Tips

A user recently asked about fixing time zones when you are importing photos that were shot in one time zone, possibly set accurately (possibly not), but while sitting in another time zone. If you find an accurate time stamp to be critical to your workflow (as many of us do), having this right is quite important.

It’s a pretty big discussion, and I will do an in-depth tip on that sooner or later, and with it include syncing GPS data (which is where things get really messy). But today while importing some photos I made while in Slovenia in October (yeah… I’m behind) I noticed something I’d never seen before.

Verifying Capture Time

The very first thing I did was to open a .CR2 file in Preview to check out the EXIF data and see what time it had set. I know for a fact that my camera was set correctly, so before I even went into Aperture (expecting to have some time zone confusion), I verified the time.

As you can see, the image was captured on October 12, 2010, at 17:51:48

Now what?

A kb (knowledge base) article was released explaining in much more detail what was fixed in the recent Aperture 3.1.1 update. No huge surprises here personally (many of these fixes were things I never knew were broken), but worth a read if you’ve discovered some bizarre activity in Aperture and are curious if it’s been fixed, or just to get more details on the iLife, Flickr, etc. updates.

I’ve been lusting after a new MacBook Air since they were released, but have been waiting to see what the reviews said for performance. After all, it’s (just) a Core 2 Duo processor, and even at the top-end, significantly lower specced than my 2.93Ghz 15” MacBook Pro from early 2009. But the hope of course was that with a more modern graphics card, the SSD “hard drive”, and some wishful thinking, that it could still stand up as an Aperture machine.

I ensure that all cameras — mine and my assistant’s — are perfectly synced immediately before a shoot so that I can edit them all chronologically later, without care to who shot what. That way when I’m sorting through photos of a critical moment (like the kiss at a wedding), I can step through image by image in perfect chronological order, regardless of who shot it or from what angle. This goes for multiple cameras that I may be carrying, and any other cameras under my control on the shoot. I find when compiling the best shots to tell a story, having all the photos in perfect order to be a tremendous timesaver (anyone who’s read any of my eBooks knows how much emphasis I put on having accurate and precise timestamps on my photos).

Separating my shots from their shots in Aperture 3

However if you’re on a job with an assistant/second shooter, such as a wedding, you may want to separate out their photos from yours at some point. Perhaps you want to see how many of their shots you ended up using (good way to judge how useful they were as a second shooter), or you simply want to take a critical eye to their work. Fortunately with Aperture, this is incredibly easy to do.