Craig Abaya: Shooting Stars
Non-destructive editing in Aperture means that Abaya never has to worry about damaging the perfect shot. Any adjustments he makes in post-production are simply stored as a set of instructions that affect the way the picture is displayed — his files remain untouched. “I can make as many iterations of the file as I want and the original image from the camera is always safe,” he says. “Aperture never touches it.”
Easy Editing
Even the most vigilant photographer needs to make adjustments in post-production. Abaya uses Aperture to tweak colors and white balance before delivering his work to clients. “I think in old-school terms,” says Abaya. “Aperture is really good about carrying that thought process forward by having things like color temperature settings. I think cinematographers and photographers are already thinking in terms of color temperature — they’re thinking in terms of degrees Kelvin.”
Dave Matthews at the 2005 Bridge School Benefit Concert. Photo by Craig Abaya.
Sometimes a photographer needs to make similar color adjustments to an entire batch of shots. “At a recent concert I took lot of pictures under the same lighting conditions with the same exposure,” says Abaya. “Later I decided that I wanted to adjust the colors in one shot and apply those changes to all of the other shots. I used the Lift and Stamp tool in Aperture to drag the changes from one shot to all the rest and it was done in seconds. Those kinds of adjustments are common with things like exposure and color temperature. Having a tool like that really speeds things up for me.”
Laptop Lab
Abaya does most of his post-production work on his PowerBook G4 while he’s in transit. “I’ve saved a lot of time because I do a lot of work on the train,” he says. “I answer emails, compose curricula, and work on photographs of rock stars on the way to work in the morning. I’m married and I have two children — my time is extremely limited.”
To save as much time as possible, he loads his images onto external hard drives and adds extensive metadata and keywords to speed up his searches. “The search tools in Aperture are just amazing,” he says. “I can pull up any image I need in an instant with a keyword search.”
Organizational Web
Keeping things straight after a shot can be a nightmare — ask any photographer — and even electronic organizational methods like file trees have their limits. “After something like a concert festival, there are so many different webs of pictures,” says Abaya. “I’ve got a picture of David Crosby, then one of Crosby and Neil Young. Do I file it under ‘David Crosby,’ ‘Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young,’ or ‘Neil Young’? Or if it’s backstage, do I file it under ‘backstage’? I have that sort of dilemma with a lot of pictures. How do you make heads or tails of that in the real world? Thankfully, in the virtual world, you can have all of the connections, like the synapses of the brain.”
“The search tools in Aperture are just amazing. I can pull up any image I need in an instant with a keyword search.”
Using Aperture, Abaya can organize his shots in multiple folders without making multiple copies. “Aperture stores everything in one place and uses pointers to those images — it doesn’t make copies,” he says. “In my recent past, I would have to make multiple copies of my files before I even started my work. I had the pristine RAW file, the semi-pristine file, the web files. Now I don’t spend a lot of time making copies and saving different versions. It also saves a lot of storage space.”
Abaya also uses Aperture’s automated web galleries to give his clients previews of his work. “It’s a convenient way to give the client images,” he says, “and I can do it all from Aperture. I love the web paradigm. Anyone can view the pictures. I can burn the gallery to a CD so they can view it with a web browser at any time.”
Every Abaya photo project is archived using Aperture Vaults. The photographer’s work is securely stored on external hard drives automatically. “I love Vaults because I often forget which shots need backing up,” he says. “Now I don’t spend any time wondering if I backed something up. Between the library and the Vault, Aperture knows for me. It keeps track of what has been backed up and what hasn’t and deals with it. That means I can spend more time shooting.”
