The Unreal Me

Well I finally did it. I went and upgraded my old 2006 iMac. Doing photography and encoding a lot of my DVD’s recently I’d been a little annoyed at the speed (Or lack of) of my old iMac. While it boasted a Core 2 Duo running at a little over 2Ghz, it had started to show it’s age with raw throughput when using Adobe Lightroom and Handbrake. Apple had recently revved their lineup so I decided to look into an upgrade and see what it’d cost me. Of course, a small upgrade to the low end iMac would have still left me with tech envy, so I opted for the new Quad Core iMac.

I had ordered through JBHiFi but after some mucking around by them and being told in the end I wouldn’t get it until mid January I cancelled my order and bought instead from the Apple store. This was a good move for Apple because while I was there I noticed that for just a teeny bit more I could get the i7 Quad Core running at 2.8GHz as opposed to the i5 Quad Core @ 2.66GHz which is Apple’s stock top of the line model; the i7 is a custom build which benchmarks showed to be about 20% faster in some cases than the i5. So I hit the button and hunkered down for the guesstimated 6th Jan ship date. However, I must have been a good boy throughout the year because on the 29th of December Santa delivered my new toy!

I eagerly unpacked it and admired the predictably sexy Apple packaging then fired it up, grabbed my Firewire cable to join to my old iMac for migration and – uh oh – “Where do I stick this Firewire plug” – oh “I don’t, it only has a Firewire 800 port now”. This was my first hurdle and while very inconvenient, the Migration Assistant allows network migration. I hit Airport and started the process – “Oh, 13 hours to migrate? No way am I waiting for that!” so I cancelled it. In the end I had to resort to making a Time Machine backup of my old machine first and using that as my migration source.

Then issue two hit me and this was was a bit more worrisome. I let the migration progress, came back when it finished, looked at my files and noticed lots were missing. I then tried migrating again, and watched it. Part way through at some random time (I tried a few more times) my drive would just disappear from the system and so the migration wouldn’t finish. On top of that the Migration Assistant reported success so I thought it’d worked. In the end I turned off every setting to do with Sleeping, Screen Fading and what have you as well as trying a different USB port and managed to get migrated without the drive being lost. I really hope the issue doesn’t come back but I’ll spend some time later looking into it.

Anyway once up and running I have to say the machine is sexy. It looks good, with a 27″ anodised aluminium body and runs like the clappers. I did some test encodings of DVD’s of mine and the machine could encode at about 4x the speed of my old iMac. Very, Very nice. Everything opens fast, Lightroom flies and life is good. Apart from this keyboard which is already hurting my hands.

The mouse on the other hand feels quite nice, albeit small (Most mice are for my hands) and the touch sensitive surface for scrolling and swiping works well. It does suffer from Apple’s usual mouse issue of not tracking fast enough, but I found a little Preference Pane called Mouse Zoom that makes my mouse a lot faster, even if not quite fast enough for me.

Anyway, I can’t wait to get into some real work with this baby.

Uncategorized Apple, Computers, Mac

Recently I was asked to do a photoshoot of a house that was currently being renovated in a very swanky part of Auckland city. The builders were proud of the work they had done on the home and wanted something as a memento. Not only did they want the main rooms shown off, but they wanted some of the finer work photographed also. I had shot some product photography for one of the builders earlier in the year for a deck-jacking system they had invented and they called me back to shoot this home.

Having never shot a house before (And when you see it, it wasn’t a small house) I was a little unsure of I could pull it off and suggested the pull in a pro architecture photographer, but the client didn’t mind and trusted that I could get the job done for them. I also hired a couple of assistants to help me at different parts of the day. Nykie from mistralphotography took up the bulk of the work and a good friend of mine Vincent Yu came in during the last hour of the shoot. I had them essentially go around and shoot little pickup shots of details and other things that I wasn’t going to shoot in the primary photography. They did a great job!

There were a couple of obstacles to this shoot. The biggest was the contrast ratios. Trying to get a good exposure from inside to out was challenging because the house had so many windows. I employed some HDR for exposure blending, flash, and avoided problematic areas as much as I could and things worked out pretty good in the end.

The second was what to shoot! In the lead up to the shoot it was hard to get access to the location because the home owners were now living in it, and were giving permission out of the goodness of their hearts. So, the builder wanted to turn up on the day to show me what he wanted photographed but he got held up at another job so I had to just go ahead anyway. I’m glad I did because I finished not long before a dinner party started to be prepared which would have made shooting the kitchen a little hard

The images were captured, processed and delivered to the client within a week and the response was very satisfying:

“Hi Aaron……those look amazing    AWESOME  photos…thank you very much..”

I also added a number of images with some more stylised treatment to make things a little more dynamic.

So all in all a successful shoot and the builder said that he will get me back for his next job – nice!

Uncategorized