conscious).

Now you have a collection of pictures that you can import into iPhoto. Create a new iPhoto book based on your newly exported slides. Make sure you choose the same size book that you used for your math earlier. Personally, I like the Travel book. It’s actually my favorite book style from iPhoto. Choose a 1 picture layout and make it full page.

Buy Your Book
That wasn’t too bad, was it?

On-disk Aperture stores all of its data in a special folder called a Library. This folder is a Mac OS X Package and the Finder represents it as a file. The file suffix for an Aperture Library file is ‘aplibrary’.

If you want to make a point-in-time backup of your Aperture data (except for preferences) you can make a copy of this file. It will very likely get really big. As you can see, mine is almost 22GB in size and most of my images are stored on an external hard drive.

As I mentioned, Aperture stores its information in this file. All of your images’ metadata and edits are stored in there. They’re small, though and most of the size is the database file that Aperture uses to quickly access the info stored in those files as well as thumbnail images and high-resolution previews.

This is a very important file to back up and Apple made it easy to do so. The built-in Vaults feature allows you to keep multiple copies of your Library stored on various hard drives in the event that lose your Library file itself. Synchronizing the Vaults with the master Library is a manual task so remember to do it frequently!

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple

So… will this post get sent to Twitter properly?

Yes it does… post info sent to Twitter which updates Facebook. Nice. Well done Tweetsuite!

Now that spring is finally here I am starting to really miss my photowalks with Hera. 1 dog + 1 camera makes for a nice walk. Even when I have to shoo her away from close to the ground closeups I have a great time.

Today, walking the Gang of Twelve Legs I saw a very nice dewey spider web. I saw some clover with a great sheen of wetness in perfect light. You will have to take my word for this because I didn’t have a camera with me. The problem is that 3 dogs (even with 1 off leash) and a single camera is a real pain. If I try to crouch down I have 3 wet noses wondering what excellent (and hopefully rank) smell I found.

I need to work out a better system because I don’t want to give up my photowalks and I can’t neglect the dog walking.

Maybe I need a dog walker…

Technorati Tags: iPhoto, Photography, puppy

Growing grass (No, not this kind…) has become something of a necessity since we got two more dogs last summer. It turns out that 3 dogs can be hard on a 80×50 yard and we have some bare spots.

About a month ago I went to Lowes and got a garden weasel contraption that looks like a few really big spurs mounted on a stick that is used to aerate the ground and loosen the soil. It sure looked effective and after a bit of rain I gave it a go. I weaseled (new word) and then put down a PA mix of sun/shade grass mix (I think that lawn grass is more expensive than the other kind), watered it and waited.

Weeks later nothing happened.

In desperation (3 dogs can bring a lot of mud into a house!) I put down some Scott’s patchmaster gunk. I think it is just ground up T-shirts and newspaper embedded with grass seed and fertilizer. Penn State uses something similar that they spray out after Arts Fest destroys the lawns and I’ve used it before with good results. I put a couple of bags of that down before we went to Myrtle Beach and am evaluating the results.

The patchmaster hasn’t sprouted yet, but I have an area of lawn that has strangely regular rows of grass. I guess that I have to believe that the weasel+grass seed method works.

Good to know.

I usually stay pretty loyal to the Hampton Inn chain (I’ve been a faithful sleeper there since before I knew that Paris Hilton existed), but this week in Chicago I am staying at Kimpton’s Hotel Allegro. The hotel is nice enough and the staff certainly is friendly, but what impressed me was the housekeeping.

Yeah.

I’m used to seeing the little cards in the hotel room’s bathroom saying that if you leave your towel on the floor (like a slob) they’ll replace it but if you hang it up (like a good guest) they’ll leave it for you. The little card usually says how much water and detergent waste you can save by reusing your towel. Never before has my towel on the hook (or bar) been left alone. This was the first time I’ve been able to reuse my towel -and they left the used soap and shampoo in the shower!

I know I shouldn’t be so excited about this, but despite what the cards say the housekeeping always seems to give me new towels regardless of my wishes.

Kudos Hotel Allegro!

PS- it is now cold here in Chicago. Cold and windy.

Technorati Tags: Travel