Month: November 2016

If you can only afford one computer and you want a portable for Photography, its hard not to recommend the best MacBook Pro you can afford.  For those of use lucky enough to have several Mac laptops and desktops around the building to use, then for heavy Photoshop its the MacPro and for lighter work my old eight year old MacBook Pro.  The little MacBook most people including me dismiss and look more towards the Air for light work, but I was looking at the Geekbench scores and its amazing how computers have progressed.  That little underpowered laptop is nearly twice the power of my old laptop so if your just after something for occasional work it is an option but remember that USB-C hub.

While taking a quick a break from the office, I walked through town to visit my faviorate coffee shop.

Camera in hand I took a few snaps.

Once back at my desk I quickly imported them into Lightroom Mobile on the iPad but then did nothing with them.  Later I grabbed my laptop and opened up Lightroom on the web, and did a quick edit.  I later returned to the image but this time wanted to work a little more on the image so this time I opened up my master Lightroom catalogue held in my dropbox folder.

The photographs downloaded themselves quickly with my edits and I continued to work on them.  I have not yet fired up my master catalogue on my desktop yet, it will be interesting to see where the photographs are there!

 

I keep experimenting with different ways of working with Lightroom.  The problem I have is that I always want to use the computer/iPad thats to hand to work on my photographs.

Having been using Lightroom since it was released, there are about 70,000 shots in my main catalogue which lives on my desktop computer.  The catalogue on the internal SSD and the photographic files on two large external Thunderbolt2 drives.

Lightroom Mobile now means I can sync my work and use the web version and the iPad and some of the remote tools now available make the iPad very useful if you have the Pro version and Apple pencil, but sometimes you want to use your laptop.

I have been trying to work using a small temp catalogue for that months data but then it does not get synced to Lightroom mobile, and then there is importing it into your main library and remembering which version is the current version.

To make life a little easier I have been keeping this temp catalogue in my dropbox and it seems to work well and not corrupt.  

So that made me think, what about keeping my main catalogue in Dropbox; well that would be good but with one major problem, on my main machine my Dropbox is on an external old 1 TB FireWire800 drive connected into the back of my MacPro.  That way all the files I want handy are not cluttering up the main internal SSD.

If your used to Microsoft Windows then you are used to shortcuts, these come from a UNIX idea of symbolic links.  You create a soft link and the shortcut acts as the real file, very useful.  Well in UNIX and MacOS is just UNIX with a pretty GUI front end, you not only have soft symbolic links but something called hard links.  This tricks applications in thinking its the real deal and not just a ‘shortcut’.  So what I did was create a hard symbolic link on my dropbox folder, and low and behold the catalogue synced across.

So far it seems to be working well but I’ll keep on top of my regular backups just in case.

 

 

I was looking over the spec of the new Hasselblad and happened to notice they have put a USB-C port on it, looks like USB-C maybe coming faster then I thought. 

So how many ports does a photographer need on his computer?

The new MacBooks, like anytime a new Mac comes out with a redesign and new technology, are causing a lot of complaints.

I see a lot of people complaining about the loss of the SD card slot, while  my wife’s retina laptop has this, none of my computers ever have and all my camera with the exception of my Leica and Nikon V1 which I use as a compact use compact flash, and while my Nikon D800 can use SD I still use CF and either have the SD card set to roll over, or backup.

Ignoring things like port types I had a thought about the two types of usage I make, tethered shooting in the studio and mobile import and editing and backup.

Studio Tethering

So what ports do we need:

• Power
• USB Tether
• External HD for backup
• Optional but for some HDMI or some other type of monitor output

So depending out how you like to work thats three or four ports, something the older 15 inch MacBooks handled with ease.  Now the new machines have four TB3 connectors so a new tethering cable would be needed for say my Nikon D800 but USB3 to USB-C are now available, I do not think I would trust using a hub for tethering.

 

Remote Editing

• Power
• USB/CF/XQD Card reader
• External HD for Backup
• Optional External HD for Lightroom Catalogue Photographs

 

What about users who max out there laptops and use them as desktop replacements

Home/Office Use

• Power
• USB/CF/XQD Card reader
• External HD for Backup
• Optional External HD for Lightroom Catalogue Photographs
• External HD for Time Machine Backup
• External HD for iTunes
• Scanner
• Printer
• Monitor

 

So by buying the appropriate cables remote working and tethering is fine, for me home use, well I have a desktop, but one of those new LG 5K monitors with built in hub would be tempting.

I would try and buy a decent quality mobile and desktop hub, and where possible have dedicated cables but I have to admit its a shame they don’t have one USB3 port, it would have made life a lot easier.