I’ve had the chance to put Mac OS X Lion to daily use for the past few months and can now write down a few thoughts and observations.
More general reviews can be found all over the web that are also much more comprehensive. Instead, this one focuses on the features and additions that I think might be useful to photographers.
What a difference a decade makes for Apple. During the late nineties the computer company (that’s all they built back then) nearly went broke. But then came the iMac which changed the company’s fortunes, followed by the iPod, which changed the world.
For most of its thirty years in business Apple has held underdog status, a David in the context of a Microsoft Goliath. The Apple brand brought connotations of a fringe-dwelling cult and its followers were personal computer outcasts with just a two or three-percent market share. But you need to strain hard to remember those days now given what Apple has become: today it’s a globally dominant force in half a dozen markets.
Only a few short years ago most photographers had not been persuaded to adopt the Raw file format in any great number and of those who had, it tended to be pulled out just for special occasions. The hefty overheads that came with Raw files, together with the less than ideal post production software of the era, made it a very time consuming proposition. High quality JPGs were so much easier to deal with that they tended to win the argument on most occasions.
In the years since we have acquired much better computers, far cheaper storage media and hugely improved software. Together, all of this has reduced those overheads to the point that working with Raw files has become akin to handling JPGs. Now that they can enjoy all the benefits and few of the constraints, it has come to be that for most of the photographers that I know at least, shooting in Raw is now standard.
But while Raw certainly helps them make better pictures, a seldom realised danger has arisen as an unintended consequence of this mass-migration.
Here’s a quick note to alert you to a handy new app that I think is worth investigating if you’re a photographer with an iPad.
If anything it would have been the incessant marketing and manipulative PR antics of Apple that might have diluted my interest in the iPad. But knowing this brand as I do and relying on the company’s equipment for years as I have, I was able to put aside my inclination towards cynicism long enough to have a proper look at the iPad. It’s also wise to pay attention when a company like Apple says it’s going to create an entirely new computer platform completely afresh.
The iPad sounds like it caters more for the photography audience than photographers themselves but I’ll speculate that it will be quite useful to us nonetheless. We know that it’s not going to be a primary computer any time soon, and it’s a consumer oriented device for sure, but priced at well under a grand I think it’s easy enough to justify, especially when you consider a few of these possibilities.
I expect that not many of you are being kept awake at night by fears of a cyber attack, but we should at least all be aware of the scope of the threats that exist to photographers on the internet, and that there are some pretty straightforward countermeasures available to us.
The online bits of any small business are susceptible to risks which are compounded by the fact most of us are not IT experts and therefore don’t even know what they are, let alone how we might defend ourselves against them.
It took a long time to get here, but the new Aperture release looks like it’s been worth waiting for. A bunch of new features like selective (non-destructive) dodging and burning, 64-bit architecture with the additional memory capacity that it brings with it, together with the introduction of adjustment presets and something resembling Photoshop’s curves functionality are all things I’ll use daily.
But it’s not all rosy. You see, Aperture 3.0 seems to have brought with it a few teething problems that are a good reminder to us all that the early adoption of new technology and business critical systems don’t mix.
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