Forum Replies Created
Air in use:
So far very satisfied.
1.Tethering with LR3 is very nifty and fast.
Might be the best way to download images to the computer, skipping the SD slot, or CF external reader, until a CF thunderbolt reader is available. Any concerns?2. For moving LR files/catalogs from the Air back to my iMac, I am using a 16 gig SD card for storage transfer to the iMac. Slow but sure. Perhaps will buy a 32gig card for the purpose?
3. Lion makes the Air and a smaller screen much more useable. One has to try it to see.
I would now strongly suggest a 11″ is plenty good enough if you are wanting smaller and cheaper than 13″Photo is as if the S2 has live view, it doesn't. Moire pattern pretty strong here, but not an issue.
JackNick,
I quite agree. There were so many early postings in 2010 by S2 triers, rather than S2 owners who set up the expectation that only ISO 160 was going to be any good with the S2. But as Leica has worked with Adobe LR, the facts come out that shooting at ISO 640 is no hardship. Next they will complain that there still is no ISO 320000.BTW your choice of lenses 35 and 120 is all I have.
JackI saw your reach for it shot first and wondered where you were to shoot it. Perhaps this explains it as you were laying down on the job.
JackDavid,
You could buy this:
http://gizmodo.com/5807015/asus-ux21-matches-macbook-airs-sizes-and-scorches-its-specsJackIf you use your laptop as your desktop I give you a pass on my weightlifting crack.
I think Dell is terrific, there are dell products that are as light as the Air, not as well promoted, but excellent choices. A Latitude E6320 is a nice choice.
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/laptops#!facets=117389~0~3792855,168074~0~11506627,51795~0~11401827,51795~0~11384531,55846~0~5930679&p=1I think you should consider an air-like dell as an alternative to your iPad. I got the iPad as an electronic portfolio. Turns out I sold more iPads to clients in the first months than photos. Then I just liked it for web browsing. But for typing, it was not fun. I needed a keyboard that would not print m instead of a space. See today's WSJ for Walt's keyboard solutions for the iPad. Rather than drag around such a keyboard, I asked myself why not just get a light laptop, as long as it had impressive battery life as the iPad does. I don't miss the iPad, so far a light laptop, be it Dell or Air is working for me.
I did a test of speed of the Air vs iMac today using LR and photoshop. LR is faster with the Air than the iMac because of the SSD which I do not have in the iMac. LR is not ram intensive either. Doing a test merge of three S2 images into a panorama , something I do fairly ofter, the iMac with 16 gig of Ram was 40 seconds faster. A delay I can live with on the road.
Your demo needs may always require you to carry the 6 pound solution. I am agnostic on Mac vs PC. I agree with you on the genius lines at the Apple store. My solution is that I buy from a local brick based third party store where I can walk in any time and get instant solutions. And now they are a customer of mine. Fortunately I haven't needed instant help but once every two years. If one of our forum readers wants a Mac, I do suggest they search out the independent resellers who are in business to work with large design businesses but are more than willing to sell and service an individual. The one I use in Wisconsin is Techwise, in case Kurt wants to know.
JackMark,
I think David wants to do weightlifting. Since he is both his own very good IT dept. and Dale has an IT dept. he can work very well with a PC. Apple is a good choice for those of us without those skills and departments.So if he was willing to give up 8 to 16 Gig RAM capabilities with all the rest that he needs to have with him at all times, David should get a Dell SSD lightweight over the Air, and that is fine and can be a great choice.
If however one lives in the Mac ecosystem, the Air is an perfect solution for travel as I discussed on another thread. I am now typing on it and I must say that David was the one who advised me to get the i7 over the i5. I am not using this for huge crunching of photos because when I am on the road, I don't want to be in my hotel all night crunching photos and then too tired to shoot photos the next day. BTW David, you are so right that the SD card reader is one quarter of the download speed of a firewire 800 reader of my CD card, so I look forward to a thunderbolt reader. I have yet to test how long it takes to work a big S2 file on my 4gig Air versus my 16gig iMac. I am hoping the SSD is a big help.
If I go on the fall shoot with David, we will have a test of the best travel solution. But if he doesn't buy a true lightweight solution, either PC or Mac, we will see who checked their luggage and who did just carry-on.
JackMark,
The only noise reduction was via the Dale S2 presets for 1250.
Had I wanted to use that shot, I might have played with it a bit more, but I liked what the preset did this time.Regarding hand holding, I thought I didn't have much more movement than the friend's shot at 1/400th, so thanks for the compliment. I did one shot at 1/25th instead of 1/60 and you can see plenty of camera movement then. Photo attached. That overexposure allowed me to use the preset as suggested, but 1/25 was too slow.
Hand holding would have been better with something to brace against. Frankly, I was shooting others locations earlier some with my battery powered studio strobes at 160.
The photographer friend is a professional wedding photographer and he prefers reflectors which is fine if you have an assistant. In this informal shoot for fun, we were each other's assistant. He was moving around pretty fast after we got our initial shots.JackI was shooting some portraits in the deep shade with another photographer last weekend. Handheld, I had to go to 1250 to keep camera shake out of a 120mm lens. He was shooting another camera and he was amazed at what the S2 could do. He also loved the simplicity of the S controls versus his camera. The only control he missed was a dial that could reduce the price of excellence.
The first shot is the Leica, the one with the lamp, the second is my friend's. Mine is with the Dale preset applied, but I had not yet read about the half stop overexposure and couldn't have done it anyway without going to 1/45th. Thanks for the presets.
OK, the keepers from this shoot were not shot in deep shade, and one keeper is shown elsewhere. My friend wanted to try deep shade, and I followed. Had I not been able to go to 1250 I would have had too much camera shake. Frankly, from this work, I decided that 1/60 is about what I can handhold the 120mm in worst case. BTW, normally I prefer to play it safe at 1/500th. As they say, better to give up perfect IQ to avoid camera shake.
Thanks to David for encouraging me months ago not to avoid 1250, but to avoid camera shake. So far LR cannot correct for camera shake in post.
JackI like both.
That's always been a plus to extra resolution. You can create so many photographs from one scene.I recently sold from my website what I had posted as a panorama shot, and off my website, which allows for custom cropping, the buyer cbose to crop it to a rectangle and it still had enough resolution for them to order it as a 30″x40″ photograph.
JackLet's see if they do the other suggestions as fast as they did the bracketing suggestion. That was turn around in less than five days? Gee David, what a powerful forum.:)
JackKurt,
Nice.
That was a crop down from what?
I ask since the 120 is not 1to1 as your bee would suggest.Jack
JackStuart,
Your SSD solution sounds smart.
In my case I have an iMac for studio, and the Air will be for the road.
I thought I could avoid a laptop on the road, but on every photo trip I missed it, and my old MacBook Pro is heavy, slow, maxed at 3Gig, battery that lasts 5 minutes, etc. I have given it a new battery, new hard drive, more Ram, but time marches on, and the Air will do the trick, now that it is fast and not as expensive as when it first came out. If you want just one computer and you need a laptop for portability, the Mac Book Pro with quad and SSD is very nice, or a powerful PC is probably smarter for an S2 user than just an Air.
Transferring LR files from the Air to my iMac using USB2 will be an overnight effort at the end of a photo trip. Too bad my iMac is last year's and has no thunderbolt connection. Yes I could buy the new thunderbolt display that gives me firewire800 transfer rates, but I will wait for an external hard drive that takes both firewire 800 and thunderbolt or eventually a thunderbolt adaptor to firewire800. This Air will also replace my iPad with never worked for viewing Raw and was not a file backup for the field. Plus I hate typing on the iPad. The SSD speed will make up for the limit of 4Gig RAM I hope. David, I have a 13″ with i7 on order, thanks for your advice. The i7 costs an extra 6% for a minimum 10% improvement, and any of the machines are being reported as twice as fast as those of just 8 months ago. I'll let you know what I think when it arrives.
JackJackDavid,
So you want USB 3.0 on your Mac? So would we all. Stay with your PC, as 3.0 is going to be added to a Mac right after Jobs adds Blue Ray disk readers and writers, and you know it.Since I want to use a MacBook Air for photo travel, I would have been happy if it had FireWire 800, but that's not going to happen. Nor is 3.0. So thunderbolt will allow me to transfer my files full bore to an eventual thunderbolt external drive when I get home. Thanks for your links. I buy the Air in a week when it is introduced I hope.
JackJack
