Digital Innovations

When I was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art back in the film days, there was a bulletin board near the school’s darkrooms where misplaced negatives were pinned. It was officially called “The Little Lost Negative Board” but someone had surreptitiously added, “Someday my prints will come.”

The most important tip I would like to share about travel photography is never buy a new camera or lens before traveling to Bhutan or even Carhenge. The next most essential travel photography secret is that using your equipment has to be instinctive; when a photo op presents itself you may only have a few seconds to get a shot. There’s no time to think about what menu to use or how to turn on continuous AF, or what exposure mode you’re in. Using your camera has to be instinctive; you should see—or even anticipate—then click the shutter. It’ll make travel more fun, too.

Aside from how to pronounce my name, the main question readers ask is about the workflow I use to process image files. I find it’s convenient to work with two desktop computers, often at the same time, with a laptop computer used on the road and for testing new software. A Mac Pro handles my daily work with an iMac tasked for e-mail and research but also as a live backup when problems occur with computer number one. The iMac also runs Microsoft Windows 7 using Apple’s Boot Camp. Since my laptop is used for experimentation, and that’s where you’ll find the latest OS and imaging software, I don’t store anything critical on it.

Many people think they need to travel far from home to make photographs when, chances are, if they took the time to look around they would discover that photo ops are right around the corner. That’s where self-assignments come in: for the past 30 years mine has been making images that I can walk to from my front door—like the tiny flower in my front yard I captured this afternoon. It wasn’t made for any commercial purpose and is just a way for me to appreciate and document the small things of daily life that many people take for granted. It’s personal projects like this that help us all stretch our talent, skill, and imagination. You can think of it is as a form of digital meditation.

Instead of visions of sugarplums, it’s visions of gadgets, gizmos, and software dancing through digital photographers’ heads during the holiday time. Presented for your approval is a group of fun, clever, and affordable tools that will put a smile on your face when opening holiday gifts and make imaging in 2014 more exciting.

As I write this controversy is swirling over Adobe Systems abandoning Creative Suite to focus on Creative Cloud. Even if this is solved by the time you read this, there will come a time when you’ll have to face a decision about whether or not to upgrade your software. There are two different schools of thought on software upgrades: one approach suggests that if a program is working, why spend money to upgrade? The reason behind this philosophy is that sometimes upgrades create more problems than they solve. A second viewpoint is to always upgrade to the latest version—no matter what. The thinking is that since change is inevitable that you should upgrade to the newer version to minimize or eliminate future problems. How Adobe has handled Camera Raw over the past few Photoshop upgrades is a testament to that theory. Over the years I’ve changed from an upgrade-regardless person to a more cautious approach. I may prefer to have the latest version of everything being used on a daily basis but now will wait weeks (months, years?) all the while listening to the drumbeat of grumbles from early adopters. That’s why I’m waiting to see what happens with Adobe’s new policy.

All You really need to take a picture is a camera and a lens, but if you decide what you really want to do is make a photograph, a few extra tools come in handy. Any one of the imaging tools in this month’s column will make creating a photograph or making a portrait easier and, in some cases, better than they would be otherwise. For the pro or aspiring professional anything that increases productivity by streamlining workflow while improving the quality of the product delivered to the client translates into making money too, not just photographs.