Aperture Vault Problems…

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I’ve had the strangest problem with Aperture, and I’ve absolutely no idea what went wrong. I’ve been using it for over a year, and merrily backing up to a vault on my NAS device, as referenced files. It’s always been a bit glitchy with the ‘finding’ of the masters if I subsequently want to make a change: I would do a path update, and still have the offline master warning if I tried to relocate it. The only way that I could reliably get this to work en masse was by doing a vault update – no big deal as these were sporadic enough to coincide with backup activity anyway. I should mention that, because the NAS device is noisy and slow, I only turn it on when I have to.

Anyway, the arrival of my AppleTV around the end of January has prompted a lot of looking back at old projects, editing, and metadata slicing and dicing as a consequence – smart folders organised by Faces etc. I decided over the weekend that I’d do mass ‘consolidate master file’ update over about a year’s worth of  projects, and it crashed at some stage. It’s hard to say when as I left it running overnight to do it.

The next night I decided to to the path update and vault sync, and rather than taking about 5 minutes, the sync took about 4 hours. I decided to have a look at the NAS directory structure and the vault appears to have turned itself inside out. Having read up on this a bit, if you don’t specify a location for the masters when you load the images from your camera [or some other storage], Aperture will put them inside the vault package. I’ve duly looked and it’s almost empty. I now find myself with about 5,500 pictures in two separate directories, one where the vault is, and one in the directory above. By a process of elimination [i.e., deleting them, then trying to resync, and watching Aperture delete previews from the library. I had backed them up before!] I’ve discovered these are the masters.

The naming convention is peculiar, with the files have been renamed in numeric order in the format <unknown>_nnnn.jpeg [I have a lot of RAW and a few Tif files as well] – the angle brackets are literal.

So the long-term path to recovery is to consolidate the libraries for the period of time that Aperture has been managing my imports; export them to a directory structure reflecting year, month and event, and then creating a brand new library from scratch. From now on I’ll set the image import preferences to copy the pictures from my camera to this manually assigned directory structure – something I should have done from the start.

The masters are all there, in the exploded version of the vault. It’s just that they are mixed up with pre-Aperture days images, and with unrecognisable names. This is going go take quite a while. Especially as Aperture isn’t finding everything… Oh dear…

The irony is that part of the reason I did this in the first place – the mass consolidation – was so that Apple TV would have access to the highest quality images. This is almost certainly daft: I can’t imagine that it uses anything other the previews – dumping 20 meg raw files down the wireless network for slideshows is extremely unlikely.

One last piece of weirdness: my entire library has converted itself to referenced, right across the board.

Ely Cathedral – HDR

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Yesterday I found myself in another of England’s finest cathedrals within the space of a couple of weeks. It was the a return visit to Ely Cathedral for photography: last summer I had a major problem with my old tripod that led, via a long and torturous route, to the tripod that I should have bought in the first place.

I had some satisfactory results in full-on HDR mode, after lessons learned in Peterborough. All but the first four shots are neutral; the last two have the Gotham dial turned up to 11.

These types of interior / tripod shots can be quite labour intensive, especially when the camera is pointing either straight up or at a steep angle. Where the light is low, you have little choice but to use manual focus. Combining manual with Live Preview on 10x magnification can get very sharp results. But pointing the camera upwards means getting low enough to the ground to see the screen, which can get uncomfortable over the course of a couple of hours.

Some brief lens asides at this point. Lofting the 24-105mm to an angle of about 70 degrees or higher causes the zoom to slip, which can be quite annoying. Also, with my 10-22mm lens, I’ve found that I can get much sharper results on manual focus than I can with auto – obviously this only applies to tripod shots where you are probably going to get the tweezers out later anyway.

Towards the end of the afternoon I wasted about 20 minutes being completely bamboozled by the camera. I had bracketing on, but the camera insisted on only taking the central exposure, with the auto exposure asterisk merrily flashing away. I’m going to have to get the manual out on this one. I had turned off the timer in the drive mode briefly to take a couple of flash shots, and turning it back on – I think – fixed it, but I’m not convinced. The external light was starting to fade by this time, so the other possibility was that the camera couldn’t expose the darkest of the bracketed shots, i.e., without going above 30 seconds on F22. I lost the head to the point that I very nearly walked out of the cathedral without my flash.

And I’m not sure I would have been able to convince my wife that losing my flash would have been “my camera’s fault” :).

HDR – Stained Glass

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I was in Peterborough Cathedral yesterday, seeking sanctuary from the January sales. It’s the first time I’ve ever been and it is a fabulous building. If I can wring a little more from the pun, I have a confesssion to make. What I did know pre-visit: that it was one of the early inspirations for Ken Follett before writing Pillars of the earth, one of my reading highlights from last year. What I didn’t know: that it is the resting place of Katherine of Aragon, and formerly that of Mary Queen of Scots. Doh!

I’ve tried to take pictures of stained glass before with universally poor results – though to be fair, in unplanned visits sans tripod. I went armed yesterday, and after trying a variety of exposures, decided on a whim that it would be worth trying some bracketing. Despite the fact that the composition is awful [the picture below is a portrait crop, with enough surrounding detail to show that the stone is exposed, but the tops of the windows annoyingly absent], I’m impressed with the balance of light that the HDR managed to produce.

The three exposures are: F14 for 0.3 seconds, F6.3 for 0.6 seconds and F9 for 0.6 seconds. This is at 22mm on my ultra-wide, and ISO 100:

Stained Glass [HDR]

Stained Glass HDR

And here is a close-to-100% crop:

100% crop: stained class HDR

100% crop: stained class HDR

In Photmatix, I’ve set: Strength:70, Colour Saturation: 46 [i.e., defaults], Luminosity of -3.1, micro-contrast: 2.0, and finally, micro-smoothing 0.

There is a slight green cast to the stone, but this is a reflection of reality [the amount of green glass], and is present in the central exposure I bracketed around. I’ve intentionally left it in, for what it’s worth.

I’m going to have to go back now: as so often happens for me, what I consider to be the result of the day was – not quite a fluke, more of an afterthought.