The iPad and photography? A very certain yes

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.

There’s a lot to be gained from such a venture. It’s an opportunity to build software and hardware environments free from the obsolete hangovers that continue to weigh down manufacturers on other platforms today. In creating a new platform and doing so entirely in-house, Apple has also positioned itself as gate-keeper, declining third party software contributions with totalitarian aplomb. The upside is quality control but there are worrying downsides too.

Putting quality control into Apple’s hands should mean a higher standard of software product than is available on many other mobile platforms. Apple software has always been of the highest standard after all, and its hardware design is what brought the company back from the brink in the 1990s. But that pipe dream is already proven so: if you shop at the App Store, you know that while some of its content is top-notch, most is trash and the challenge is to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Third party developers have complained loudly about Apple’s approval process and aspersions have even been cast calling it an anti-competitive process and a method by which to constrain key-competitors like Google. To this Apple says users aren’t compelled to buy, and developers aren’t compelled to build. Nice.

The iPad brings to the table another dimension to the software approval politics. Magazines and newspaper publishers are flocking to release their titles in a digital form that closely reflects their printed products. This new model brings with it a whole lot of hope for companies that have to this point been feeling a whole lot of pain from the decline of advertising revenues and circulation numbers. But editorial content and censorship of any kind are dangerous notions for publishers and for Apple. For this we need to see a clear policy outlining how digital publications will be treated differently to software.

Photography became a trade firmly linked with computer technology by the late 1990s and soon after it was commercially senseless not to be mindful of how technology might help your business. I’ve always had an eye on the horizon with a view to how new technology might benefit photography and the conclusion of this review is that the iPad does very much do that.

You can find any number of technical reports on the iPad across the internet which will tell you how the battery lasts all day (which it does), and how the oil resistant touch-dsiplay isn’t very smudge-resistant at all (it’s a mess). They’ll give you all the technical analysis you could ever want, so I am not taking that approach here. Rather, I am going to point out five reasons that I have concluded the iPad to be a worthy tool for photographers.

1 Wireless image preview

Its most intriguing function for us, I think, is in its role as a wireless tethered display for big shoots on location. Photographers have been lugging laptops or even carting entire desktop systems with them for their large displays so that art directors, stylists and others can collaborate directly during a shoot.

What I wanted to see from the iPad from day one was a way of previewing pictures on its display in as close as possible to real time, definitely wirelessly and preferably without the need for a host computer to be on the network. ShutterSnitch ticks all of those boxes.

Real-time wireless preview on your iPad as you shoot

The essential ingredients are a digital SLR, an Eye-Fi card (or a proprietary wireless adapter for your camera model), a wireless network, and an iPad with the ShutterSnitch app itself.

2 Portfolio viewings

One of the most obvious applications for the iPad in the hands of photographers is portfolio display and for that role it receives high marks for polish and presentation. But the iPad’s touch-screen display is very susceptible to smudges, even in the cleanest of hands. That’s not a good look, so running your cleaning-cloth over the display before a client meeting is essential preparation.

Highly customisable photo presentations

From the App Store’s current offerings Keynote is my tip for photo slideshow software. The iPad implementation of the desktop original by Apple is a very smooth product and offers the flexibility to cater for whatever bells and whistles you might like. It demands more preparation than the much more simple, in-built functionality but Keynote offers you an overall level of polish that makes it well worth $12.99.

3 Pre-production meetings

If you have pre-production meetings with your clients or crew, use the iPad for brainstorming and the laying-out of ideas and lighting concepts. With the right software, you can very easily sketch a lighting diagram and send it to your desktop computer for tidying-up or distribute it to all parties as needed then and there. If you like the sound of this, you’ll want OmniGraffle for iPad.

Complex drawings and diagrams – useful for lighting diagrams and set designs

I’ve been using OmniGraffle for Mac for a while and it’s a very fine product indeed. It’s a diagram, mock-up and drawing application that is simultaneously sophisticated and simple such that you’ll pick it up in minutes. OmniGraffle maintains a library of stencils that are essentially icons and other useful templates that save you having to create them yourself. Download the lighting and photography themed stencil (called Strobist Stencil) and you’ll be creating lighting diagrams in minutes with point-and-click ease. Or pinch-and-zoom ease on the iPad version.

A lighting diagram sketched out using templates in OmniGraffle for iPad

At $59.99 OmniGraffle for iPad is an expensive piece of software by App Store standards but it’s probably worth twice that price. You’ll find its depth of features, simplicity of design, and compatibility with the desktop version very impressive. It’s simply the best piece of software I’ve seen for the iPad yet.

Also for the pre-production planning process, take a look at Lightrac. It illustrates the angle of the sun for any location at your chosen date and time by plotting it on a map for you. Very handy when planning timings.

Plot the angle of the sun for your desired location, at your desired time

4 Digital wallet

At up to 64GB, the iPad is a reasonably sized mobile storage device if you don’t fill it all with music and movies. If you use it for wireless preview with ShutterSnitch as detailed above, and if you configure it to transfer your full-sized originals, you also have an instant back-up of your shoot as you work. The downside is that the wireless transfer of modern raw image files can take a while.

5 Property and model releases

I am beta-testing an iPhone and iPad app at present which presents a very useful function for photographers on location by managing property and model releases for them. It displays legally binding (and customisable) contracts that signatories acknowledge and agree to via the touch-screen display, following which it despatches PDF copies of the digitally signed contract to both parties and to a back-up server also. That’s it in a nutshell. Very useful for photographers, and very adaptable to a variety of other industries I would imagine. More on that app later.

And beyond…

There are iPad apps for processing credit card payments on the spot. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of shot-lists on a complicated day of shooting. Get detailed weather forecasts and update your blog during a rain delay with the WordPress app. Complete fully fledged finance functions with the Numbers spreadsheet. Access your desktop machine (Mac or Windows) from wherever you are with LogMeIn Ignition. Be immediately informed of flight delays as they are announced by the carrier with FlightTrack Pro. Or seek inspiration from the Guardian newspaper’s Eyewitness photo-feed app. The list of secondary-functions is huge, growing daily and only limited by the imaginations of developers.

As a first generation product the iPad performs surprisingly well. That’s probably because it’s not truly first generation, given that it comprises largely of technologies Apple has been bedding-in for years.

It’s by no means a replacement for a laptop computer and therefore it’s not a means by which press photographers or photojournalists could realistically transmit their pictures from the field. It’s therefore probably of limited use to them. But for the average commercial or portrait photographer, the iPad is a tool you will not regret buying.

wade@wadelaube.com

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Related posts:

1. OmniFocus for iPad (for photographers)
2. iPad 1.5