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In some respects using film as
a professional photographer was relatively straightforward; you threw away bad
slides and filed the good ones in sleeves, preferably in a fire proof filing
cabinet. Due to the cost of film and processing, the number of photographs
taken was minimal compared to using digital cameras, therefore sorting through
the photos was a relatively fast affair.
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Don't get me wrong, I love
digital photography but now a photographer needs to have a good grasp of
software, computers and other IT related topics in order to protect the
photos, sort through them, file them and carry out post processing.
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Fortunately, I have been using
computers (in one form or another) for over 30 years. Despite a high level of
computer literacy, I find that I have to constantly keep up with the latest
software and hardware so that I can work efficiently.
The aim of this page is to
describe the equipment and software that I use and explain the rationalé
behind using it.
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Hardware
I had been using MS DOS and Windows for years but
switched to an Apple computer and Macintosh OS in 2001. It just took a few
days before I was hooked and now I wouldn't dream of using Windows again
unless I had to.
The Mac OS is intuitive, stable and fast. What more
can you ask of an operating system?
It is true that Apple computers often cost more than
the competition, however, I have always been able to sell my used Apple
computers for around 1/3 to 1/2 of what I paid for them and that is after
three to four years of use.
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Hardware
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Reason I bought it
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Apple Mac Pro Quad Core (2 x 2Ghz Dual core
processors) with 16 GHz RAM and four hard-drives.
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When I bought this computer in 2006, the Intel
processors were new for Apple and this was the best value desktop in terms of
performance.
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Software
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Adobe's Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 are the
cornerstones of my file management and photograph editing.
Lightroom is intuitive to use, it is fast and I use it
for importing, organizing, RAW processing, slideshows and batch processing. It
is possible to do most image editing within Lightroom but for most editing
jobs I choose to use Photoshop CS4 which I find fast and incredibly powerful.
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