bobsleigh ticket © Jay Goodrich

Since age 10 I have been enthralled with the bobsleigh. That was the first time I was old enough to realize what it was. I watched every segment of the sport on TV during the Lake Placid Olympics of 1980. I built my own toy bobsleigh run out of clay, cotton and plywood, built bobsleighs to accompany it, and pretended to race all of the different colors of the competing countries. Fast forward to 30 years later and a childhood dream has come to pass. Last week I got to photograph and spectate the 4 man bobsleigh in Whistler, British Columbia. I can tell you that it was the best sporting event I have ever been to, period. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling that 1000 plus pounds of athletes and machine passing at 95 miles an hour generates, within a proximity so close, that I could high-five them. Pure insanity. Try to capture it on film, well on sensor I guess, and it is just plain ridiculous. This is the coolest idea since sliced bread. These are the guys who never let the runners of their flexible flyers rust. With all of this excitement and emotion built from the past 30 years of my life, I decided that one image I had to have was of the final turn, the turn where the riders experience 5 Gs. To put it in a different perspective, that is 5 times the force of normal gravity, and the average person passes out at 9 Gs. Again, did I state this was crazy. I slowed my shutter and tried to maintain focus on the sleds as they went through this turn at lightspeed. If it weren’t for digital, I would never have been able to come up with this image. A USA sled coming through the final turn at the Whistler Sliding Venue. I don’t need to play with those homemade toys anymore.

USA bobsleigh final turn © Jay Goodrich

We are finally getting new images up on our Stock site. The more that go in there, the more we will update you on those new images. These are only a handful of what is to come!

deep snow in the Vail backcountry

Chris is one of my best skiing buds of all time. I don’t know how many days we have logged together, but I can tell you that it is probably close to 1000. He was one of my first friends in Vail, and that friendship is still going strong today. A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call from him with a completely off the wall idea. Let’s go to the Olympics. My initial reaction was hell yes, then I thought about the money and backed out, then I talked to Heather and she said what are you stupid? The reply to that question does not need to be answered here or in the future. That pushed me back to my initial response, hell yeah. Plans were formulated, magazines were contacted, letters fired off in all directions, then responses came back, a little success. Now we have a story to shoot, I think, if Whistler doesn’t change their mind. Anyway, last night Chris showed up at my doorstep. And consequently, we, he and I, are headed to Vancouver tomorrow. Yes, I am headed to the Olympics for a few days of shooting, eating, drinking, and hopefully some skiing on snow like the image above. It is entirely possible with the weather that is supposedly coming in…we’ll see.

Moss covered trees near Mount Baker iPhone © Jay Goodrich

In a little over 12 hours I will commence on my adam 12 project. I hope some of you will do the same and send me the results. Watch my facebook, twitter, and flickr accounts for up to the minute postings of our travels.

I have been really inspired by black and white imagery lately. So after 20 years of shooting nothing but color here are the beginnings of a new collection for me. Let me know what you think.

Yellowstone Wolf © Jay Goodrich

National Geographic has a really good article online, that will also be included in their March 2010 print issue, regarding the wolf population in the west. It’s written by By Douglas Chadwick and photographed by a host of photographers. If you have ever traveled to Yellowstone and witnessed the spectacle surrounding these amazing creatures this article is a must read. As for my photo, a wolf crossed the road right in front of me during one of my many visits to the region, I didn’t even have time to make any adjustments with the camera. Just point and click.

The Photoshop 20^th anniversary celebration on February 18^th at 7:30 p.m. pst will be streamed LIVE and feature Photoshop luminaries including NAPP’s Scott Kelby, John Loiacono, Adobe Senior Vice President and General Manager, Creative Solutions Business Unit, NAPP Photoshop gurus Dave Cross and Matt Kloskowski, Adobe Photoshop star Russell Brown, and other key members of the Adobe Photoshop team. This fun-filled night will feature a walk through Photoshop history, a glimpse into the future, and celebrates all things Photoshop.

It’s easy to attend! Sign up at http://www.photoshopuser.com/photoshop20th, and come back to that page on February 18^th at 7:30 p.m. pst for an amazing history-making night.

Martha's Beach, Washington, Taken with iPhone © Jay Goodrich

I am going to try this only because I can. I now have the latest version of the Wordpress application for my iPhone, which I have discovered can do just about everything that my desktop version can do. This will be my first post to my blog from my iPhone using only an iPhone image. The image was taken at my local beach one evening while I was on a trail run with my wife Heather. Hopefully it looks ok. And yes I did write this while sitting at the breakfast table…in my boxers. There truly isn’t anything that you can not do in this world.

I also want you to have a brief overview of my current workflow. All of my initial editing, renaming, cataloging, and keywording is currently accomplished using Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits, Inc. I can tell you that this will never change. Photo Mechanic is super fast, super responsive, and super easy to get those images organized to a point where I can work on them further. Once I am finished in Photo Mechanic the images are imported into Lightroom. This is where I apply global and some local adjustments prior to finishing the images in Photoshop. All of the Photoshop images are stacked with the original raws and assigned a rating, color code and flag per the way my wacked out brain works. At this point, they are ready to send out for usages, added to the web, or uploaded to my Photoshelter account.

I had a bunch of tasks in mind once I downloaded my trial version of Aperture 3, yesterday. I have a set workflow in place, so my main concern is how easy it would be to integrate Aperture into that workflow. Next, I wanted to review all of the new features and adjustment tools. Then, I wanted to see what I could produce with some of my current images and how fast I could do it.

I opened Aperture for the first time in a bunch of years last night after dinner. I watched all of the videos that pop up as you start the software for the first time and then was off to the races. I decided to only import two folders from my terabyte of images that reside on my computer. I figured if I couldn’t get a good idea as to how this software would work with creating only two projects on the platform, I could stop right there and continue on with my current workflow. I chose two folders of images that I captured in Yellowstone this past summer, both of which contained untouched raws, HDR merges, and final Photoshop selects. With this first stage, I discovered my first problem. Aperture does not read any of my Lightroom ratings, color coding or stacks. It does organize the files so I can see them in the order in which they reside in Lightroom, but all of that important info attached to the photos falls by the waste-side. There might be a way to do this and have it work, I just don’t know it yet. Also, I discovered that Aperture drops all of my IPTC contact info from my Photoshop finals. And yes, this info is present when viewing the images in Photoshop and Lightroom. Everything else appears to be correct – filenames, keywords, and IPTC data on the original raws.

Next up were the features. I have to say that I am pretty amazed here. The browser is super fast even while you are uploading, something that Lightroom lacks. I managed to find my first bug fairly quickly. I went right into the adjustments tab once the import was complete, selected an image, chose the retouch adjustment, and proceeded to clone dust out of an image. I have to say that I usually do this in Photoshop, because even Lightroom is way too slow with its version of this tool. Aperture proceeded to crash 5 times in a row. So it looks like I will either need to slow down on the way I clone and become more patient, or continue to work this process in Photoshop.

Preprocessed Raw, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone NP, © Jay Goodrich

Now I wanted to master an image and see if I could get similar results here in Aperture to what is available to me in Lightroom. This is where Apple left me drooling. I have to say that they are crushing Lightroom in their ability to apply local adjustments to an image. You can see what I was able to get out of my raw in just a couple of minutes using only Aperture 3. The adjustments tab contains over 20 adjustments, and 30 presets, and this is the kicker – they can all be applied locally, with a custom brush that you create. In addition, you can create presets for both individual adjustments or a series of them. The adjustments do apply super fast, although there was some glitchyness as the hardware applied it to the raw. Sometimes it only displayed part of the image during it’s redraw process, this was fixed by just clicking on the image again. Not a big problem, but it definitely contributes to frustration. I also tried clicking one of my existing .psd files to see if I could go back into Photoshop and make additional adjustments to a final select. This was not a problem, however, Aperture needed to create an additional psd of the existing psd to do so. Meaning it was treating my final Photoshop file as a raw. All of the adjustment layers were present and workable. My main wish here is that it would read my psd as the psd and open it directly, and then re-save it as the original.

Processed with Aperture only, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone NP, © Jay Goodrich

With the discovery of how amazing the adjustments tab is I decided to see if I could match an image in Aperture with one that has been processed through my current Photoshop workflow. And to my amazement it actually exceeded the current Photoshop image, by holding more detail in the highlights, and giving me a very close rendition (as seen below) without using anything but Aperture. This could make it a more powerful editing tool for me, bringing images into Photoshop only for merges and panoramic creation.

Aperture Version, © Jay Goodrich

Photoshop Version, © Jay Goodrich

So what else do I like? The GEO tagging feature is a really cool option. I do not GEO tag my photos in the field, but with a quick click of the “places” tool in the upper right hand corner of Aperture, I was able to tag all of my Yellowstone photo locations in a couple of minutes by dropping pins on the map exactly where I know I stood. Then I was able to easily attach the specific photos to those locations. Way cool. The slideshow feature is really impressive too. It gives you the power to pretty much create a movie with your images, add music, add video that you have with your D-SLR, sync those images to the music, and then export the whole show directly to youTube, Quicktime, or even as full resolution HD. Having the ability to upload directly to Flickr and Facebook is a welcome plus for me also.

I know that I haven’t even touched the surface of this software and upon more review could find even more likes and dislikes with it. My main objective here was to see if it will do a better job for me personally. Anything that speeds up my editing processes, contributes to my bottom line and that is an ever growing necessity in this industry.

Am I going to make the switch back? Well that’s not an easy question to answer. Losing my ratings, stacks, and color coding would make my life a little harder. I will have to decide how important it is for me to keep those settings, and if the answer is yes, then making the commitment to update all of the folders and images accordingly. However, the adjustment tools are calling me like the Sirens of the Odyssey. I think before I jump off of the boat half cocked, I am going to do a little more research and see what Adobe steps up to the plate with in Lightroom 3. Never-the-less, if I was a current Aperture user, I would already have the upgrade. And as it stands right now, I really want to make the leap.

Pros:

-great image adjustments – especially on the local adjustment level

-slide show and places

-uploading to Facebook, MobileMe, and Flickr – it would be even cooler if they added posting to Twitter and personal blog galleries similar to what Photoshelter offers.

-speed when browsing and adjusting

Cons:

-doesn’t read Lightroom’s ratings, color coding, and stacks

-duplicates current .psd files as if they were raws

-crashes and glitchy redraws with certain tools in certain situations

-loses IPTC contact info with existing .psd files