Apple has just released the first major upgrade in a long time to Aperture, its photo-workflow application that fights against Adobe Lightroom for market share in the pro / advanced-amateur photographer market. This is great news if you're into photography, even if, like me, you've never used Aperture.

The list of features in Aperture 3.0 shares many things with what Lightroom already has, but includes plenty that Lightroom doesn't have (geoencoding, video support, and face recognition are a few of the headline features, but it's actually in the small details that one often finds salve to a workflow irritation).

People [...]

So I watched the unveiling of the Apple iPad event. I was not surprised about the product, but I was very surprised at Steve Job's performance. Normally he's a really dynamic presenter who quickly grabs the audience and takes them on a thrill ride with him, but I guess his health issues have left him hollow, because he was flat out boring. He would offer some fact, then tell us that it's "amazing" or "incredible" or "unbelievable", instead of letting the fact speak for itself, egged on by the thrilling way he would tell it. I was as embarrassed for [...]
View full post »

Just a short followup to last week's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" post, I've gone ahead and released the Lightroom plugin I'd built before realizing the major problems plaguing Picasa's face-recognition feature. If you've invested time in Picasa's face recognition, use Lightroom, and are lucky, the plugin may be of use.

Here it is:    Jeffrey’s "Picasa Face-Recognition Import" Lightroom Plugin

I've just wasted the last two days on something more fun (and more frustrating) than any video game – Google's Picasa photo app "face recognition" stuff.

Google's Picasa desktop photo application includes the very cool feature of face recognition. Point it at a photo and it will identify where in the photo faces are to be found, and do so with great precision. I pointed Picasa at the 20,000 photos in my archive from this year (maybe 100,000 faces?) and there were no false positives, unless you don't count sculptures of faces as a face. Very impressive.

But like a [...]
View full post »

We had a bit of fun this evening; with Fumie's folks and my friend Shimada-san, we went up to Shogunzuka (from where I often try to catch a photogenic sunset) to watch the Space Shuttle and the Space Station pass almost directly overhead, 215 miles up. We arrived, literally, just as the space station popped up over the horizon, 725 miles away, followed 10 or so seconds later by the space shuttle. They seemed to be moving quite fast – it was pretty obvious that they weren't airplanes – but it still took a couple of minutes for them to [...]
View full post »