D'Arcy Norman dot net » photography

The Bike Blur Photo – behind the scenes

dnorman — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:10:23 +0000

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

(in case the video doesn’t show up in the RSS feed, here’s the link)

YYCPhotoBook 2009

dnorman — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:57:18 +0000

I was extremely fortunate to have been a part of the fantastic YYCPhotoBook 2009 project. It’s a community-based photography book project, featuring 32 different Calgary photographers ranging from amateurs to high-end professionals. The goal was to show the city from various perspectives, outside the traditional stereotypes and stock-photo views. From start to finish, the project took 4 months – including recruiting the photographers, sourcing photos, editing, designing, and releasing to print. Duncan Kinney did an absolutely amazing job in wrangling the project and pushing it forward, and Connor Turner did an equally fantastic job in putting the book design together.

I love the project for a few reasons. First, it’s a crowdsourced, grassroots community project. I described it at the first project meeting as being more of a community art project than a photography project. It brought together 32 photographers, with 32 different views, perspectives, and styles. The end result is an incredible, beautiful book of photography that is a wonderful representation of the city of Calgary and those who live here.

The other reason I love the project is that it is a non-profit endeavor, raising funds for the Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids charity – a local charity that is devoted to providing healthy meals to underprivileged Calgary kids.

It was truly an honour to have been a part of this project. The photos in the book are amazing, the photographers are inspiring, and the book itself is gorgeous.

If you’d like a copy of the book (for the awesome page 12 photo *cough*, or to support Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids) head over to the Blurb store to get yours now.

cleaning up my Aperture library

dnorman — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:39:36 +0000

My Aperture library tends to grow much larger than it should. It seems as though Aperture does not delete the thumbnails for photographs even when deleting the originals, leaving several gigabytes of orphaned kruft behind, accumulating bits, filling up volumes. I delete most of the photos I shoot, so the majority of thumbnails in my library are orphaned. But there’s a quick and easy way to clean it up. After backing up the entire library, I did this (after a blog post by Brett Gross):

First, find out how many petabytes of space have been sucked up on your drive by thumbnails:

find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Thumbnails" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Minis" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Tinies" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch

Then, after backing stuff up, this’ll clean out the kruft:

find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Thumbnails" -delete
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Minis" -delete
find ~/Pictures -name "AP.Tinies" -delete

After running it, Aperture will have to generate new thumbnails for all of the photos in the library – but it won’t generate thumbnails for the photos that were deleted, obviously. On my desktop box at work (with only 4535 photos), this cleared up a couple of GB of space. Thumbnail regeneration took almost an hour. I’ll try it on my home laptop tonight, with over ~~30,000~~17,000 photos on it. It’ll probably take several hours to regenerate thumbnails.

Of course, it’d be nicer for Aperture to properly clean up after itself – the whole point of abstracting file management behind the library interface is to make this kind of mundane maintenance stuff unnecessary.

Update: I ran it on my main Aperture library, with 17,371 photos. After letting Aperture rebuild thumbnails overnight, I saved 2GB of disk space from orphaned thumbnails. That may not seem like a lot with today’s gigantor-sized drives, but that’s a LOT of kruft that could have been easily cleaned up by properly removing thumbnails when deleting photos from the library. Leaving them behind to fill up drive space is just lazy and sloppy.

random photography assignment generator

dnorman — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:49:53 +0000

I’m working on my third year in a photo-a-day photography project, and there are days when it’s pretty near impossible to think of something to shoot. On days like that, you need an assignment – someone to give you a topic or subject, and you go hunting for (or staging) a photo to meet the assignment.

So, I cobbled together a simple web page to randomly generate assignments.

If nothing else, it might spark some ideas for you to create your own assignments.

If you use the utility, I’d love to hear about it! If you post to Flickr, throw a tag of “assignmentr” on the photo.

on following the light

dnorman — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:07:42 +0000

Photography literally means “the process of drawing with light” – it’s not “taking pictures of people or things,” it’s all about playing with light. If the light isn’t there, there’s no photograph. If the light is boring, the photograph is boring. But, if the light is right, even the most boring subject is transformed into something magical.

Much of the time, when I jump to grab my camera, it’s because the light has caught my eye. Warm light coming through a window. Light refracting through glass. Reflecting off of a surface. Sometimes it’s just a property of the light that catches my attention – warmth, softness, darkness, harshness.

Shoot the light. Start with the light, then find the subject or story, and work on angles and composition.

It’s not an absolute, and I’ve got plenty of counter-example photos that work despite the light, but it’s a pretty good starting point to find the light, and a photograph will follow.

rethinking the digital photography sessions

dnorman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:57:54 +0000

I’d planned to keep doing episodes of the sessions, even going so far as to map out a few on the wiki. But, the folks at Inside Aperture are doing such a fandamntastic job, that there isn’t really much point for me to do Aperture-related screencasts, which is really all I’d done so far.

I’m going to rethink the sessions a bit. Maybe they’ll evolve into more of a storytelling thing – picking a shot and talking about the story behind it, and how the shot was composed, taken and processed… Something like that might be more interesting for everyone, rather than just duplicating a set of screencasts.

Digital Photography Sessions – Episode 003 – RAW vs. JPEG

dnorman — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:08:37 +0000

It’s not a full examination of every technical aspect of RAW vs. JPEG, but I show some of the reasons why I try to shoot RAW almost all the time, as well as some reasons why I sometimes shoot in JPEG instead. Some of the subtle differences didn’t really translate into the compressed video files, but hopefully you can get an idea of what the extra data in a RAW file is handy for.

Episode 003: 10:43 duration, 320×240 11.4MB or HD 15.2MB

Digital Photography Sessions – Episode 002: Basic Workflow

dnorman — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:52:33 +0000

Time for another episode, this time on basic workflow – importing a few photos, deleting the crap, and processing the one(s) that don’t get nuked. This time, the dogs were quiet, and The Boy™ decided not to make an appearance. I might schedule him for a later episode…

Episode 2: Basic Workflow weighs in at 12.1 MB, and clocks in at 10:27. Or, if you want a full HD version, use the second link.

Digital Photography Sessions – Episode 2 (320×240, 12.1MB)

Episode 2 (1080×675, 14.6MB)

Digital Photography Sessions – Episode 001

dnorman — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:44:05 +0000

I’m going to try producing a series of presentations in various media to document and share some of the tricks I’ve learned in my playing with digital photography. There are lots of other resources out there, so I’m not going to try to be canonical or exhaustive, but will try to answer some of the questions that people ask me.

This first episode is mostly just an intro/warmup for me, and I picked a basic topic: project and album management in Aperture 2.

Episode 1: Aperture 2 Project and Album Management weighs in at 10.20 MB, and clocks in at 8:24.

Digital Photography Sessions – Episode 1 (320×240, 10.2MB)

Episode 1 (1080×675, 14.2MB)