Photo from November 27, 2011.

I’ve decided for my own sanity, to make a habit of processing a photo from my past.

Howl
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G
1/125sec @ ƒ2.8, ISO500, 24mm

One of the advantages of having a relative who is an artist is that, when they do manage to convince you to get out of your cave, it’s for some cool art exhibition in your neighborhood. In this case, we met up with Chris to see The Matter Within, which was an Indian contemporary art exhibit exhibit at the YBCA.

One of the first and most striking exhibit was Now in Your Neighborhood which used painted plastic bottles to make a dinosaur. My cousin’s son, Juno, sure enjoyed it. I enjoyed taking this photo where, in this brief moment, he mimics the pink sculpture.

Processing notes

Incorrect auto white balance often occurs in mixed indoor/outdoor lighting scenarios. In post-processing, I balanced on the gray of the floor tiles with the eyedropper until I got the right level of warmth.

I then added the film contrast curve I prefer for my color photography. Film contrast often loses detail in the highlights and shadows, so I did some recovery of the shadows (in this case), until I could see the hair detail on my cousin.

Aperture notes

The processing actually involved a lot of cursing. I re-discovered my frustrations with Aperture and Flickr — reminding my why I should have never stopped using FlickrExport. Yet again, Aperture lost the link between the photo on Flickr and Aperture meaning that all my previous changes were desynced from the original image.

When trying to upload a new image, it reduced the resolution to a max of 1024. No amount of fiddling fixed this because there must be some hard-coding that when you add something back into an old album, Aperture will reduce the resolution.

When I deleted it in the Flickr album in Aperture, it deleted the photo entirely in Aperture in a manner that is unrecoverable. Aperture trash reports 12 items, but there is nothing there. 🙁 Since rebuilding an Aperture database can take days, I just re-imported the photo from my backups and re-processed.

On the other hand, I did a better job than two years ago when forced into a do-over. There’s more detail and better contrast and color balance. It also took me much less time.