Next week is the last week of classes for my first semester at the Maryland Institute College of Art. For those of you who don’t know, I started working towards an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media this Fall.

It has been a pretty intense semester, trying to get back into the academic atmosphere, and deciding which direction I want to go with my photography over the next couple of years. I have come up with lots of ideas, tried them all, and, well I am still pretty much in the dark. However, things are beginning to take shape, and I am certainly developing a working method that I think will, in the end, result in a great body of work.

On Tuesday I am scheduled to give a presentation which will be an overview of the work I have done up until now. This is sort of a final critique for the first semester and all 24 of us are presenting over a two week period. We each get about 15 to 20 minutes barring any heated debates.

To prepare for this critique I have been looking through my Aperture library to figure out just what it is I plan to show. I started this process by creating an album that contains all the images I have shot since the semester began. I didn’t have to do this, but I thought it would make things line up a little chronologically speaking.

To do this I simply selected the All Photos tab in my Library and used the search tool to highlight the dates going back to the beginning of September. I then created an album containing my results. It turns out I have shot some 2500 still images. These consist of frames from my Canon DSLR, my Panasonic LX3, and a selection of frame-grabs from HD video. I also have a 250 gig portable drive that is currently FILLED with HD video, and audio which I also shot over this past semester.

To make my presentation I began looking through my images. Some of them were for obvious projects I had been working on, and many of them were from my daily shooting that I do. I began to organize them in terms of what I thought would make sense for a series of short films. As I haven’t presented this to my class, I will have to hold off on the specifics for now as I don’t want to ruin the surprise! Next week these films will be up on my Vimeo site for you all to see.

Once I had organized my images into albums I went through and added star ratings to images I thought would be useful in the films. I moved things around, changed ratings, created new version and organized all of my work. Using Aperture in this way was really fun. Instead of looking at each Project as a shoot that I did on a given day, I was able to look at my entire set of images over a four month span and make sense out of them in a totally new way.

Many of the images were processed into black and white using Silver Efex Pro, and so I had to go through and make sure I had toned them al the same for consistency in these short films. No problemo, if I found one that was toned differently, I just took a new version form the master and opened it up in Silver Efex to re-do the toning.

Now for the good part

For the series of short films I am working on, the images will need to be exported as Jpegs for Final Cut Pro. I tend to do this on an as needed basis, as it can be confusing and tedious to work with all of the exported files. Once they are out of Aperture, I am sort of on my own to remember where they all went.

However, for my presentation on Tuesday I will be using Keynote to display most of the still images, with audio clips in the background. So quite a bit of the work was done direct from Keynote using the Aperture Preview files. This technique seems to work great. Keynote makes a local copy of the Preview files I choose to use so I can easily transfer the Keynote presentation to the class podium computer. The Keynote presentation also includes a few exported films from FCP, but these are also all self contained, so I don’t need to worry about where the original source files have gone.

Aperture is something that not a lot of my fellow students seem to know about. I am hopeful that they might become interested when they find out how easy it was to make my final critique presentation using a combo of Aperture and Keynote.