Technology and workflows.

Some of you who know me well will know I have a love of new tech, much to my detriment, I’ve never been one to wait for the fully baked version of an OS or the 2.0 version of a physical product. So no surprise then when once more I launch myself headlong into a new tech and software relationship.

I’m going to spend the next month, or more, just using the iPad Pro and iOS 11 (Beta 3 onwards) to do my photography editing and blog writing and pretty much everything else I need to do online and see how it goes. It’s primarily a ‘travel photography’ driven experiment, what’s the least amount of kit you need to travel with to get the best results? is it a full DSLR and a MacBook Pro or a small Fuji and an iPad? Only time will tell.

Off we go.

This is the first post on the blog since I’ve made this decision and so far so good. Running iOS 11 I haven’t had any Wi-Fi issues, Bluetooth all seems good and most importantly the Squarespace blogging app is working without any issues, well no major issues. There have been some odd formatting things going on and the side by side app view doesn’t work, but I don’t think it worked in iOS 10 either, so no show stoppers.

I’ve only had one old app stop working and it wasn’t a mission critical piece of software and I’m yet to figure if that was down to iOS 11 or the app itself which was always a bit temperamental anyway.

I haven’t noticed any weird battery drain issues yet either which is a relief as I’d read some concerns about that earlier in the week. So, the initial signs all look good!

Hardware and Software.

So in order to pull this off what will I be using:

Fuji XT-1
Fuji 23mm f1.4 ( this is also going to be pretty much a one lens month ) , Amazon link here.
10.5 inch iPad iPro
Smart keyboard and Apple Pencil
Apple Lighting to USB 3 Camera Adapter, link here
Delkin USB 3 Dual Slot SD UHS-II & CF Memory Card Reader, link here
An old unbranded USB SD card reader
The Squarespace blog app
Ulysses App. I’ll use this to write any longer pieces which I can then just paste into the blog app text blocks, this will let me develop my Markdown skills as well, it’s all go!!
Lightroom to edit and manage files
Snapseed for additional edits
Affinity Photo for more in-depth edits and just to frustrate myself as I’ve refused to read the manual so far.
Apple iCloud and Dropbox to experiment with storage online.

The issues so far.

Hardware.

The first hurdle that I’ve come across is that the Delkin card reader tries to draw too much power when its connected to the iPad and as such it can’t be used to download the images via the built in Photos app. I tried an older multi card reader and it too tried to draw too much power. The solution to get either of these readers to work is to plug the power supply into the Lightenting port that’s on the USB 3 Camera Adapter, I need to do a bit more research to see if this is a know issue or if there is a work around for those times when I’m away from mains power.

I knew that the Apple Camera Card reader works perfectly to read SD cards without additional power, so I plugged an old USB SD card reader into the Camera Adapter cable and it worked! so it would appear that the CF card requires more power and that’s the issue?

My short term work around for this is easy, the Fuji uses an SD card so no problem there with the old USB SD reader. The Nikon has both an SD card and CF card so I’ve set that up to capture RAW on both the SD card and CF card. This means I can download images without needing a nearby power supply for the ipad which will help while travelling. First problem solved!

Software.

The second issue that I have is a Lightroom one. I’m still in the early stages of using Lightroom on the iPad and starting to work out all of the nuances it has. At the moment I have a main library setup on my desktop Mac, with a shared collection. The shared collection is accessed on both the Mac and the iPad and the edits flow both ways from each platform. I’m not quite sure how this is going to work if I only upload images to the iPad from my camera and try to send RAW files from the iPad back to the desktop Lightroom library or if indeed this is even possible? RTFM, Google it! I hear you cry ! I will and I’ll update this post or write up a review as I learn more.

The third issue I have is with the editing capabilities of Lightroom itself, its missing one fundamental element and that’s the brush tool, many people have commented on this and have contacted Adobe about it already and I think it is going to be brought to market and hopefully soon, Adobe have great aspirations for Lightroom mobile and that can only be good for all of us.

The blogging app from Squarespace doesn’t have an obvious way of editing image sizes when they are added to the blog, I need to check this out further but it looks like the physical size has to be set prior to importing the image, it would great if the blog app had some sort of built in image editor to tweak things in line when writing the content. I’m on the look out for an alternative, so far I haven’t found anything and I don’t want to leave the Squarespace platform, the Ulysses app that I am using for longer writing is also lacking lacking an inline image editor. Small beer at present and I have a work around by using Snapseed or Lightroom or Affinity! Did I say I wanted to streamline my workflow !

Distractions and workflow.

The big driver for this workflow change is to simplify things and this is going to be a challenge. There are numerous photo editing apps available for iOS which could mean a flood of edited images floating around on various cloud storage platforms, the temptation is strong in this one and self discipline is going to be key to success.

So as part of this new workflow I’ll be trying to do as little post editing as possible and where necessary work out a structure for an online photo archive or bring the edits back into Lightroom. Is there really a right or wrong way to do this? I don’t know yet and it may be different for all of us depending on the end use of your images, either way you can learn from my mistakes.

A couple of apps that have I’ve been testing so far to edit images outside of Lightroom are:

Snapseed by Google. A simple, yet full featured editor that delivers great results on iPhone and iPad.
Affinity Photo. This piece of software has blown me away, its basically Photoshop on the iPad with layers, curves, masks, brushes. Its all there but this one definitely needs to be worked through with the manual, the results look amazing. Link here.
Lightroom for iPad. This is where it all started for me. I’ll be using this the most, I already have some frustrations but I am going to persevere and see how practical this setup really is, either for travel and holiday blogging or a full time alternative on the go. All in all Lightroom on iPad is a great product and it will have a lot more to offer when Adobe ramp up the features,

So here we are, the start of a journey and what I hope turns out to be a simple workflow. I don’t know if life without a desk and a MacBook Pro will work out, it may be more difficult than I think it will be but nothing ventured nothing gained.

I’ll update this blog around twice a month and I’ll be putting out more posts with some real life use case examples. I may also update on the DJI Mavic Pro that arrived a few weeks back and that’s a whole blog of its own, almost impossible to crash they said, almost impossible to lose they said!!

Thanks for reading, have a great day!

#Beach Blog - It’s a mobile world.