The dust is beginning to settle on the Aperture debacle, and I’ve had some time to think about it. It’s interesting to see some considered views from long term, expert Aperture bloggers. There’s a glass half full view here, and a glass half empty one here. I’d tend to say the latter was more realistic, but my glass remains ditheringly uncommitted. I’ve dusted off CaptureOne Pro 7 and Lightroom 5, and I find both competent in various ways, but both feel like downgrades from Aperture. Both are good enough, and feature some editing tools which are superior to Aperture’s (sharpening, in Lightroom, and keystone correction in both), but in general I still always come back to re-realising how good, if unassuming, Aperture actually is. The Aperture marketing team deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered. In terms of UI and DAM features, Aperture makes both look prehistoric. CaptureOne’s DAM toolset is a partial cut & paste from MediaPro, with plenty of critical bits missing. It’s a start, but general about as much use as chocolate teapot, not to mention very clunky to use. In theory CaptureOne interfaces with MediaPro. In any approaching realistic practice, it doesn’t. For example MediaPro knows nothing about CaptureOne’s variants, and CaptureOne is totally unaware of MediaPro’s hierarchic keywording. Both have a “catalog” concept, which are superficially similar but completely seperate. Basically it’s a total dog’s breakfast. The rendering of CaptureOne is quite interesting, in that it is quite unlike Aperture and Lightroom for my Olympus ORF files. CaptureOne has more saturated red tones, which are quite difficult to replicate. When evaluating CaptureOne, you do need to be aware of it’s unusual input tone curve feature, which defaults to “film standard”. In my opinion it’s better to start off with the “linear” option, at least until you get a feel for what it is doing. However, taking Olympus Viewer as a reference, Lightroom and Aperture are much closer than the CaptureOne default rendition.

And so to Lightroom. I used Lightroom v1 for about a year before moving to Aperture, so I know roughly what makes it tick. Lightroom 5 seems to have had all manner of bits glued onto it, and quite a lot of random changes. Some of this good, some less so, but the overall impression remains of someone trying to build a replica of Aperture in Lego. There is far too much clutter in the UI, and far too many options, many of which are squirrelled away in unlikely locations. It’s all pretty chaotic, and doesn’t seem to have had much overall design guidance. I think that in time it could be tamed and streamlined through use of keyboard shortcuts, but even so, I’m not why “Map”, for example, gets the same prominence as “Develop”. By using this ultra-modal approach, seems to me that Adobe’s designers painted themselves into a corner very early on. However, Lightroom has two key aspects: a massive installed user base, and endless web and print resources, paid for and free, some of which are very good. It also has an iPad client - not Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile, which even the cheerleaders seem unimpressed with, but the excellent 3rd party app, Photosmith, which has similar functionality to the late lamented Pixelsync (and thanks again for murdering that, Apple. Bastards).

So on the whole, Lightroom seems to come out on top. The problem there is that I’m really not enamoured about Adobe’s subscription model. Now, maybe, for 20 years, maybe, but if my circumstances change, or when I’m retired on a pension, Adobe’s monthly tax might become a big issue.

Anyway, when it comes down to RAW editing, even if for some reason Aperture doesn’t cut it for me, there’s really no reason why I can’t continue to catalogue in Aperture and edit elsewhere. I’m aLightroomeady doing this - I sometimes use Iridient, or Photo Ninja, or Photoshop, or Sigma DPP to process photos, and manage the output in Aperture. So the big issue really is the longevity of Aperture’s DAM features.

I’ve obviously had my eye off the ball as far as the DAM market is concerned. I used to follow it closely, hoping for a modern replacement for iView, but I gave up. In the meantime a very promising looking application called Photo Supreme has emerged. Apart from it’s inherent values, it looks to me that it could act as a metadata hub, or bridge, between various applications. It can read Aperture (and Lightroom, and CaptureOne) libraries, and it seems it can spit out data which others can then import. I haven’t had time to try it yet, but I will.

In the meantime, I’m not evaluating the fullness of my glass just yet. I’ll stick with Aperture for a while at least, but with a very clear eye on keeping everything ready to export.

So, Apple has admitted, in some roundabout way, that Aperture is finished. It hasn’t been announced on their website, indeed, it is still promoted and up for sale. No, somehow the news has been leaked in a very uncharacteristic way.

Nobody should be surprised by this. If Apple is consistent about anything, it is in dropping products or complete product lines without any second though for its customer’s investments. But with Aperture, it’s worse. Much worse. With Aperture, it’s customers are not just financially invested, but also creatively invested. This is the drawback of both non-destructive editing and proprietary digits asset management: you need to be able to trust that the software supplier you depend on is committed to long-term support. It was always a risky bet with Apple, and now it has proven to be the case. Apple is focused purely on short-term gain in increasingly dumbed-down disposable consumer electronics, and is fundamentally an untrustworthy partner. It is telling that the company has made no formal statement on its website, and shown absolutely no concern at all for its customers’ plight, and instead offers the insulting idea that it’s a fair swap to lose years of work for some rubbish piece of iCrap gloss in “the Cloud”. And in some cases, those customer’s entire business model rested on trusting Apple as a reliable partner.

I’m pretty sure that within the Aperture team there are people who well realise just how badly customers have been let down, but with Apple’s corporate Iron Curtain firmly in place, we’ll never know. And for the rest, from Tim Cook and all his anonymous MBA cohorts, we’re collateral damage. Long term I suspect it will be their loss.

So what went wrong ? When Aperture hit the market in 2005 it was unexpected and revolutionary. It was also a massive resource hog, and expensive - $599 - and that didn’t help it gain early market share. People assumed it was a Photoshop rival, and perhaps even Steve Jobs did too, with his antipathy towards Adobe, but it wasn’t. It was something completely new, an application designed specifically for the needs of photographers in the digital age. Looking at it as a Photoshop rival obscured the real marvel of Aperture, its photo management and cataloging tools. There’s still nothing to beat it on that front, in fact as far as I know, nothing even comes close.  Then there was the non-modal UI, which some people had (and still do have) a really hard time getting their heads around.  Basically, with Aperture, you choose the context to work in (Project, Album, Book, Website, Light table, Print) and all editing and management tools are available at all times. This is quite the reverse to all other applications, including Lightroom, where the workflow is firmly object(photo)-centric.

This is a key and unique feature in Aperture: here, as I lay out a selection of images on a light table, perhaps to plan a print series, I can tweak each photo’s settings in-situ as I work. The UI is completely non-modal. Were it not for the Apple Iron Curtain, whoever devised this would be celebrated in the design community. And no, it wasn’t Jonny bloody Ive. Or indeed St Steve.

So Apple had a fantastic application on their hands. But apart from high profile launch events, they essentially put no effort at all into explaining it, or marketing it. When Adobe brought out their rival application, Lightroom, which was certainly a major step forward from Photoshop for digital photo workflow, but much, much less imaginative and ambitious than Aperture, they rolled out the full force of their marketing tools, including getting legions of industry stars and opinion-formers on board, they kept up contact between engineers and users - hell, we even knew who the key engineers were - and they maintained open Beta programs for each new version. Aperture, crippled by general Apple arrogance towards customers, had no chance. The few opinion-formers they got on board seemed to be used solely as marketing mouthpieces, whereas Adobe avoided the whole control-freakery scene. As time went on, Lightroom got caught up in the Adobe bean counters insistence on yearly upgrade fees, and so started to acquire bloat and useless features, without much improvement to the core application. Also, anybody coming to Lightroom from Aperture cannot help but feel manacled by the step-by-step workflow, which reminds me of the 1990s UI “room” concepts championed by Kai Krause. Nothing like Aperture’s unconstrained creativity. Lightroom felt like an engineer’s idea of what photographers wanted. Aperture felt like a photographer’s invention which could maybe do with a touch more engineering input, especially at version 1.

But essentially Aperture was completely out of place in Apple’s product line-up. A deep, non-glitzy application that demanded, but rewarded, serious commitment on the behalf of its users. Certainly no iOS or AppStore fluff. Indeed, although the Iron Curtain lets out no whispers, I really wonder if Aperture’s genesis lies outside of Apple, much like Final Cut. Perhaps Aperture also was initially a Macromedia project, and therefore might even share some DNA with Lightroom. Pure speculation, and I guess we’ll never know. Or care.

So now what ?

Well, Aperture is still working, and Apple has committed to maintenance support for at least one further OS X iteration. But the end is irrevocable, and that means that any work expended from now on in Aperture is wasted. There’s much talk of migrating to Lightroom, or whatever, but let’s be clear: you can migrate your metadata - ratings, stars, keywords - but that’s it. You cannot migrate any develop settings, or your whole library structure, your projects, albums, smart albums, light tables, books, etc. You might be able to migrate your keyword hierarchies, which for power users is a big deal. Certainly you can migrate these to Media Pro. I have 51,225 photos in Aperture. If I were to set aside the time to recreate all the non-destructive edits in Lightroom, I might as well give up photography.

So what are the alternatives ? I’ve tried most of them: my mainstream history goes something like this: Olympus Studio -> Adobe Camera RAW 1.0 -> CaptureOne 3.6 -> Iridient Raw Developer -> Lightroom 1 -> Aperture 2 -> Aperture 3. Along the way I’ve tried out pretty much all other options available on the Mac At present I use Aperture 3 for everything, except for Sigma Merrill files which I develop in Iridient Developer (which has indeed recently become much closer integrated with Aperture).  Prior to Lightroom, indeed prior to digital, I used what was called iView MediaPro, and is now called PhaseOne MediaPro, to catalog and manage my library. I’ve carried on using it for scanned files and Sigma files alongside Aperture, and I still consider a great tool. Indeed, many years ago I speculated that a merger between CaptureOne and MediaPro would be a combination to beat. Eventually PhaseOne did acquire MediaPro, but frankly they haven’t done a lot with it.

To replace Aperture 3 we need to consider two aspects (at least). RAW development, and Digital Asset Management. There are only two real options which cover both parts. Lightroom, which is fully integrated, and CaptureOne/MediaPro, which is more like a bunch of bits flying roughly in the same direction. Although I have no particular axe to grind with Adobe, and indeed have used (and paid for) Photoshop since v2.0, InDesign since v1.0 (and Pagemaker before that, indeed before Adobe acquired it), and a whole host of other Adobe apps, I just don’t find Lightroom very inspiring. But I can’t deny that it does the job, and is probably the sensible choice. CaptureOne, on the other hand, seems to be more driven by photographers than marketing, and v7 has a management component which clearly inherits conceptually from MediaPro, although just how C1 and MediaPro are supposed to be “integrated” still puzzles me. CaptureOne went through a very bad patch after v3.x. Version 4 was very late, all-new and something of a disaster. But now at v7 it seems to have matured.

I guess in the coming weeks, I’ll try the latest versions of both on a small library and make my choice based on what I actually see, which is how I came to choose Aperture. Ill write more about this in the coming days / weeks, maybe.

But what about Apple? I’ve been an Apple customer for over 20 years. I bought my first Mac (a Powerbook Duo) on a university discount scheme. I’ve never been a fanboy, although I got close to it in the dark years of the 1990s, and I’ve always seen pros and cons to buying Apple. These days it’s more through inertia and have a considerable investment in software and peripherals that I stick with Apple. And on the whole, indeed it does “just work”. In Management Powerpoint Bullshit speak, companies talk of being in a stakeholder, partnership relationship with their customers. Apple are not. Apple, in 2014, see customers purely as cash machines. Their total wall of secrecy and refusal to engage - and it was not always so, not by a long way - makes them, as a company, amoral and totally untrustworthy. Unfortunately the whole industry is going that way. We’re a long, long way from the Revolution In The Valley.

Warning: you might want to skip the bit after the photo. I think I wrote it mainly for me.

A Camellia, a little past its best, Locarno

My publication rate here has slowed down quite a bit recently. So has my reading rate, at least of photo trivia on the web. I’ve been feeling that I’m not really going anywhere with my photography, which is nothing new, but this time it’s a bit different. I’ve been trying to move up a level, somehow, but it’s not really working, and the fundamental reason is that whatever level I’ve reached is as high as I’m going to get. In the past I’ve got around this by managing to just take personal enjoyment in whatever I do, and not get too bothered, if at all, about what others think. Which does of course beg the question of why I write all this rubbish…

I thought maybe I should enter a few competitions - why not, I’ve got plenty of photos, it’s no big deal - and Amateur Photographer’s “Animal Planet” seemed like a reasonable opportunity. I’ve got lots of animal photos. The trouble is, they’re either trite, boring, badly composed, blurry, technically hopeless, or, in several landmark cases, all these together. Hardly worth the electrons.

And then there’s this “Street” thing. Well, although I appreciate the encouragement, and the new followers I’ve gained on Flickr, I’ve quite quickly realised that this is a dangerous diversion for me. As someone who is chronically unfocussed, adding yet another pursuit is the last thing I need. And anyway, I really don’t feel comfortable photographing people surreptitiously. It’s not a judgment on anybody else, I don’t think it’s incorrect per se, but I’m not good at it.

What I like doing is my own peculiar blend of natural and human landscape photography, with some travel thrown into the mix. It’s hardly caught the eye of the specialists such as On Landscape or Landscape Photography, but that’s probably due to it being trite, boring, badly composed (etc, see above). I’m not much into wide vistas these days, although I don’t pass up a good one if it presents itself to me.  I’ve got three favourite subjects. The first, the arctic, sub-arctic and polar regions, is unfortunately largely denied to me due to cost and opportunity, and really it has less to do with photography and more to do with some deeper pull. The second, roughly speaking, is Italy, which is more fortunate as it is under 4km away. There is just something so incredibly magical about Italy. It’s hard to really nail down and harder still to capture in a photograph, and there are so many aspects to it, but a country that can include gems such as Stromboli, Venice, the Dolomites and Tuscany within it’s borders - and that’s just a starter - really can’t be ignored. And then there are the glacial valleys and high alpine plateaus of Ticino. On my doorstep. So plenty of blessings to be counted.

What I am pulling back from is the web echo chamber. I’ve drastically cut back on the photo blogs in my RSS feed, and purged everything with even a whiff of the tiresome (to me) happy clappy inspirational visionary that was beginning to make me scream at my iPad (not a good idea on the train), and the overly techy stuff, and the endless thinly disguised flogging of eBooks, workshops, etc. Nein, Danke. I’ve kept following the few well written, thought provoking, non-preachy authors I know. Funnily enough, I’ve been following a good few of them for well over 10 years.  I’m tempted to dump my Flickr account, but, well, it’s still a nice way to interact with other photographers, and 326 (wow - that many!) people seem to think I’m worth “following”.

This has a another good side effect of diluting even further the gear lust. No camera is going to make me a better photographer, or give me more enjoyment, at least none I know of. And I like the ones I’ve got, quite a lot. I strongly regret selling my Hasselblad ArcBody, as these days I think I’d use it a lot. But selling that got me to Svalbard, so it was a good trade.

It would be great to be able to press a big RESET button and get back to around 2001 when I was really discovering all this stuff.  But maybe reducing the external stimuli will help me to remember the fun of exploration.

In the meantime, how better to re-state my dedication to landscape photography and my dedication to stay on the path than branching out into flower photography ?

Yep.

Iceland … it’s hard to avoid it these days. According to various sources, such as Alda Sigmundsdóttir’s “The Iceland Weather Report”, over 27 Billion people are expected to visit Iceland next year, which is quite a lot. Of course 25.6 Billion of those will be Fine Art Landscape Photographers (or birders, which is much the same thing), and they will all publish AWESOME GREAT CAPTUREs of bits of ice trying to mind their own business melting away on a black sand beach, of Skogafoss and Gullfoss waterfalls, of a place puffins used to live, and some steam. And most of these will get published as publicity material for forthcoming, unique, book-now-before-it-sells-out, photo workshops (which will principally visit the aforementioned and now very stressed bits of ice).

Overexposure, anyone ?  Iceland, and photography of Iceland especially, has become a commodity. Of course you don’t have to go to Iceland to photograph it. You could also go to Reykjavik to drink a lot. Iceland has options, you know.

I guess I’m lucky that I got in before the rush, although really it was the beginning of the rush. Not so long ago, even the “Golden Circle” was a bit of an adventure. Now (I imagine) it is a continuous loop of huge tourist coaches.

For me Iceland was never really about the honeypot locations. It was always much more to do with the unique atmosphere that permeates the whole island, the idea that pretty much everybody knows everybody else, the weirdness and yet familiarity of gas stations 200km from anywhere, the friendly and yet aloof, alien people. And all this wrapped up in a batshit-crazy landscape.

And yet when I looked at the photos I had published here in my galleries, there was a strong element of “look, I’ve been there too!” shots, of trying to play to the gallery rather than show photographs that I have a stronger connection to.  And so, setting aside Venice for an evening or two, I had a retrospective trawl through the 6000-odd photos I’ve accumulated over the past 10 years, and I came up with a new selection.

The “Iceland Landscapes” and “Iceland - the human landscape” galleries are now offline, and a new one has taken their place. In a boldly imaginative move, I’ve titled it “Iceland”. Hope you like it.

And maybe when those 27 Billion people have got bored and moved on to somewhere else, like Belgium, for instance, and when Icelanders just get a little over themselves been so awesomely cool, maybe I’ll return.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, Venice.

I’m in the mood for a bit of a rant.

It’s the season for emails soliciting for next summer’s photo “workshops” in exotic parts of the world, in particular, for me, due to my track record, the higher latitudes. Although such outings have never, on the whole, been particularly cheap, despite the general economical situation, I’m getting the feeling that a threshold has been crossed: prices have passed “expensive” and are now in full blown “outrageous” territory.

What is a “photo workshop” anyway ? I suppose generally one might imagine that it involves an intensive period taking on a challenging subject in a small group setting, led by an experienced photographer who also happens to be a good teacher - a rare combination. That photographer might even, in an ideal world, have some formal teaching qualification of some kind. And actually, in the worlds of studio and street photography, such workshops do exist.  But what I’m talking about is nature photography workshops, in far flung places, and the nature of these is more group travel with a focus on photography, and with optimised itineraries and schedules.

Obviously some places are hard to get to, and hard to travel around if you don’t know the area or language. So the first advantage is that somebody else takes care of the logistics, and you pay a price which covers your share of the overheads and a fee for the organiser / guide, who after all is making a living. Fair enough. But where things start to go a little out of control is where the guide is basically a hired hand and the workshop is run under the aegis of some “star” photographer in who’s glow you will theoretically bask. And who will basically be taking their own photos, building their own portfolio, and actually getting paid to do so. Of course there is a sliding scale here. I’m absolutely not going to name names, but there are some “star” photographers who will go out of their way to help and advise their clients, and there are others who will behave like absolute prima donnas, considering that their clients should stay out of the way and speak only when spoken to. 

As far as costs go, here’s one benchmark: in 2010, myself and 9 others arranged a co-operative tour of Svalbard. We hired a 12 berth ocean-going sailboat, with expert crew of two, for 14 days. The cost, including all food, fuel, harbour charges, etc, worked out at almost exactly 50% of the mean price being charged for several significantly shorter and/or less flexible trips offered for 2014. Even assuming that we got a very good price, one can’t help but wonder where that 50% is going. Well, actually you don’t need to wonder too much.

So what, though? It’s a free world, and if people have the money and feel that the prices are justified, well then the market is well adjusted. But on the other hand, it is driving access to places which should, and could be, an accessible dream to a lot of people, into the luxury market. And that’s a shame.

There is also the label “workshop” itself. I may be wrong, but I would imagine that the average person is not going to head off to the Arctic to learn how to set an aperture or exposure dial. And yet many prospectuses seem to offer just that - and little else. Some vendors are actually forthright about this, and differentiate between “workshop” and “expedition”. This is commendable, in my opinion.

So what should you do if, say, you want to go to the Arctic, to Patagonia, to Greenland or other far flung destination ? By all means search for “workshops” on offer. But also look for general interest tourist trips, and compare prices. Then you’ll get some idea of the markup charged by the star photographer. If it’s over 25%, forget it, it’s money down the drain. You’re basically buying bragging rights to say you’re Best Friends Forever which whichever Canikon poster boy. Also, on the vendor’s website, in the workshop pages, look out for photos taken by workshop participants, and not (only) the photographer him/herself. Such photographers who are genuinely pleased to showcase their clients work are probably those you will learn the most from, even if their own work is not full-on National Geographic level.  Ideally, if you feel you can manage it, try to organise your own group on a cost-sharing basis, and write your own agenda. It’s not as hard as it seems. And don’t get discouraged by ridiculous, inflated prices which would take you over 3 months to earn.