Hi,
I haven't posted for a while, so though I'd share one of my latest blog posts from
http://www.chrispowellphotography.com/blog
To try and speed up my downloading and processing primarily at Weddings when i have a very tight timeframe to put together enough images for the evening slideshow, but also just when im working on a mobile shoot I decided to modify a Peli 1495 case to provide me with a mobile workstation setup.
Also keeps my nice new macbook (which is amazingly quick….but more on that later) nice and safe.
I started with a Peli 1495 case with foam insert, and cut out the correct sizes to fit:
Macbook Pro 15″
2x WD 2.5″ 750GB USB Drives
SanDisk Card Reader
Mini USB Hub
Apple Magic Mouse
Macbook Power Cables
Wacom Tablet (in the case roof)
So this had its first outing this weekend at Zoe & Pauls Wedding, within seconds of opening it, not only was the MacBook powered up and ready to go, but I had two external drives, a Card Reader, mouse and power connected. The combination of moving to a Macbook and this setup must have saved me at least 10 minutes to get everything setup and ready to start downloading the images.
Talking about downloading images, by the time I do my first download of the day during the wedding breakfast to allow me to process images for inclusion in the evening slideshow I
normally have between 45-50GB to download. At my last wedding in February when i was solely Windows based this download took 1hr 15m using a combination of DownloaderPro & Lightroom to just download and import the images, cutting heavily into the 1.5hr timeslot I have to download approx 1700 images and process 200. This time using Aperture on the mac this whole download took just 25 minutes, and this included re-downloading the first 8GB card because I noticed my naming convention was set wrong.So Aperture, I took the hit when moving to the Mac to give Aperture a try, and wow….not sure if its the mac or the software, or a combination of both, but soooo unbelievably quick, in just 45 minutes I viewed 1700 images, and processed 311 of them. No lag, no “Loading…..” screens, just the images in all their high resolution glory (16MP). I love the ability to download to an 2nd external drive at import as a backup, I love the customisable keyboard commands (still learning them!!) and just the speed to navigate between the images. The biggest hit I took was losing all my Lightroom presets, (I have the loaded into Lightroom on the mac, but I’m seriously liking Aperture atm), so its back to basics to re-create them. Maybe not a bad thing, maybe its time for a slightly new processing style.
So I’m totally sold on the Macbook Pro, I think the 8GB RAM upgrade was an extremely good move, now I just need to get used to using it! Having been a Windows kid for as long as I can remember its taking a little getting used to, but saying that it is so intuitive to use, its just the advanced features that are bugging me right now.
