I've been receiving a lot of e-mails about the gear I use when shooting "On Location", such as:
- What's your "fave" lens?
- What camera do you like?
- Which light modifier do you like?
- How many lights do you use?
- What kind of flashes do you use?
Last Christmas, as a present, Drew and Teresa bought me the iPad with built-in 3G and the Camera Connection Kit. I played with the iPad when it was released in April of 2010, but was planning to wait for the Motorola Xoom, since I'm not an Apple Fanboy. However, after having it for six months, I can't imagine not having it in my backpack. It's small, lightweight, has excellent battery life compared to a laptop and can access the internet a majority of the time. I brought it along on our Hawaii vacation, which allowed me to keep my family and friends abreast of our adventures.
Like any chip-based device, software applications dictate utility. So what are my favorite Photography Apps for the iPad? Well, I must've downloaded a bunch of free apps and paid up to $4.99 for others, but I've pared it down to these apps:
Easy Release: A Release Form for Models and Property. You can fill it out on the iPad , insert a sample image from the shoot and have the Model sign the form. Once everything is done, you can generate a PDF and e-mail it to anyone.
LightTrac: Excellent for determining the path of the sun from Sunrise to Sunset from anywhere. AS I mentioned in my Hawaii Vacation post, I used LightTrac to determine when I needed to wake-up and capture a Hawaiian Sunrise.
Snapseed: Photo Editing software by NIK Software. I'm biased since I use NIK Software's Capture NX2 and Color eFex Pro 3.0 for all my photo editing on my computer and laptop. This has to be my Favorite app for the iPad by far. It uses the same kind of "select" points for creating masks as Capture NX2. This is what the app's User Interface (UI) looks like:
The first screen, above, is the initial page where you can access editing tools, but the real powerful tool is the Selective Adjust. You can add a point anywhere, increase/decrease the size and the change the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation. On the image below, I added a Control Point on Darnah's hair and bumped up the brightness.
The next image, below, allows you to add some pretty cool filters. This image of Darnah was completely edited using Snapseed.
Once you are finished, you can print it, upload it to FLICKR, or Facebook, or e-mail it.
Flickr Studio: This app access my FLICKR account and let's me view photos from my photostream, my contacts, and FLICKR's Interestingness page. What I like is the "batch" function for uploading photos when the Internet is not available. I can also batch tag, resize my images, and reorganize them via this app.
Epson iPrint: I purchased an EPSON Artisan 800 Photo printer, with Wi-Fi, last year to print small images ( 4x6 and 5x7). The EPSON iPrint app lets me print any photo, or web page from my iPad to the Artisan over my Wi-Fi network at home.
Impression: Watermarks, something I forget to do when posting my images on the web. I find logos distracting regardless of how discrete or well-designed. The app is very easy to use and comes with a decent array of fonts to use.
Earlier in this post I mentioned that I was waiting to purchase a Motorola Xoom. Well, we purchased one at work and as soon as I compared it to the image quality of the iPad, the iPad won hands down. Aside from using the iPad as an ePort of my pictures, it allows me to review images during a shoot. Whenever Rob and I shoot together, you can bet that after the shoot, while waiting for our food, we'll be downloading our images to our iPads, editing them and posting. It's the perfect tool for the "Virtual" Generation.
I have a shoot coming up July 31, so what will I take? I can tell you without a doubt, my iPad!!!
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