I will be heading out to MacWorld next week, where I will be doing a day long “Advanced Digital Safari” where I hope to see some of you Inside Aperture regulars.

On my recent wanderings in Rwanda, I had everything I needed in my bag, except one thing: Aperture.

Not that I forgot my workflow program at home. It just didn’t support my new Nikon D300 RAW files.

So rather than going back to shoot RAW & JPEG, I decided to go back to my roots, using Photo Mechanic for editing and metadata, and Photoshop CS3 for everything else.

Well of course, both of these programs are very, very good. With Photo Mechanic, I was quickly able to edit, add metadata, rate the images and see them in all their glory. When time permitted, I would take a closer look in Photoshop. But time is the key word here.

There is no doubt that working this way was much more time consuming than I was used to in Aperture. And I just didn’t have the time.

So here’s hoping for some new RAW format support for some very popular cameras next week. After establishing a workflow in Aperture I really like, it was hard not adding my new work to my grand library archive, a sacred place I have chosen to hold my entire photographic life.

I won’t rest until my new work is safely stored in Aperture. Here’s a few more images from my trip, all shot with the Nikon D300 and 14-24mm lens.