What is the hype about sapphire lens covers?

I am a reasonably disgruntled iPhone 5 photographer.  I, like many others, will use the camera often.  But for me, its always with a tinge of regret that I didn't plan ahead and have one of my better cameras with me.  Even a 10 MP four year old Olympus Stylus 1030SW is better than my iPhone if only because the optics are not fixed.

So with that as a background, it really bothers me when one of the supposed benefits of the iPhone 5, its Sapphire lens cover is crap.  I don't care how high on the hardness scale this stuff is supposed to be, it scratches and leaves behind crappy artifacts, such as in the picture below.  There are no fewer than six visible problems currently.  It is particularly notable on a ski trip.

Perhaps this is a problem of not only knowing how to protect some part of your device, but being OK with the failure mode.  I'd say that this is a big fail for Apple.

The Move to Aperture

I recently upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture. Overall, I'm glad I did, though this assessment may be a bit premature. I'm a reasonably experienced iPhoto users, so hopefully my experience could be instructive for others out there.

Here are my initial thoughts on Aperture:

• Import Process: Setting up the process to import is easy and I particularly liked how the process did not take up all available resources. That is to say, after Aperture identified all of the events from iPhoto to import, it went about the import in an event by event fashion. As soon as an event was imported, you could go to work on it.
• Faces Import Data Integrity:Faces information came in well. All of the people that I had tagged were there with all of their associated pictures. Note that this included 100's of photos for some of the kids, so it would have been a real hassle if it had not worked well.
• Places Import Data Integrity:Apparent failure at first. None of the geotagging information seemed to be imported. None whatsoever. That is say that when I went to the map, there were no pins on it. At first, there are only two things that mitigate this failure: ex post geotagging is easily done with multiple photos and you can import a GPS track log and pictures to geotag. This will remove the extra step of using GPSPhotoLinker for doing this with iPhoto. After messing around some more, and unsure if I was just looking at things incorrectly previously, it appears that my tagging information is still there. Excellent. I'm looking forward to tagging a larger percentage of newly imported pictures and will also work to tag some old stuff due to the easier process.
• Image Adjustments: Brushes One of the items that I thought was particularly interesting about Aperature was the ability to brush in our out an image adjustment. This has already come in very handy for some post-processing of an image that needed the lowlights brought up, but had some blacks in it that I wanted preserved. Not a problem, just brush out the adjustment on those areas.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: There are a lot of them, which is very appealing to me. I've already downloaded a cheat sheet and have put next to my monitor. I hope to learn them over time.
• Interface: I will have to say that I have done much more stray clicking around in Aperture than I have ever done in iPhoto. The interface looks like its going to take some getting used to. That said, I'm not worried that it will never make sense. I think it will just take some getting use to.
• More to come . . . .

"Faces" are good - but I want people

Just got the new iLife '09 package from Apple. Fine package and I do like the addition of "places" and "faces" in iPhoto. I was inspired to write this post given some limitations that I see in the latter, but decided that I should really take the discussion to the perhaps absurd, but complete view of meta-data that I would like.

Let's take stock of how we are doing with meta-data for photos. Here's my list of desired meta-data and my view of where we are currently (in order of easiest to address and most useful to hardest and most obscure):

1) When: this was the first and easiest issue for people to both understand and deal with - its even available in the file properties as the creation date. This has been, almost by default, become the most common and useful way of organizing large photo libraries. The "grand daddy" of all meta-data for your pictures.

2)Picture Orientation: this one is dealt with in Exif data, but incredibly many point and shoot cameras still do not provide this information. My DSLRs do just fine - its not a big deal, but it sure is an annoyance to rotate all you pictures when you import. This also represents the category of "data lost". As in, the information was available for "free" if the hardware had the where-with-all to capture it.

3) Why (event): iPhoto introduced this a few versions ago. Seems to be a useful way of grouping (e.g., "John & Debs Wedding Weekend") photos that span a medium term of time, but a bad way of trying to implement tags. Overall, reasonably useful, but I believe on the whole implemented in a very proprietary manner.

4) Where: Geotagging - good stuff, but not quite ubiquitous. Would like to see some super easy to use software to merge trail information with a photostream (I've read that it exists, but haven't been able to find it). This should be built in to the likes of iPhoto.

5) Who's in the picture: "Faces" (in iPhoto) are great, but I have tons of pictures that are full of other body parts and I would like a fast way of tagging all of my historic and new pictures with that information. There seem to be plenty of ways to use pattern recognition (not just of faces) to make this super easy. For instance, when I take several pictures of people just moments apart, it is probably a reasonable assumption that they have the same clothes on (not true for all of us, but for most of us). Why not use this information (and that of the human form) along with the genius facial recognition software to make this a "Who" not just "Face".

6) How (exposure, etc.): Nicely dealt with (for the most part), with Exif data and potentially XMP (if anybody other than Adobe ever supports that). Mostly us photo geeks like this stuff - but eventually most people might care.

7) Who's taking the picture: This comes from a strong bias in the photostream at my house. As in, I'm almost always the one taking the picture, not the one in the picture. Its not that important, but come on, let's collect this information!

8) Orientation: (i.e., elevation and compass direction) Location is good but location, plus camera elevation and camera direction completely define the source point of the picture. How cool would it be to see a virtual panorama on g-maps if done on the fly by the mob?

9) Atmospheric Conditions: I think it'd be useful to capture all of the atmospheric conditions (weather information) that were present when the picture was taken. Much more of an issue for outside photography, but the first layer of information would be whether the picture was taken inside or outside. Then, why not store temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, wind speed, etc. Most of that information could be merged at a later time from outside sources based on location and timestamps.

10) Light augmentation: This is one for the photography geek in me. I'd like to be able to track all manner of light augmentation/modification: flashes, filters and reflectors. Useful information, probably most of the usefulness of this would be in the professional/studio setting. EXIF also deals with this to a limited extent, but not generally captured well.

11) Spoken commentary: How cool would it be that you tag your photos will a few comments about what was going on. Entry should be facilitated by the camera, but there will need to be a universal way of linking the audio file to the picture file for this to be effective. Speech recognition would eventually catch up regular folks and would allow us to have a treasure trove of useful information in our photo archives.

Finally, I believe that all of this information should be able to be stored in the photo files themselves in an open format. I'm not too happy with the fact that I'm a hostage to all of the tags that I've spent time with in iPhoto. Faces and Places just make this dependency even deeper. My only hope is that some day there is a way out (somebody figures out how to write an export routine).