Wrapping Up the Week

Friday finally brings a very busy week to an end.

In between all the meetings, trip to Johannesburg and admin I have still been able to capture a few decent wildlife images.  Our good run on lion sightings continue and this week we got to spend a lot of time with five young cubs, their mom and the pride males.  Fantastic sightings and some brilliant photo opportunities.  On top of that I have also been processing a number of images from the hospitality shoot I did at Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse a few weeks ago.  As a wrap up to the week, below is a slide show featuring not only some of the lion shots but also a few random images from the hospitality shoot images I have been working on.

[slideshow id=3]

One of the most difficult things is to choose which images to showcase on your site or portfolio so in stead of spending hours figuring out which images I should include, the Friday slideshow is purely a fun thing to which images that catch my eye, for whatever reason, gets added.

Aperture 3

A little while ago I downloaded the trial version of Aperture 3.  The hype about Apple’s new image processing software has been quite something and, as with anything Apple, it is bound to keep on drawing quite a bit of attention.

Up until now I have been using Adobe Lightroom for all my image cataloging and processing purely because I work on both Mac and PC and Lightroom is a dual platform program, making things a whole lot easier.  Since I got my iPhone and started doing a lot of my processing on my Macbook Pro I have been very open to anything Apple so I thought I would have a look at what Aperture 3 has to offer.  Being used to Lightroom it took me a few minutes to look around and find all the basic controls and start looking through and processing a few test images but one thing is for certain – Aperture definitely has that Apple magic.

Even though I can find my way around Lightroom with my eyes closed, I found Aperture’s user interface to be elegant, intuitive and easy to use.  It would obviously be unfair to compare the two after just a brief look so for the next week, which is a bit quieter than the past few days, I will only use Aperture to catalogue and process my images.  There are already a few features that I reckon is pretty nice and these include the skin smoothing brush, which can be used with surprising efficiency on certain wildlife images, and the slideshow maker is fantastic.

At this stage I have only put one image  through Aperture 3 just to check the process and it seems simple enough.  After opening the Wild Dog image on the right I did a few basic adjustments using the sliders on the left of the screen.   I then tested a few of the adjustment brushes after which exporting the final image.  Very easy to do and at first glance the results are pretty good.

I enjoy playing around with new programs and by the look of it Aperture has quite a bit of depth to it.  If you have had a look at Aperture 3 I would love to hear your comments.  Once I have given it a good working over I will share my thoughts on the blog.

At first glance Aperture 3 looks impressive but it’s gonna take a lot for me to change over from Lightroom. Let’s see how things go.

Other than that it has been a pretty quiet photographic week so gonna wrap it up.

To end off, one more image from the week that goes along with a quote I saw on Nick Coyne’s blog sometime this week.  Check out Nick’s site for a great mix of images and photographic quotes.  Some great stuff in there.

“You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.” ~ Galen Rowell

Have a great weekend.  See you on Monday!

Gerry