Photography

Photographing the moon

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When I attempt to take a photo of the moon, it usually comes out as a featureless white blob, due to being overexposed. Thanks to a tip on Flickr, I discovered that the secret to taking a photo of the moon that doesn’t suck is to use spot metering rather than matrix.

With matrix metering, the camera will use both the dark sky and the bright moon to determine the exposure, which usually ends up overexposing the moon to avoid underexposing everything else. Spot metering lets you use only the moon to determine the exposure, which avoids the usual blown out appearance.

Moon & Star

For this shot, I used my Sigma 70-300mm lens with shutter priority. Since I wasn’t using a tripod and this lens doesn’t have VR, I used a shutter speed of 1/250 with ISO 3200.

Follow-up on the Sigma 70-300mm lens

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After using the lens for a few days, I’m very happy with it. For the price, it’s a great lens and a good addition for anyone who wants a higher zoom and macro capabilities. It does take some getting used to, but it’s possible to get some excellent results from it. In macro mode, you can get very sharp images with good bokeh.

Since the lens lacks vibration reduction, if you’re not using a tripod, you’ll have to use a very fast shutter speed, around 1/focal length, to avoid camera shake. I find I get the best results using shutter priority and raising the ISO if necessary. For this shot, I used a shutter speed of 1/320 and ISO 1600 at the maximum aperture, which is 5.6 at 300mm.

Little Orchids

The focus can be very slow, so in many cases you’ll probably want to use manual focus. The macro switch can be a bit tricky – it can only be engaged at a focal length of 200mm or greater, and you can’t switch it off with the second extension (used for focus) extended. In most cases, that means you’ll have to switch to manual focus to rotate the focus ring.

Despite those limitations, there probably isn’t another lens that offers the same capabilities for under $200.

iPhoto 09 vs. Aperture

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After trying iPhoto 09 for a few days, I’ve decided to go back to Aperture for several reasons. Although I like iPhoto’s faces & places feature, it’s still missing many of Apertures features. Hopefully faces & places will be added to Aperture 3.

Here are my favorite Aperture features that are missing from iPhoto:

  • Aperture lets you store your photos outside of the library, even when importing from a camera. Aperture also lets you move your originals at any time after it’s been imported. I like to keep my originals on an external drive to save room. Even with my originals offline, Aperture still lets me see previews and do anything that doesn’t require a high resolution image, such as set desktop or sync with iPod or iPhone.
  • Aperture gives you a lot more power & flexibility in selecting and organizing photos. You can group similar photos in a stack and view them side by side to choose the best of the group.
  • Aperture supports editing plugins such as Hydra HDR, which can avoid a trip to Photoshop in many cases.
  • Aperture gives more options for viewing & editing metadata, including the ability to embed a copyright notice.
  • Aperture gives more layout options for viewing your photos, including thumbnails only, thumbnails plus large photo, and list view plus large photo.
  • Aperture lets you maintain multiple versions of a photo as well as the original, so you can try different edits.

iLife 09

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My copy of iLife 09 finally arrived today, two days later than it was supposed to arrive. I chose standard shipping, which turned out to be DHL via USPS. I don’t understand why Apple even bothers with DHL as the middleman. It would probably be easier, faster, and cheaper to just ship it directly via USPS.

The only application I’ve tried so far is iPhoto 09. I haven’t used iPhoto in about a year since I switched to Aperture, so most of the photos in my iPhoto library are at least a year old. With over 3000 pictures in the library, converting it to iPhoto 09 took only a few seconds. Scanning for faces took about 45 minutes.

I find that iPhoto’s face recognition is very erratic. It seems to recognize faces only if the person is facing more or less straight ahead. It often misses faces completely if someone is facing sideways.

iPhoto 09’s built-in Flickr support is pretty weak. It always creates a new photo set for every group of photos uploaded, and it doesn’t let you add keywords or a description when you upload. Thankfully, FlickrExport still works with iPhoto 09.

I still prefer Aperture for several reasons. I like being able to store the originals outside the library, so I can keep them on an external drive. iPhoto 09 still doesn’t let you move the originals after you import them, and when you import from a camera, you can only store them in the library. I also miss Aperture’s editing plugins like Hydra HDR.

On the plus side, iPhoto is a lot faster than Aperture. I find that Aperture can sometimes get painfully slow on my MacBook, even with 4GB RAM.