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Personal

First day of spring

First day outside

Here in Santa Fe, the snow’s finally melting (most of it off our roof and into our spare room, but anyway) and today was the first time that my daughter and I could hang out under the portal outside our living room without gloves, hats and snowboots.

I’ve been busy with web work recently, for which I’m grateful, but I’ve not been shooting as much as I should. So the camera’s been sitting there reproachfully, but today I grabbed it when we went outside.

And of course, it was taking photos of my daughter that got me excited about photography again so chatting away to her while I took some shots was nicely revivifying (which is hard to spell, but I think that’s the word I want).

I ran this shot through one of Aperture 3’s cross-processing presets for extra contrasty and saturated goodness. Now that Apple have released version 3.0.1, Aperture seems stable enough that you can actually use it without worrying about crashes all the time, and its new features are impressive.

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Moore Consulting

AIA Santa Fe chooses Moore Consulting to design new architects’ site

We’ve just launched the new site for the local Santa Fe Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and we’re very happy with it.

With over 130 Regular, Associate, Emeritus and Allied members, AIA Santa Fe focuses on local design and construction issues, supports New Mexico architecture students, provides continuing education opportunities for its members and circulates news and event information. Its lecture and film series are open to the public to bring diverse groups together to discuss architectural issues.

Updating their previous site meant calling its developer, and the site content had grown a little disorganized over time. So two key aims for the new site were that it could be updated by AIA volunteers and that it was structured to allow for additions.

Given the site’s main audience is architects, it also had to look good.

We developed a clean and spare design that incorporated the AIA colors but also left lots of white space. The most recent items added to the site’s News section appear automatically on the front page of the site, and other sections include sublevel navigation that can grow as more pages are added.

A Member Directory and Search feature make it easy to find the contact details for the chapter members, while integration with Paypal allows members to pay for their monthly lunches via the site.

And because the site is built using the WordPress content management system, all the updates and additions across the site are now performed by AIA volunteers.

Site address: http://www.aiasantafe.org

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Aperture Tips/Tutorials

Aperture 3 upgrade problems and fixes

UPDATE MARCH 2010: the release of the Aperture 3.0.1 update seems to have fixed many of the reliability problems. I’m back running in 64-bit mode with Faces working, and things haven’t crashed horribly for a while. YMMV.

After a long wait for the release of Aperture 3, I ignored my own rule about waiting until the first incremental update of new software before installing it. Big mistake.

Upgrading my 20,000 image library meant I fell foul of the apparent memory leak problem that seems to beset the new version.

First I was told I hadn’t enough room on my HD to complete the update – it had filled the spare 35GB on my MacBook Pro internal drive with a giant swap file.

Then the whole machine would hang while Aperture 3 performed some mystery ‘processing’ work on my images. I had no idea if my library was intact, and no way of actually using the product for real work.

The Fix – sort of

Thanks to the useful advice from fellow sufferers on the Apple Aperture Support forums, I binned my first attempt, and cobbled together a solution. I’ve no idea if these will work for you, and hopefully there’ll be an update along soon that will help us all out, but here’s what got me working again.

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Photoshelter Tips/Tutorials Web design

The Digital Skills Pro Photographers Need Now

Sometimes the younger generation seem to get a handle on all this more quickly

As a photographer, Apple Aperture consultant and web designer for photographers, I spend a lot of time helping other pros.

Recently three episodes have shown me how drastically the photography business is changing, and what range of skills are required to run a successful photography business.

Episode 1 – “WordPress is hard”

I’d just finished a site for a client and had carried out a training session on how to use WordPress to keep the site up to date. The next day I got a call from the flustered photog who had spent the afternoon trying to add one article. ‘This is much harder than I thought it was going to be,’ he explained.

I have some sympathy – for people who’ve never spent any time around a website before, the admin panel and functionality of a content management system takes a little getting used to. But part of his difficulty was that he lacked even basic web skills such as knowing how to copy a link from the address bar of a browser and paste it in somewhere else. This lack of familiarity with what are for many everyday habits made everything else much harder.

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Creativity Tips/Tutorials

What being a writer taught me about being a photographer

writingFor my first thirty years I was the writing guy: good at English in school and college, Masters in Literature, and a working journalist for The Irish Times and other publications in Ireland, the US and UK. And I’m the author of a a book of travel literature (that doesn’t have any photographs in it).

Even my entrance into the world of technology came because I could write – in this case, training materials teaching people how to use Microsoft products (God help me).

This might seem like a lot of wasted time, or at best lots of irrelevant experience.

But since I’ve been pursuing photography more seriously over the last four or five years, I’ve come to see that a lot of the things I learned writing have been very useful when I have a camera in my hand.

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Personal Santa Fe

Christmas Eve 2009

Christmas Eve might already seem a long way away as we head into mid-January, but I’ve just had a chance to look through some of the pictures I took around Canyon Road that cold night a few weeks ago.

It’s a Santa Fe Christmas Eve tradition to light farolitos – nothing more than a night light in a brown paper bag weighed down with sand – and the area around Canyon Road hosts thousands of them, and hundreds who bundle up to come out to see them.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to them, especially if there’s snow on the ground.
So here’s a blast of good cheer for you.

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Personal

Client Favourites of 2009

Before 2009 disappears entirely from memory, there’s just time for me to follow up my pick of my 2009 personal work with these favourites from my work for my fantastic clients.

I was lucky enough to meet some great children (and their parents) over the year, and we ended up with some lovely images.

Here’s to a great 2010 to all of you.

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Personal

Home-made tamales ready for steaming

Happy Holidays, everyone.

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Personal

Personal Favourites of 2009

With the end of the year fast approaching, I’ve put together a baker’s dozen of my favourite personal photos from the year. I’ll do a similar list of favourites from my client shoots in the next few days.

So here they are, from scraped knees to Our Lady, from rainbows to foggy Mazatlan. And I hope you all have a peaceful and warm holiday period.

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Moore Consulting

New Website for Santa Fe Architect Steve Shaw

Shaw Architecture, P.A a long-established architecture firm here in Santa Fe chose Moore Consulting to design and develop their new website, which has just launched.

Steve Shaw was looking for a clean and elegant design that showcased his high-end residential and commercial work, which includes the new ranch headquarters facility at the Flying Diamond Ranch, the Madden-Follingstad residence and the Santa Fe Business Incubator.

We chose a dark background to show the photography to best advantage and used an elegant display solution to allow visitors to click through multiple images for a project without having to reload the whole page.

The site is built using WordPress, making it easy to maintain. However, we developed a set of custom templates for the site, allowing for control over every detail, from the homepage slideshow to the unusual sub-level navigation which appears above the main navigation bar, allowing the full width of the page to be used for images and text.

Site address: http://www.shawsf.com