I am no bird watcher and certainly no twitcher but I do enjoy a trip to the Park or Nature Reserve, either to just enjoy the view, walk or fresh air.
Often I’ll take the camera and photograph the birds.
That often leaves me with a problem. Recognising the birds. While I have books at home, sometimes you want to know there and then what it is you have spotted/photographed.
This is where your iPhone/iPod Touch comes in, together with an app called iBird UK (also available for other countries).
Download the limited free version and give it a trial. I am sure, like me after a short while you will end up buying it.
PhotoSmith, the companion iPad application for Adobe Lightroom is now available.
As soon as it became available this morning I downloaded and installed it.
When I am away from home and don’t have my laptop with me, it will be come an essential part of my work flow.
Import is simple. I just plugged my Compact Flash card reader into the USB connector of the Apple connection kit and I had soon imported the hundred odd photographs I had taken at Whisby Nature Reserve yesterday.
The app itself is relatively simple. With the ability to select all, or by a two fingered tap, just the ones you are interested in, you can create Collections. With a Grid view, Loupe view and a full screen view, interacting with your photographs is simple and direct. Zoom in and check you focus, flag them with Ratings, Keywords and Metadata.
Once your back home, either wirelessly sync or if you have a lot of images, sync with your iPad cable back to lightroom. iTunes is not necessary, just download the free Lightroom plugin from http://blog.photosmithapp.com/index.php/plugin/
A simple but killer app which will make my work flow easier and faster, when away from home.
I can think of a number additional features I would like to see, such as presets to quickly add common details to lots of photos at once, and two way sync, so I can take a batch of photographs out of lightroom and onto the iPad for updating metadata when I have some free time.
So far its worked as advertised, does it have any bugs, well not really, I have been a little unfair to it, such as cancelling mid sync over wireless then trying to continue over a wired connection. I had to quit both Lightroom and PhotoSmith and restart them before they would carry on where they left, but to complain about such things is a little unfair. Sometime the refresh can fail but just click to another section and all is updated.
Can I recommend it, Yes definitely, and I look forward to putting it into some real action next time I take a trip as I will be leaving the laptop at home.
Rating 4 stars out of 5. If it gets the ability to apply presets and two way sync, i’ll make that 5 stars. For the amount of effect the develops have put in and for the amount of time this will save it is well worth the £10.99.
If your an iPad user and you have Lightroom, buy now.
Justed added a couple of plug-ins to my WordPress installation. Added a Twitter feed and Twitter/Facebook Like buttons, and also a Twitter Feed Plugin.
Not sure if there going to stay but I thought I would give them a try.
Oh and in case your wondering; Yes I did steal the idea off you Chris 😉
If your anything like me then you make your camera’s last. Back in the film days, I bought high end secondhand SLR’s, saving my money towards good glass. I expected them to last at least ten years.
Now with digital SLR’s the manufacturers seem to push you to upgrade every couple of years.
With the high cost of digital SLR’s I expect to get a minimum of 5 years out of them.
As technology moves on Compact Flash cards get bigger and faster. The latest cards include UDMA high speed technology, and have capacities reaching 64GB.
The question that often arises is do the newer cards work in older camera’s.
Well I thought I would buy some new cards this week for an upcoming trip.
A bit of research seemed to indicate that cards up to 16GB would work in my five year old Nikon D200’s, if I had the latest firmware but I could find nothing about the speed or if they supported UDMA (they don’t I have since found).
I keep my firmware up to date, but I decided to get some 8GB cards. Having lots of small cards is always better then a few large cards. I have only had a card corrupt on me once, and I only lost the last few images, but its not a risk I want to take.
Well today they arrived, and I am pleased to report they work.
Incase your wondering, the Nikon D200’s are running firmware, A2.01 and B2.01 and the cards were SanDisk Extreme 8GB 400x UDMA.
Well yes for you Apple/iPad nay Sayers, we bought the hype, been deceived by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field; we now have an iPad.
We took delivery yesterday together with the camera connection. So far it’s lot of fun. Our favourite apps are:
Comics – fun
Evernote – productivity
FTP On The Go – productivity
iBooks – reference and fun
iSsh – productivity
WordPress – productivity and using it on the iPad now to write this
NYTimes – information
Flipboard – information
Pulse -information
WeatherPro – information
Wikihood – information
As we play and use it for real work I’ll recommend some apps that we enjoy.
While I do not have an iPad yet, I like many other photographers can see the use they can be put through.
While some consider it useless, and label it a toy, unable to be used for real work, a joke for professionals, many people think its great for when you cannot take the trouble to carry a laptop.
To be honest when travelling I sometimes take Medium Format Camera equipment, 35mm equipment, lighting equipment and heavy tripods and light stands. Sometimes the last thing I want to add is a laptop.
Yesterday I spotted a posting from Adobe about a beta Photoshop App (see Chris Bennett’s Blog Post).
Photoshop is not one of the key apps that would make me buy an iPad but if someone released the Library Module of Adobe Lightroom then I would be buying an iPad like a shot.
http://blog.photosmithapp.com/
Well that day may well be nearly here. Check out the Photosmith Blog. This seems to offer what I want.
For heavy image work then a laptop in the field in not really the tool. Heavy image work is a job for back in the office/home with a powerful computer and controlled lighting conditions in the room, and a calibrated monitor. No, in the field its evaluating your work, making picks, keywording, metadata and quick adjusts to help you evaluate the shots.
When this gets released, together with some of the tethering apps that are coming out; Elinchrom’s and Hasselblad’s remote control apps then the iPad will be coming with me, out in the field and in the studio.
I just found out that its the Mac OS X Operating System’s 10th Birthday today.
Its certainly come a long way. While at work I use Windows, Solaris, Redhat and AIX, at home I stopped using Windows as my primary operating system not long after Windows XP was released.
Working my way through various versions of Linux before finally settling happily on Fedora Linux.
Well that changed when I decided to buy Caroline a Wedding Present of an Apple Powerbook. OS X was just so easy to use, never getting in the way and just letting you get on with the work at hand.
While Apple users may like to claim Mac’s never crash this is not true but they certainly do not crash often, certainly an improvement on Windows, NT4, 2000, XP and 2003.
Through what little I have used Windows 7 it to looks very good now but I think i’ll stick with OS X for a few more years.
If your anything like me then you make your camera’s last. Back in the film days, I bought high end secondhand SLR’s, saving my money towards good glass. I expected them to last at least ten years.
