Western Digital iPad App

Hmmmm.....that's interesting.

Western Digital announced a free photo viewing application called WD Photos for the iPad that works with its line of external storage products like the My Book World Edition, My Book Live, and WD ShareSpace.  The app is said to allow the user to access up to 285,000 images placed in a shared folder.

The advantage in this is that saved images can be accessed using the app from anywhere through a web connection. The benefits to photographers are obvious...for instance, while traveling I could show my portfolio to anyone in the world on my iPad using this app. The app has pinch and zoom functionality,  and the images can be viewed in 1024 x 768 resolution on the iPad.

However,  wouldn't it be phenomenal if the iPad could connect to a portable external drive, on which I could download my travel photographs as I made them in the field? Once the photographs were saved on the portable drive, I could then use this app to access them (at least the jpegs) through a web connection.

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S&F™ Lowepro: MultiMedia Photographer

Here's what is fantastic about being ad-free and not beholden to any manufacturer (or retailer)...I am free in liking or disliking any product I want, and mention my opinion on my blog. I'm not paid to flog a particular product and ignore others that I like. I can use a product from ABC and another from XYZ...I have no particular loyalty to any manufacturer (unless it produces exceptionally good products), nor do I follow a fad...nor another photographer. I like what I like...period.

Now, I happen to like some of the Lowepro products, and I've used a couple of them myself. I use a Top Loader Pro bought in 2000 or 2001 that still works perfectly well, except for one of its zippers that doesn't work any more...it's been badly abused for the past 10 years, and it's grubby...but that's how I like my stuff. I also have a Lowepro backpack and a Stealth Reporter shoulder bag that I seldom use now, but in their heyday, they were great.

I suppose Lowepro realized it had to come up with a separate line of products for the growing number of multimedia photographers, perhaps following Think Tank which also has an interesting product line, and has recently launched the S&F™ Lowepro for the Multimedia Photographer products, which consist of S&F™ Technical Harness with S&F™ Light Utility Belt, S&F™ Slim Lens Pouch 75 AW & 55 AW, S&F™ Audio Utility Bag 100, S&F™ Laptop Utility Backpack 100 AW, S&F™ Lens Exchange Case 200 AW and S&F™ Transport Duffle Backpack.

I am only interested in the S&F™ Audio Utility Bag 100 at this stage, so I'll probably pop in one of the two photography retailers closest to me, and check it out.

I am still enthralled by my The Travel Photographer Pouches, so it'll be difficult to pry them from my hands...but one never knows.

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Lightroom 3's Ice Climbing Ad

It's only because I like Lightroom a lot and use it virtually all the time that I agreed to post this advert on The Travel Photographer's Blog. As my readers know, I don't place any ads on this blog, but I occasionally write on products that I like and use...and Lightroom makes that cut.

Tyler Stableford is an adventure photographer, and was given the challenge of shooting an ice climbing expedition and perfecting his images with the help of Lightroom 3 beta 2.

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Canon's Digital Photo Professional

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Although I have a couple of international trips in the interim, my mind is increasingly getting focused on my forthcoming Bali: Island of Odalan Photo-Expedition™ in August, and to refresh my memory, I've been revisiting my RAW images files of my 2007 photo-expedition, and even processing some of them.

As is usual when I revisit images files after a while, I uncovered some images that I missed during my initial edits on my return from the 2007 trip, and some that are worth a second look. I viewed these with my Canon's Digital Photo Professional software (version 3.7.3) which, while admittedly somewhat clunky, still does a reasonable job as a viewer and RAW converter.

I also used DPP's built-in image processor, and edited the images you see in this post entirely with it. I didn't use CS or LR at all. I'm not suggesting that DPP replaces any of those, but I was surprised that it did such a reasonable job in adjusting the exposure, de-saturating the colors and sharpening the images of the Legong dancers.

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POV: No To Walking Billboards?

Here's a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek post.

In the midst of packing my stuff for about 3 weeks on the road in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and at the risk of being tarred and feathered by the various manufacturers of photographic soft accessories such as Think Tank, Domke, Lowepro etc, I thought my readers would be interested in my alternative choice to the high priced pouches that are marketed and sold by these companies.

With the exception of my Domke camera bag (which I love dearly because of its ruggedness and quality), I prefer not to carry products that have prominent logos/names for a variety of reasons; some reasons are legitimate and others just silly and whimsical.

As an example of the logo-less products, I bought no-name pouches for less than $6 each from an Army Surplus Store in the West Village. They are made of rugged canvas, have belt loops, with metal fasteners, and are perfect to carry my sound recorder, mic & a small gorillapod, or a small lens and other stuff, while in the field. Sure, they're not as sleek or modular as those sold by any the above-mentioned manufacturers, but they're cheaper, and are certainly as resilient. At these surplus stores, one can find bags and pouches (easily adapted for cameras), apparel and a myriad of other stuff a quarter to one-half the price of logo brands.

With this in mind, why should I be a walking billboard for manufacturers who charged me top dollar for the product(s) anyway? Heck, I can even have these canvas pouches printed/embroidered with a The Travel Photographer logo. With my own exclusive line of photo pouches, I'd go in business and be a millionaire in no time!

The logo shown in the picture is photoshopped...so don't get too excited (yet).

But first, I'd better learn how to photograph products better. The picture above is so bad that I can't get myself to put my copyright notice under it!

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Field Report: B&H & Adorama

Well, I succumbed to the "bigger is better" axiom and decided to add a 16gb SanDisk Compact Flash card to my inventory.

In arriving to this decision, I was guided by two facts: the first is that the images files from Canon 5D Mark II are monstrously large and that, although my 8gb CF cards are quite adequate, I filled them up a number of times in the midst of a photo shoot. The second reason is that SanDisk was offering interesting rebates on its cards, which meant $20 off the 16gb baby I got.

After spending an hour browsing at B&H, and touching-feeling-playing with the newly released Canon 7D (it feels solid, well balanced and its 8 fps sounds really good to my ears...but we'll see about the image quality), I was told that the SanDisk Extreme III Compact Flash Card were sold out. B&H was a madhouse this Sunday...presumably all from the traffic generated by Photo Plus Expo that took place the past few days.

So my next stop was Adorama where I did find the product I needed. While the delivery system at Adorama is far from being as sophisticated as B&H's, the card and its rebate sheet were readily available. The traffic was also very impressive at Adorama, with long lines at their cashiers.

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Beta

Adobe just announced its Lightroom 3 as a public beta version, which means anyone with an Internet connection can download it and start putting it to the test. You do not need to own (or have tried) a previous version of Lightroom. The version of Lightroom 3 beta software available for download is offered in English only. You can download the beta and use it until the product expires on April 30, 2010.

By the way, those who are on a Mac PowerPC are out of luck. Lightroom 3 Beta will not download on your machines.

Notable new features are:

* Brand new performance architecture.
* State-of-the-art noise reduction.
* Watermarking tool
* Portable sharable slideshows with audio, which allows us to save and export slideshows as videos.
* Film grain simulation tool

I'm interested in two of these features; the grain simulator and the sharable slideshows with audio. However, the latter does not seem to allow any adjustment (or sync'ing) individual frames to the audio....so it has a long way before it can be used for semi-serious multimedia. I'm sure the reviews will start flowing in soon.

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5D Mark II: New Firmware

Canon USA published the recently announced firmware update for its EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR which enables manual exposure during video capture.

As well as the manual exposure video functionality, EOS 5D Mk II firmware v1.1.0 includes fixes to the lens peripheral illumination correction, auto lighting optimizer, battery information display, and depth-of-field preview button functionality, as well as correcting menu errors in certain languages.

You can download it from here

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Canon 5D Mark II's Movie Exposure

I haven't posted much on what I call Soft Gear, so Eric Beecroft's heads-up this morning was a welcome one.

According to DPReview, Canon just announced it will release a firmware update for the EOS 5D Mark II allowing users to manually control exposure when shooting video. The new firmware will be available for download from 2 June 2009 on Canon Europe’s support web site.

(via Planet 5D Blog)

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Lightroom 2.2 Available

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.2 is available immediately as a free upgrade for existing Lightroom 2 users. According to the company, its Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2.2 update includes these enhancements:

• Additional camera support for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon PowerShot G10, Panasonic DMC-LX3 and other.

• Includes several corrections for issues introduced by the Lightroom 2.0 release

Mac users can get it from here.

Windows users from here.

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DxOMark

DxO Mark proclaims that it's a website for people who are passionate about image quality. It's still in beta version, and it "features the first database of objective digital camera image quality measurements entirely accessible via the internet."

In addition to the Image Quality Database itself, the website proposes its new DxOMark Sensor scale, which allows it to rank digital camera with a single number for photographers to evaluate and compare models.

Certainly an interesting concept, and quite useful for buyers when confronted with the myriad of camera choices. Being interested in the new Canon 5D Mark II, I'll be keen to have a look at DxO Mark's measurements when these are published.

DxO Mark's Canon Database

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small Folio: Websites For iPhones

smallFolio claims that it's "a wicked-simple website solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch". It's essentially a service to create a web presence for photographers and other creative types that is specifically adapted for mobile devices.

smallFolio must have its benefits, but I'm skeptical that photo editors, for instance, will use their iPhones or iTouches to view photographers' websites...to do that, wouldn't they be better served at their desks facing a large monitor? As for a portable marketing tool, I'd prefer loading my portfolios through iPhoto/iTunes on my iTouch, and show them to buyers, clients and others that way.

I've written up the benefits of having one's portfolios on the iTouch in this earlier post.

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Dilemma: Keffiyeh or Krama?

The blogosphere (and cable news) are buzzing with the hilarious news that a bunch of ideologues forced Dunkin Donuts to pull an ad featuring a celebrity chef because she was wearing what was erroneously seen as a keffiyeh. The ideologues of course, consider the keffiyeh as a "symbol of violence and of anti-Israel sentiments".

This utter stupidity is compounded by the fact that the scarf is a traditional head gear worn by many tribal societies in the Middle East. The king of Saudi Arabia (currently our administration's best friend, our suppliers of oil and buyers of our government's Treasury Bills) wears one...the king of Jordan (another of our allies) wears one, as well as members of Jordan's elite military forces.

But setting this silliness aside...what are photographers and photojournalists to do now? Do we wear our keffiyehs (right) and risk being labeled as Arab sympathizers by xenophobes? What if we wore our krama (left) scarf instead? Would we be labeled as Khmer Rouge sympathizers? Oh my gosh, this is a "serious" dilemma, folks.

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Camera Bags Part Two

In my previous post on Camera Bags, I neglected to mention that while in the field, I've opted for the Lowepro Street & Field belt system to carry my cameras without straining my back or shoulders. Yes, it's a gunslinger look, but I've used it since I photographed the unforgettable Maha Kumbh Mela in 2001, and it proved to be a winner for me.

I use the Lowepro Toploader 75 AW for either of my two cameras; the one I plan to use the most frequently dangling from my right shoulder, and the back-up in the holster bag. The Toploader is attached to a Lowepro Street & Field Deluxe Padded Waistbelt to which I also attach a pouch for my digital recorder.

If and when my right shoulder complains, I'll get a second Toploader and I'll really look like a gunslinger.

Note: As my readers know, this blog is ad-free so I'm not bound to plug any brand over the other. It just so happens that I've used Lowepro for quite a while, and I'm satisfied with its products' reliability and design. Tamrac is another company that has an equally good product line. It's basically a matter of personal preference.

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Camera Bags

WIRED has a recent post on what it describes as three of the best camera bags you can buy. One of these is the Billingham 550. As most of us know, finding the 'perfect' camera bag is tantamount to finding the holy grail...and may be even harder.

I have owned the Billingham 550 for a few years now, but used it infrequently. It's a British classic, sturdily built based on a fishing bag design and, similar to the famous Barbour rain jackets, gives off an assurance of indestructibility. The downsides to these attributes are that it's heavy, the leather straps are hard to handle and it's fiddly to open.

I have no doubts that the Billingham would be a delight to use after a decade (or more) of steady rough usage, when the canvas gets softer, the straps more malleable and easier to fit in the brass buckles. Frankly-speaking, when the bag is new, it's a pain. It used to be that English aristocrats gave their new shoes to their butlers to break them in...I wonder if that concept would work with the Billingham bags?

Naturally, with the current weak dollar, these bags (which are manufactured in the West Midlands) are singularly expensive....but they'll last forever. Just be prepared to have to break them in for a long time.

I used a Lowepro Stealth Reporter AW until I noticed I was starting to walk crab-like because of its weight on one shoulder. I then switched to a Lowepro CompuTrekker AW backpack until I noticed I was walking hunched like Quasimodo, so I switched to a roller bag made by Wenger. So far so good. My still new Billingham 550 is in my closet.

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Lightroom 2.0: Decision Time

Well, time does fly. It's been a month since I signed on to try Lightroom 2.0 which means that the free trial period is over, and I now have to decide whether to buy it for $300.

There are many websites that offer tutorials, and here's one recommended to me by Dave Thompson, a regular reader of this blog and who frequently offers me his insight on photography.

Julieanne Kost's Lightroom Tutorials

I still have some free time on my Aperture trial period, which I'm still fiddling with. Despite Aperture's "fit" with Apple software, I am leaning heavily towards Lightroom.

For a comparison of the two, check Gavin Gough's post on the matter. I won't divulge his preference, but I found his analogy to be interesting:

"If they (Lightroom and Aperture) were people, Lightroom would be a dour, stodgy Yorkshire lass sitting in the corner of a smoke-filled, dingy pub drinking Stout and Babycham whilst fingering her moustache and mumbling at her whippet, whilst Aperture would be a leggy blonde model perched elegantly on a stool in the corner of a Soho wine bar, sexily sipping a cocktail before beckoning you over to her table with a smouldering pout and a suggestively raised eyebrow.

I reckon I'm a Yorkshire lass kind of guy.

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Photog's Togs

I've been asked by a few readers to share my preferred type of clothes when traveling on my photo expeditions or on assignments. It's an important issue because weight, durability, ease of washing/drying, etc all come into play. So here are the items that usually make it into my dufflebag...there must be womens' equivalents at the same stores. (Since I don't mean this to be adverts for the companies that stock these items, I won't link to them...sorry).

1. I lost my old safari jacket in Bhutan last year, and its subsequent replacement from Orvis wasn't as comfortable. But I've recently found an alternative at Cabela's for the reasonable price of $45. It even has a cheesy map of Africa on the inside back should I travel there and get lost. Now, this is an important article of clothing because it has many pockets, which can come in handy should the check-in staff at my airline of choice decide that my hand luggage with all the photo gear is too heavy to bring in the cabin. I just stuff the jacket's pockets with lenses and stuff, and I'm waved through. Idiotic, I know...but it happened twice, so long live the safari jacket!

2. Apart from a bunch of tshirts, I also pack a few Cabela's Guidewear® GXII™ shirts. These are made for fly-fishing, and have zipper side vents in the underarms for extra ventilation, a cooling mesh liner and the UPF 40 shell fabric is great. The large chest pockets are very useful for CF cards and other stuff. Easy to wash (only when I really need to!) and fast to dry.

3. As for the trousers, I'm partial to either jeans or to lightweight cargo pants by Eastern Mountain Sports called Profile Zip-Off. They're made of a soft, quick-drying nylon with UPF 30+ protection, and have many side pockets. Again, these are easy to wash and dry very quickly. Both shirts and trousers are lightweight and take no space at all in my luggage. The trousers retail for about $50.

4. Finally, my favored footwear at the moment is the Merrell Intercept, which I bought in London. I'm not sure if mine are really the Intercept model, but in any event, they look very similar...less gaudy perhaps. They're not made for heavy trekking, but they're just right for long hard walks. I think I paid the equivalent of $120 for my pair (yes, I know...the dollar is in the pits).

5. The final must-have article of clothing is my Khmer kroma scarf. This candid admission will earn me the sneers of many, but most of us "serious" photographers have one of those in their luggage. They're invaluable for a variety of uses...lens cleaner, snot remover (not mine...those of the children I photograph), flag to attract the attention of wandering participants on my photo expeditions, fly-swatter, etc. I also carry a few bandannas, which are always useful.

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Camera Raw, Bridge or Lightroom?

Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider has an interesting comparison between Camera Raw, Bridge and Lightroom, and it made my day because of what he writes at the end of the post:

"So basically, all the things that Lightroom and Photoshop have in common, Lightroom does much, much better. That’s why I spend about 70% of my time in Lightroom."

Since I started trying out Lightroom 2.0, I've been impressed by its capabilities, and found that I've used Photoshop much less since. I was never a pixel-pusher, nor will I ever be...so while my usage of Photoshop was always minimal, Lightroom makes my image processing even simpler!

Scott Kelby is the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Layers magazine and President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP).

(Via Imaging Insider)

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Email Newsletters

I don't usually plug products much, but I found Campaign Monitor to be one of the better ones I've used so far. The thing I like best about it is its pricing structure. There are no setup fees, no monthly fees and no hidden fees. For each campaign sent with more than 5 recipients, it's a flat delivery fee of $5 plus 1 cent/recipient. So it's a purely pay-as-you-go product.

Sending newsletters by email is one of the most effective way to reach one's clients/audience, whether your mailing list is in the tens or in the thousands. You have to realize that some will not reach their mailbox destination, but that's a function of anti-spam filters in email providers.

Using Campaign Monitor is not difficult, but because it's built for designers, it gives its users complete creative control over the design and structure of their emails. You can use their templates or you can create your own to send in HTML, plain text or both.

I use my own newsletter design (the link to my latest newsletter is on the right of this post, under "My Other Websites". My mailing list, which is expanding every day, is all permission-based (as it should be) and I'm ruthless in weeding out those names who signed on to the list just to get details of my photo-expeditions' itineraries for their own purposes...a bunch of those have already been removed!

It's one thing for photographers to keep track of what others are doing (some view it as 'industrial espionage'...but I don't) and quite another to essentially 'steal' photo itineraries which have taken me effort and time to put together, and just walk away. So I'm very selective as to whom I send itinerary details to.

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Lightroom Beta 2.0: Sample

© Tewfic El-Sawy - All Rights Reserved
As reported in an earlier post this week, I've been test-driving Lightroom 2.0 in its Beta form. I found it to be intuitive and simple to use so far, and I'm very pleased to have downloaded it. I'm far from being a "pixel-pusher", so I keep my usage very basic and the photograph above (village elders in Jojawar, Rajasthan) is the result of just a couple of clicks.

A photojournalist friend recommended that I try the recently updated Aperture as well, predominantly for its capability to seamlessly integrate with all of Apple's applications. I shall do so shortly.

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