Guilty as charged…I am a gadget junkie!
Here is my chance to give my real thoughts and opinions on what I think are some great products. As you may already know, some products just don’t live up to the hype. I’ll share my experiences with the junk that bought because I fell into the trap that is cool commercials, hip music, and great actors with a sense of humor.
I normally just review gadgets, but I’m so excited about some of the tools that Fundy has come up with to help photographers with workflow, and album design. So if you are into this stuff you owe it to yourself to check out Fundy’s blog Solutions On Steroids
Canon Powershot A2000 Digital Camera
This little camera may just be my next purchase. It’s super small, with a huge 3″ LCD, 6X optical (that is important), 10 mega pixels (which IMO is seriously overkill, but whatever), it also shoots 640×480 30 frames per second video clips, that’s cool. Most importantly, I think is the user selectable (or Automatic) ISO. Which makes it take great images even in lower than normal room light. Now keep in mind, if you try to take pictures in a dark tunnel, without some type of additional light, your pictures will look like they were taken in a dark tunnel…blasted with flash. Anyway, I really like the specs on this camera, and would recommend it to most shutterbugs who need a great camera for vacation pics, or everyday use.
Google Sitemap Automator by Rage Software
This little piece of software has to be my best purchase this year. It has without a doubt made my site much more Google friendly, and makes it a breeze to keep my Sitemaps up to date. I simply enter my URL, click the button to generate the sitemap. It then scans all of my web-pages and records all of the links and pages associated and creates the sitemap for me to upload to my server, simple, and automatic.
I’ll start off by saying I was a bit skeptical at first, but figured I’d at least give it a shot. To my surprise this little beauty works as advertised, and that’s a very good thing for the way I want to implement this into my studio photography workflow.
I had two hiccups right off the bat which left me feeling a little deflated. The instructions were easy to read, but if they would have included one additional word I would not be writing this part of the review. More on that in a second. I inserted the SD card and USB adapter (included) into the USB drive on my Mac, but the actual software was nowhere to be found. I was able to overcome this obstacle by going to the Eye-Fi website (www.eye.fi) and downloading it from the support page.
The second hickup came as I went to setup my Eye-Fi card, where I was not given the option to create an account, just a login page. Here is the part about one additional word added to the instructions would have saved me a headache. I’ll add that the customer support folks were super fast in answering my initial email, and helping me to troubleshoot my problem. So they get an A+ for the customer service, Kudos. As it turns out, you must use a powered USB port, the key word being “powered”, once I had that squared away the set-up is a snap! I was literally shooting and watching images appear on my laptop approximately 12 seconds later. Pretty cool.
Here’s actually how I’ll be implementing the into my studio workflow. Since I shoot with the Canon 1D Mark III series camera, it has the ability to record images to two separate memory cards simultaneously. The first card, Compact Flash, will be reserved for RAW files, while the Eye-Fi SD card will be used for the small JPG files.
As I am shooting a session these small JPG’s are flying across my wireless network directly into a preselected folder on my Macintosh desktop, where my assitant or editor can quickly go through and get a quick preview ready for the client almost immediately after the shoot, or simultaneously print images on our Sony SnapLab. Pretty cool.
I’ll soon be doing a review on this amazing large format printer, the Epson 4800
show hide 1 comment