This past weekend I was invited to cover the annual Trail Gear Customer Appreciation Run by Matt Messer of Trail Gear. Trail Gear is a company in Fresno that makes aftermarket upgrades for Toyotas and Jeeps.

This Event is not really about extreme wheeling as much as it is hanging out with friends, and enjoying easy wheeling in a really scenic place.

It all started with amazing BBQ at the Trail Gear shop followed by some RC Rock Crawler hi-jinx and then we rolled out for the mountains.

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I think the temperature down in the valley was over 100 degrees so getting to higher ground was most welcome. Once we were up past Shaver and into the woods, I was a lot more comfortable. All in all, this event was pretty low key but watch the pages of CRAWL Magazine sometime in October or November. 

Portland Monthly

Recently, I did a training for Portland Monthly and Portland Spaces magazines at MacForce in Portland. I have to say that to date this was one of the best classes I've done from an instructor angle. I don't mean to pat my back, I'm actually referring to how awesome all the peeps in attendance were. I was floored that lowly little me could have anything of value to share with people of such obvious talent and skill. Unless you've been asleep at the newsstand you must have seen for yourself already but if not check both out.

Portland Monthly
Portland Spaces

Aperture as an image editor?

So, lately I’ve been thinking and playing more with some export plugins and other items for Aperture. I just finished editing a huge job for Off Road Magazine. I think I shot a total of around 2800 frames for the 2008 Oregon Trail Rally. Now, this is a ton by even my own standards. Partially, this was due to the fact that it was my first rally and I wanted lots to choose from. Partially, it was that there was just a ton of high-speed action. As usual I was pleased with Aperture’s ability to very efficiently let me sift the gold from the garbage. My 2800 images by the time I elliminated stuff I knew I wouldn’t use, was reduced to around 1100 images. From there I chose my selects and tossed even more imagery until I was at about 250 shots. I cringe to think what this would have been like in the days before really efficient RAW workflow tools.


Anyway, I was looking forward to completing the above process because I was eager to try out some of the new plugins on my images that Apple opened the door for with the 2.1 update to Aperture. Then, at the end I just decided that I didn’t care. Even I was surprised. It turns out that for a lot of what I shoot a ton of post processing options just get in the way of final delivery to the client. I think a lot of shooters that shoot in the volume necessary to make Aperture or Lightroom mission critical applications, just don’t care about getting too crazy with post processing. We just need basic stuff. I want to adjust levels, tame highlights, maybe adjust the white balance. I occasionally will do a black and white conversion. At the end of the day, I find Aperture’s tools to be more than equal to the task. So though, I welcome all the great stuff on the way from Nik and other software companies, I wonder really, how useful those plugins will be if we operate under the assumption that all anyone really needs is Aperture/Lightroom and Photoshop. The heavy lifting is likely to still be done with Photoshop and a complex advertising shoot is probably going to be a Bridge/Photoshop workflow.
Maybe not though. I’ve yet to try the new tethered capture in my studio and I do love how quickly I can compare several shots with Aperture...but I can imagine with clients standing around in the background chimping the monitor with me that it might be simpler to do it with tools everyone understands rather than Aperture or Lightroom. I don’t know too many art directors or designers that have picked up that software yet.
I’m just musing though. Just sharing thoughts. I have reached no conclusions. How about you?