Aperture Users Network

The AUN's been on the scene at the Olympics for nearly two weeks, working with Apple in the Main Press Center helping to provide support for the one-thousand-plus journalists who have descended on Beijing to cover the world's largest sporting event. While I've just arrived in country to replace someone who has been here for weeks, I've already noticed examples of what I like to call the Photoshop Paradox or "How to shoot at 10-frames-per-second and edit at 12-frames-per-hour."

Apple's got a rather large amount of support available in the MPC, (we're in the lower level, relatively near the McDonalds) with fifty MacPro desktop systems set up connected to 30-inch Cinema Displays. Members of the media are welcome to come and hook up to them and work on Aperture or any of a number of other programs on the machines, and the "broadband" connections mean that photographers can go from shooting to submission in no time.

That is, unless they are still using Photoshop as their main image management tool. I'm not talking about Bridge, I've seen a few photographers who are using various iterations of that image preview and editing tool, but for some reason many of the shooters—at least many of those who bring their own laptops in to work on their images—still have a workflow whereby they open up dozens of images at a time in Photoshop, and use that interface as the way to make their image selection.

This seems absolutely ludicrous to me. Personally I don't care if a photographer uses Aperture or Lightroom or PhotoMechanic or even Bridge to do selects and ratings, but it pains me on a nearly physical level to see photographers opening up countless files in CS3 (or CS2 or CS, or 7, I've seen it all today) just to zoom in and see if they're sharp.

It's just odd to me that so many shooters are spending hours in the press room doing selects and basic edits, and I'm pretty sure that some of them are spending longer editing than they spent shooting.

Of course that's part of why we're here, to show photographers that there's another way to do things. One photographer from the UK named Ben showed up with a PC laptop and was so taken by Aperture that he went to the local Apple store and bought a Macbook (a placeholder for an upcoming Macbook Pro revision he hopes will come soon). Another, a Latvian shooter was already pretty advanced with Aperture but spent time with me today setting up his Mail.app preferences so he could send images via gmail without having to use a plug-in.

If you're an Aperture user, you already get the advantages of working with an image management program that lets you spend such a little portion of your day slaving over a computer and spend more shooting, but for many shooters that's as foreign as digital was in the days of film.

A few photographers here just seem too set on their workflow—one that I know personally (as I stopped in to train him when doing workshops in England) is still using his old Photoshop-and-Save-As workflow, making hundreds of files for his half-dozen clients for every single event he covers. He loved Aperture, but hasn't had the downtime to convert over, for him, and for many others, it seems easier to keep going.

Still though I wince as I watch him cropping and saving files over and over again, but I'm smiling as I watch many other shooters dip their toes in the visual-image-management waters and see that they realize how nice it is to have a program that takes the work out of their work.

I'll post more observations from the games, but if you're here, stop by the media center and say hello.