Organizing in Aperture

Last night was spent organizing and consolidating all my photos in aperture. I utilized referenced external masters so that I could export my projects for metadata rating on the go without having the monstrously sized masters along with them. It works beautifully! I exported some projects to dropbox, opened it up from my laptop and rated pictures without needing the masters. I am able to rate the images and reimport the project with all the ratings and organizational changes that I made.

I also decided that I'm just going to do plain text along the bottom. It's my first picture set and it's only going to get better. Here is what I did:

So figuring out how to market these is a bit of a learning process as well. I plan on uploading the pics to the internet, so people can look at them for free all they want, but if they want higher quality and printable images, those will cost. How much? This is also a learning process. Hopefully I can come up with a good and efficient system, because right now, things take FOREVER. I'm confident that with my mac and my skillz that I'll find a way, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Image Resolution, Photoshop Actions, and $.

It's amazing how much I didn't know about how photos were edited and printed! Today I was doing research on image resolution and learned that, while 72 pixels/in is sufficient for the web, if I wanted a high quality print, I'd need to be printing at 300 pixels/in. So I took one of my favorite photos of the night and created 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 versions of it and sent it off through Aperture to be printed, just to see how it turns out. I've never had any image sent off to be printed before, so learning how they get delivered, what they'll look like, the type of paper, etc. I believe will be valuable. This is the photo btw:

I'm also starting to learn about photoshop actions and getting some sort of process going on. I'm an engineer and I'm a big process guy, coming out of an Agile Development background, that thinks doing things over and over again is dumb. Problem is, I'm pretty dumb in the photoshop world right now, so learning actions is going to take some time. I plan on using it to add some kind of banner to the bottom of the pics. Lots of pics. And hopefully by Friday...

So, obvious by my self imposed time crunch, I would like to sell some of these pictures at some point, and having them as normal pics would be kind of lame, no matter how good the are. Sprucing them up should be good. Which leads to the final thing I've done today, which is sign up for dotphoto.com to see how it works. I'm probably going to end up putting another test photo up there and ordering again, just to see the ordering process and quality that comes out of there. That is, until I get some kind of store going on for the dance studio, and, hopefully, eventually for me.

FAIL - staying current with the blog

Well, I have failed miserably at updating my blog and doing p90x. It sometimes seems that updating a blog can be a full time job! Stay tuned for some good updates involving: One year anniversary of my woman's dance studio , my current stint as a photographer along with some sample pics, house hunting, and my experiences going live with the updated studio website this weekend. I promise it will be coming. And at the very least, this is going to act as my thought library.

And some proof that I actually did take pictures this weekend:

I'm going to be blogging about the whole post editing process that I'll be going through this week. You'll want to check in!

Do P90x

My roommate recently got the p90x series, which I promptly placed in my itunes library to be streamed over appleTV. The workout seems pretty intense, but not entirely different from when I was working out with a personal trainer. I would definitely like to get back in shape, so my next goal is to get some p90x in. Not the 90 day workout, not yet at least, but at least 3 times a week. Time to get back to sexy.

Practice guitar daily

Even if it's 15 minutes, I need to have structured practice that has a purpose. This month will be scale practice across all modes. And along the same guitar lines, I have a sub goal of changing my strings. It's probably been way over a year. I've been dancing so much, I haven't been playing music. I'm not getting any younger so I better get back at it.

Goals

It's been far too long since i've thought about what goals I have for the upcoming year, so my first goal of the year is to update my blog with a goal, daily. One of the reasons I have a blog is to remind myself about the things I go through and to express my thoughts in a way that allows myself to see progress that I have made. For example, almost 2 years ago, I was an emotional mess and I had that documented in my blog. It's good to see how my blog posts evolved from a constant whine to more positive and uplifting posts. So there. Goal 1: Write down a goal daily.

Options in the stock market and poker

I'm currently listening to a money management course about playing options and it is almost exactly the same as bankroll management in poker. It talks about losing streaks and how the chances of having 5 losing trades in a row, which is basically the same thing as in poker. You WILL run bad at some point. The thing you want to keep in mind is that you want to keep yourself from going bust. The same idea applies to trading options. The similarities go on and on. If you are a winning poker player and can emotionally handle the swings, you might want to take a look into playing options. A lot of the things you have learned in poker can be immediately applied to options. Think about it.