About a year ago I switched from Lightroom as my Photo Viewer/Editor of choice to Apple’s Aperture. I’ve really come to love the Aperture system overall, but there are a few Lightroom tools I really wished we had in Aperture. Tanya has stuck with Lightroom and the two of us using different software programs has made things problematic now and again, so I recently suggested to her we get on the same program. Ok, room for a joke here. Yea she suggested I get on her program. One of those husband-wife things. I persevered as any good husband would not do.

Her first question was, “can I get the captions to show under each thumbnail?” Her reason for asking this is based on the system she uses in Lightroom where she can see the caption that is attached to each image running across the top of the thumbnail. The benefit of this is she can easily see which images have been captioned and those that have not been captioned. I was not sure about her request and so I reached out to an Apple acquaintance who works on the Aperture software team. Thankfully after a few back and forth emails, he got me setup and I wanted to share the procedure with you. It can really reduce the confusion level of adding captions to your images if you can see at a glance what been done and what hasn’t.

View of Lightroom with captions on the thumbnails in Grid View

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Artist Dan Metz-An Introduction
One of the most fulfilling perks of working in the field of photography are the opportunities I get to meet a lot of interesting people. Twenty years ago or so, I met one such individual, wildlife artist Dan Metz. Dan is a true artist. He sells nothing but originals and lives for his art. He stopped by to see Tanya and me this past fall, which he does every fall, on his way down from the Canadian rockies where he had hired a horse pack team to take him fifty miles into the wilderness. There they dropped him off and two weeks later he hiked out on his own. The guy is nearly sixty years old! That’s the dedication this man has to go get just the right material for his amazingly beautiful paintings. I stopped by with my parents, to see him this past Christmas during my time in Minnesota. Photographing artists in their studio environment provides wonderful opportunities for great images and something I enjoy immensely.  However, their typically unique surroundings can provide numerous photographic challenges. Dan’s studio was no exception and I thought I would share with you some of the issues I was up against and how I solved them. Before we go into details on the photography, let me give a short introduction to this interesting man and good friend.

See a small collection of images of Dan’s studio.

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