NYDiscovery

New York Snow Day Photos

There seems to be a lot of snow around this year all over the northern hemisphere. Friday, we had yet another big snow storm in New York and this time Elke and I managed to go out and shoot. Above is a quite big snowman on Union Square. More photos are here.

NYDiscovery Photo Project: The High Line through the year

Every year we create a calendar of our pictures and give it away to our friends and family. This year's theme will be the High Line, New York's newest park, which opened last Spring. Besides being located beautifully on Manhattan's west side, it sports also a very carefully selected, interesting vegetation. Well, there's not much to see in January, but wait as we go through the seasons.
 

Want to see some pictures? (with sun, sea, beach and palm trees)

Elke and I don't want to give the winter depression a chance and looking at photos of beautiful places certainly helps us. If you need the sight of the sun, the sea, some beaches too, then I suggest having a look at the photos from our Caribbean cruise on Flickr. Also, I'm posting daily photos out of our library on Posterous and the current theme over there is also "beach". 

Working together with Aperture on multiple Macs and PCs

I'm hooked to the sleek, efficient way Apple products work together - as long as you have installed everything on a single machine. But I use multiple Macs (I think, the Desktop/Laptop scenario is not luxury anymore) and I'm working together with Elke on maintaining our photo library in Aperture. Possible? Not really, but I found a decent workaround to deal with this situation:

• Aperture is installed on the desktop under a special "shared" account. Apple explicitly states that an Aperture library cannot be used by multiple users, not over network and not on the same machine. You can try, but you most likely run into permission issues. This of course means that I cannot use the media browser to access photos in Aperture when I'm in my own account. Elke, still on a PC, is out of luck here anyway.
• I export pictures out of Aperture into a Dropbox folder, which is shared with Elke's and my accounts. By virtue of the Dropbox magic, the pictures as quickly available locally on all our PCs.
• We use Picasa to observe the shared Dropbox folder, so it will immediately load the new pictures. This all happens automatically and very quickly.
• My iPhone is also to the shared Dropbox folder, so it will also load those pictures with the next syncing. However, iTunes creates a folder "iPod Photo Cache" in the shared folder, which holds the optimized, smaller versions of the pictures loaded on the iPhone. Paradoxically, though, it has multiple times the size of the original pictures (400 MB in my case). This is a lot counting against the 2GB Dropbox limit (for free accounts) and even considerable against the 60 or 80 GB available on our laptops. Here's the workaround on the Mac: move the cache folder in some location outside the Dropbox folder and place an an alias (not a symlink) there instead. Dropbox won't follow an alias, but luckily iTunes does.

Using this setup I have only to export the pictures out of Aperture, the rest pretty much works automatically and I have some pictures ready on my laptop and the iPhone for showing around or simply for my own inspiration.

A case for a good backup (if one is needed)

In August 2004, after a rainy Saturday afternoon, the sun came suddenly out and turned New York into a golden city in a way I haven't seen before or after. We grabbed our new shiny Nikon D70, ran to the rooftop and shot whatever we could. At this time we haven't had a real workflow, so the pictures usually ended up on the hard disk with some of them published on Fotolog or printed.
Since that time I was under the impression that those pictures sit in some directory, waiting to be loaded into Aperture, sorted and selected. However, when I looked today, I couldn't find them. Apparently they got lost when the hard disk in our Linux server failed in 2005. It was a tricky failure with a few random directories and files vanishing and not surprisingly those unique photos were among them. After the crash I installed a backup solution, which improved over the years. Today we have:

• The hard disks in our Mac Pro are backed with Time Machine up over network to a disk attached to a Mac mini in a different room. We've had water raining through the ceiling at our place, so an USB disk directly attached to the Mac doesn't cut it. I'm planning to use a Drobo instead of a simple external disk when the current backup disk is full, which will give additional safety
• An external backup to mozy.com. Due to an upload speed of 768 kBit/s this has been a year-long project, but very soon we'll have all photos in the cloud. Mozy works for me quite fine, but there's a lot of buzz about BackBlazer. But of course starting all over is not an option.

Fortunately before an automated solution I was occasionally backing up to DVD, so I could recover the lost pictures. Unfortunately with us being new to a digital SLR, they turned out not as good as they could have been. I'll post some of them on Flickr in the next days.

My Apple Aperture photography workflow

I'm not a pro photographer and have little aspirations to become one. But Elke and I take a lot of pictures and we have little time to select and post-process them as we have little time besides our many other activities (not the least our daytime jobs). So speed and efficiency is paramount. Inspired by a recent episode of TWIP, I revised my Apple Aperture workflow and like to document it here.

First Pass: Tagging
Some basic tagging happens during the import, but there's a lot more individual tagging to do. I usually tag location, persons, specific subjects and the general scenery. Unfortunately Aperture with its hierarchical tags that are sometimes non-hierarchical doesn't make this too easy.

Second Pass: Stacking
In digital photography we usually take many pictures from the same subject. In Aperture those can be stacked together again. It offers a auto-stack function while importing, but so far I've preferred stacking manually. I stack pictures if they are so similar that I wouldn't put them both in a slide show. This is not an exact criterion, but it usually reduces the number of pictures to be processed independently.

Third Pass: Deleting and Rejecting
I delete photos only if they are obviously useless, means blurry, extremely over- or under-exposed. In doubt, I keep the picture. Storage is cheap and I don't want to waste too much time to muse over a photo, if it is really blurry (it probably is, but whatever). Rejection is for all uninteresting pictures and I try to be as selective as possible.

Fourth Pass: Rating
We use 3 ratings (out of five):

• 5 stars for extraordinary pictures
• 4 stars for good pictures, technically and artistically
• 3 stars for flawed photos that show some interesting memory or fit into a slideshow

In a stack, I usually select and rate one picture.

Fifth Pass: Reject the rest
Everything that didn't get rated in pass four gets rejected. That includes all not rated photos in a stack. Not sure if that's the best way, but I want to have all pictures be rated in the end.

I use an Aperture smart album to see all 4-star pictures not yet uploaded to Flickr (FlickrExport for Aperture adds a handy tag to a photo after the update). From there I upload five pictures per day. Please see the results here.

Cruise the Caribbean on board the QM2 with our travel photos

We really enjoyed this voyage and the luxury and comfort of the ship probably has spoiled us for the vacations to come. Please have a look at a selection pictures on Flickr or at a broader selection in our gallery.

Good-bye 2008, you were a good one!

With less than 8 hours to go, 2008 is clearly winding down, making room for 2009. Looking back, I'd say I particularly liked that one despite my  accident.

We were off to a rough start, 2008 and I, as it is usually the case, because I dislike January and February that much. For 2009, January is filled with already 5 concerts to hopefully ease the pain a bit, but January 2008 was the usual crappy, cold winter month with the exception that I could finally hire Ninash which still makes me happy.

In February, Oliver and I took on a gigantic project: remodeling our master bedroom! We got rid of our old sleeping sofa, painted the room ourselves - bright yellow! Bought a very nice new bed, a mattress, a new desk, chair, etc. and completely remodeled the room. It was so worth it and still is! So, February with all the yellow was already brighter than usual.

However, I didn't like my job situation too much. Jobwise okay but not the office politics and the general outlook. So I was pursuing a couple of opportunities...

In April, you can tell that Spring is in the air and by then, my mood changes and everything's getting better again.

May comes and we're going to a lot of concerts, traveling to Germany and preparing for Oliver's birthday. We had a big party on June 1st and all friends - with the exception of a few - were in New York, including his Dad, to celebrate with him.

We're digging summer. June, July, August - lots of concerts, open air dinners, some brief vacation at the beach in Montauk. Oh, not to forget our old friend Volkmar's visit who was on a business trip in New Jersey for 3 weeks, which gave us plenty of opportunities to hang out together. It felt so good to do things with an old friend!

September comes and with that not only the US Open (I've seen a Roger Federer game!!!) but some guests from Germany: Chrissi und Janina from Hamburg and Mandy and Jacko from Berlin. What fun it is to show friends our city! It's also fun to hang out with friends in Montauk, even though it's rainy. We've had a great time with Sue & Pete and Bill & Mike.

While it usually is my favorite month of the year, October turned out to be a bit too adventurous! The days up to my birthday were fantastic, then some big news, then my birthday and the day after my accident! While my head - thank the Lord! - is healed again, my right shoulder isn't yet. The comforting news however is that it's getting better. Slowly. But steadily. Yes, a lot of things happened in October and most of the events were positive like a having been promoted to Head of Community for fotolog.com, the company I am with and the community I am caring for more than 4.5 years.

November held probably the biggest highlight of 2008: our wedding anniversary cruise! 8 days on board the QM2, starting from New York City, cruising the Caribbean with final destination Fort Lauderdale. We loved it so much that we're determined to not only do this cruise every milestone anniversary but in 2009 - if in any way possible! There was another highlight of course: the election of Barrack Obama as the next US president. Let's get back the good things that America and its people stood and hopefully soon again stand for!!!

Always a fantastic month is December and this time especially with my Dad's 70th birthday surprise party! Not only did we have a great time with my family in the South of Germany but with our friends in Munich too. It felt so good to see everybody again: my sister Biggi, her boyfriend, Andrea, Elena, Fiona, Martina, Liza, Nicole, Volker, Oliver's Mom and as said my Mom and Dad.

The last couple of days in New York City could not have been any better. Oliver and I enjoyed a quiet Christmas Eve where we dressed up nicely and had a fun picture session. The next day, we were partying at Yvette's place with Melissa, Itzik and other friends. The day after that, Lani and Richard had dinner with us. Yesterday, we might with Jennifer and Bryan from Hong Kong who were on a short visit in New York and tonight we'll celebrate with Bill and Mike at Rosa Mexicano.

So, when I say that 2008 was particularly nice, then because of all of the above and so much more that I currently cannot think of.

Thanks and good-bye 2008. Welcome 2009!

Happy New Year everybody!

Photo Update: New York City Waterfalls

We took more than 300 pictures of the four waterfalls that Olafur Eliasson installed along the East River. This is, actually, not much, but it took still a while to sort through them and select the best ones. Please have a look at the final selection on Photrade.

Photo Update: Montauk in Fall

Pictures from a rainy weekend in Montauk on Long Island