Access Digital Photography

Because I like to travel and shoot, I often find myself in situations where I need to take along a laptop so that I can stay in contact with the lessons I teach on line (8 digital photography courses at Sessions.edu), friends back in the States, and those I’ve met “on the road” who’ve moved on to other interesting locations.

Then a terrible thing happened. I was stupid enough to loan it to a friend and the lid got cracked, lots of my hard work was erased, and I had to replace the hard drive. Even after I spent $600 repairing it, I really couldn’t bear to use it and didn’t want to carry it anywhere. And being outside the States, I can’t find anyone who can fix the lid.

Then, one day, luck stuck. Doug called me and said he’d just seen an ad that a “going out of business” computer store was selling the 8.9” Acer One Aspire Netbook refurbs on a “close-out” for just a few pennies over $200. I’d been moaning and groaning for something I could take to a café or on a bus trip without feeling burdened. I wasn’t sure it would have the capacity to do what I needed, but for $200, I figured it would come in handy for something…even if I only used it for writing and teaching. Most Internet Cafes have wireless Internet and so do most hotels and hostels. So, at the very least, I could teach my classes and write about my photographic experiences. So I called the company that was selling them only to find out that, in two days, they’d already sold every one of them.

Then, half an hour later, the salesperson called back and said that they had some blue ones with more memory (2GB) and a larger hard drive (160GB) (exactly what I had been wishing I could afford) for only a few dollars more. Easy decision: The order was placed immediately. Now, I figured, if I could just see the screen clearly enough (due to its small size and my old eyes), I’d even be able to download my shoots on the road and do the basic photo editing and image management when I was waiting for a plane or hanging out in the hotel living room after dinner.

Well, about two weeks later, my netbook arrived in Panama. It seemed like a dream come true. The screen was very clean and easy to read. Even photos looked good enough to edit, though it only had a reader for SD/XD-size cards. It does have three USB ports, so I can plug in a card reader for CF cards that one of my cameras uses.

I did have to train myself to use the keyboard and mousepad. Given the small screen, one of the big advantages is that you can use your fingers to zoom in and out on anything you’re working on, in any application. Trouble is, your thumbs are over the mouse pad constantly and an accidental bump could zoom your text to microscopic size or so big that you could only read two words. So it took a few days to train myself to be careful. The other thing I had to train myself to do was save the doc every time I finished a paragraph…especially if it had anything important to say. The most important part is to remember to hit Control + S at least once a minute. Then you can always just call up your document when the whole thing suddenly disappears.

Fixing that was just a matter of re-reading the manual a few times and being careful not to hit more than one key at a time. I also found that if I propped up the back of the computer, so the tiny keyboard was at angle, my typing speed nearly doubled. Then Doug told me there was a 6-cell battery available for another $60-bucks.  It weighs almost as much as the computer, but it’s so big that it perfectly props up the back of the machine. It has pretty close to 7 hours of battery life. If you take any time at all to talk to a friend or read up on what you’re writing about, that really turns out to be about 9 hours because the computer automatically puts itself to sleep. So I ordered the battery, which cost me about another $30 in shipping and duties. It took a couple of weeks of spread-out two hour away from home use to run it down to nothing so that I could “train”it, but now I can re-charge it any time I use it and it seems to regain its full battery life. The best part is, raising the back of the netbook really  made typing a lot easier. Also, I always bring along the original battery, so if I do need a little extra time after the big battery runs out, I can just swap it.

Another thing that made a big difference in “ease of use” was using a mouse instead of the finger pad. At least you know exactly what’s going to happen when you click a mouse button. Optical mice seem to be the only practical answer when working with unpredictable table surfaces and when you don’t want to worry about a mouse pad. The usual long cord, though, was getting in the way of other customers at the same table. I found this amazing mini-mouse from Discovery Labs and the cord automatically adjusts to being only as long as you want it to be:

Then came the big challenge: How to install programs on a computer too small to contain a DVD/RW drive. Well, it so happens that there are some very cool DVD drives that can do everything…including doing all their tasks…even Lightscribe disk labeling…by being powered by the USB ports on the netbook. The one I bought, pictured below, even writes to double-sided DVDs,  so I can get 9.4 GB of photos onto a single disk. So there’s hardly a day’s shoot when I can’t get the whole thing onto one disk. It reads and writes all the DVD and CD formats, too. Here’s a picture of it and the computer. It’s so slim that there’s just no problem at all slipping it into the same bag with the netbook.

Finally, I didn’t want to install the full CS4 version of Photoshop and all the plugins I used with it on the netbook. Photoshop Elements 7 and Lightroom 2.0 do everything I’m wanting to do  during my “waiting times”.  Lightroom does all the “exposure” adjusting, image management, and quick-turnaround slide shows. It also makes it really easy to send a client or compatriot a set of “preview” or quick publishing files, all pre-sized and in JPEG format. When I get back home, I immediately copy the DVDs I’ve made on the road to my big hard drive and it’s twin back-up drive. I even took the whole outfit to a party one night and did all the initial Lightroom work, got some outside feeback at the same time, and then loaded it all up to the iMac in the morning and went straight to work on the final tweaks on my calibrated monitor and did the final retouching and compositing in Photoshop CS4.

The last little part of my “workflow” is to copy individual articles, to do lists, etc, to a flash drive. Then I copy that to my  iMac. When I get a bunch of those on the netbook, I also back them up to a DVD and then erase them from the netbook so that there’s always room to do my next “on the job” photo-editing. Perhaps the biggest benefit of all in all of this is that if your editing work gives you some ideas while you’re on the road, you can probably shoot them while you’re still at that location.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 8:42 pm and is filed under Photography Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.