One of photography's all time great tools of the trade has been the contact sheet. The first time I saw a contact sheet was the first time my grandmother helped me make one in her darkroom. I'd just developed my...

I shoot almost exclusively with a digital SLR. I have a few different point-and-shoot cameras around at one time or another, mostly loaners for book or magazine projects, but I just can't stand using an LCD screen as a viewfinder....

If you’re an Aperture user, there’s a good chance that you haven’t taken a look at iPhoto in a while. Why go back to iPhoto when Aperture’s tool set is so powerful? Three reasons in particular: books, cards, and calendars....

I have maintained that Aperture can make you a better photographer in many ways. Not only can you organize your photographic life, getting rid of the cyber-clutter (duplicate images) and ultimately have more time to shoot; but it also lets...

I just finished checking out a few samples from Apple's new online seminar, Aperture for iPhoto Users. In the samples, Joe Schorr walked me through a few techniques that iPhoto users already know how to do, such as create a...

This week, I wanted to take a few minutes to decipher some of the alphabet soup that we lovingly call metadata. Metadata refers to extra bits of information about an image ranging from what shutter speed you took the image...

Today's post isn't going to be a tip or a trick, or even a story about how Aperture helped to improve my workflow. No, today I would like to talk about something a little more personal. I want to...

In late March, Derrick interviewed Robert Leslie about shooting TED and later was able to share Robert's folder organization in Aperture. I saw this and immediately fine tuned some of my own practices when shooting big intensive events, such as...

I've been in the middle of an archiving project where I'm organizing all of my early digital images into Aperture. Yesterday, I found myself staring at a stack of Kodak Photo CDs from the early 1990s wondering what to...

This last week, I was busy shooting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, along with my shooting partner, Pinar Ozger. It was a crazy busy conference and the result was 50GB of RAW image data. As you can...

Apple has released a version update of Aperture. It weighs in at a respectable 129.5 megabytes. Get it through "Software Update" under the Apple Menu or click here. From Apple: What's New in this Version Aperture 1.5.3 addresses issues related...

After listening to Derrick Story's podcast interview with Aperture wedding shooter Joe Buissink, I got to thinking. Joe mentioned he uses a technique to train himself to be a better photographer. Basically, when he's out in his life and he...

One of the things I really like about Aperture is being able to adjust my images while I'm sorting through them. Applying some quick modifications using the Adjustment HUD lets me make better decisions about which images to keep. One...

I attended a presentation by sports photographer Bill Frakes last night at the Apple Store SoHo in New York City. The event was presented by the Aperture Users Professional Network (AUPN), a user association and advocate group that supports photographers...

I recently read an interesting post over at AUPN about a company based in New Delhi, India that is doing post-production work for photographers via FTP. The company is called Differential Technologies and you can check them out yourself at...

Aperture flummoxed me for a bit this morning. I have a project with a few hundred images in it. The project also contains several albums, just the regular kind that I have dragged some images into. When I would click...

Want to see a really sharp web site created with Aperture and iWeb? Take a look at Gunnar Blondal's work. Yes, it helps that the imagery is terrific, but he's also found a way to display it in a...

One of the best things about digital photography is that it's made distributing our photos so much easier. Print at home with no chemicals needed; post on the Web; burn to DVD. How about carrying your entire portfolio with you...

I'm sure many Inside Aperture viewers have already taken advantage of the Web Gallery features in Aperture. I finally decided to take the time (three minutes) to create one, and it reinforces for me, the value of this amazing program....

When I interviewed Robert Leslie about how he handled his shoot at TED, we discussed how Martin Gisborne organized Robert's Project pane in Aperture. I've received a few requests on how those files were organized. So Robert has been kind...

Over the next few posts, I'm going to talk about some topics that might appear simple but can be a little bit confusing. Today's post will be about how to get to your image files, both converted and RAW, outside...

Aperture comes packaged with a handful of very useful file and folder naming presets. These presets come in handy anytime you are exporting images, but they can also be helpful during import or if you are in the process of...

Earlier this evening, I sat in on a presentation by Robert Houser at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. Robert talked a lot of about the value of a personal project. In fact, for him, his personal project has...

You need to be very careful when deleting images in Aperture to avoid accidentally deleting an entire project rather than a selection of pictures. To delete an image, or a series of images, you first select them, and then choose...

Today let's look at a workflow that enables fast and easy authoring of photo slideshow DVDs. We'll access our Aperture library from iDVD and create an interactive DVD project that we can burn to disc and distribute as a rich...

Diane Arbus once said that the more personal you get, the more universal and interesting the photographs become. After years in the business and years more teaching and leading workshops, I know how difficult it sometimes is for photographers to...

Last week Josh introduced us both and gave three great tips. This week I'm going to be describing some of the ways I use Aperture in my everyday workflow. I thought I'd describe one way that I use Smart Albums...

In the last couple of weeks, I've changed something very important about my photo library strategy. Previously, when hitting the road, I've been leaving behind my primary library and just focusing on the images I take while on the road....

There are a number of digital photography processes that involve shooting multiple frames of a subject. High Dynamic Range imaging allows you to combine and merge a series of images to create a final result that has extremely high dynamic...