I’ve always secretly thought I would end up with complete amnesia some day, and forget everyone I know. It’s not much of a secret though, because I probably advertise more than is healthy the fact that I don’t remember any of my childhood, and in fact, do not remember any of my life before a year or two ago (and that number moves with me, so I won’t remember today two years from now, etc.). I’ve decided to essentially combat that problem by using my good friend, technology.

When I have downtime at home, and I’m just loafing around reading blogs or somesuch, I’ve taken to tagging friends’ names into photos of them in my Aperture library. This is comparatively easy with people I only recently met, or for those I’ve only met once (and taken pictures of them at that time) because their pictures are all in one place. But for people I’ve known for the past 3-4 years, esp. close friends, that means they’ve got pictures scattered all over the 62,000 shots I keep in there currently. It ends up being less boring than I thought it would be, because seeing all these times with friends ends up being pretty enjoyable, even if we all tend to look somewhat bored in the pictures. Refreshing all this regularly might help me remember stuff better, but even if not, I can at least check the metadata on a shot to see who my friends are.

As an aside, check out this guy Eric’s blog. He’s genius with sounds.

News to any of you stumbling on this website because of my occasional mentions of Aperture. Picturecode’s Noise Ninja, long since my favorite noise-reduction utility very recently came out with an Aperture plugin for their software, which is great news as per Aperture having seemingly useless noise-reduction functions integrated into it. It lacks a few features that the full photoshop plugin has (like auto-selecting camera profiles) but it still has the main features I found myself using, which typically was auto-profiling, and then adjusting the amounts where needed. If I’m reading it right, it can only be purchased with, or as an upgrade to, any existing noise ninja license. (The cost is $20 as an upgrade). I suggest getting the pro bundle, which while costing a bit more, allows for edits on 16-bit images so you’re not ditching any color information, plus multi-core and batch support for when you need to noise-reduce a big swath of images at once.

Even without the Aperture plugin, anyone using Photoshop who ever shoots above ISO 800 has use for this product, so take a look. You can download any of their software at any time, to try it out, but will just be saved with watermarks or grid lines without purchasing a license.

Keep it real, folks.

Quick post here. In the next couple days I’ll have a number of photos to show you all, including some from a pseudo fashion shoot, a little get-together in the cities, and that amazing wedding from weekend before last. But first, some quick news.

Aperture. You all know I love it. I’ve talked about it before here and earlier as well. Today they added one of my highly requested features, which is dodging and burning, but they did it in a particular way. They met another one of my requests, by opening up a plugin architecture. I’m not sure if it’s a public SDK or what they’re going to do for that (I’m guessing they’ll make this a closed SDK in attempts to monetize it somehow), but this will greatly expand the functionality of Aperture. They’re already talking to the people who make noise ninja, which is one of my specific hopes, as I use noise ninja already in photoshop, and a number of other companies.

That’s all for now. More pictures this weekend. I promise.