Photography News Issue 40

Photography News | Issue 40 | absolutephoto.com

64 Competition

Editor’s letter A belated welcome to 2017 A Samsung memory card! WIN!

The festive season is a busy one but I managed to dedicate the odd day to trawling through the thousands of images captured over the past 12 months. At the start of 2016 I did resolve to make fewer pictures but make more of them count. Did I succeed? No, not really, although that is not to say I’munhappy withmy output. I do try to rate, delete and catalogue pictures as I go along and doing it in bite-sized chunks is much more manageable. Even so I usually end up with loads of keepers – or at least ones rated five stars. To be honest I end with too many images for two reasons: indecisiveness and impatience. The first is definitely my problem but the latter I blame on my computer so I managed to do something about that. My computer, a late 2012 Mac Mini, uses a conventional hard drive, one of those with a spinning disc. While the benefits of SSDs (solid state drives) are widely advertised most computers still use conventional hard drives where you get greater capacity and better value for money. With huge catalogues, multitasking and big files my fully RAM-ed up computer was painfully slow and this meant going through pictures was torturous, hence my impatience. My tether was at its end so I took the plunge and went for an SSD, thinking it would be a great Christmas holiday project. I first checked out the actual disk replacement procedure online to make sure I could really do it. I’m not IT literate so the prospect of disconnecting and swapping stuff around is alien and scary. The online video made it seem easy with the right tools, ie. hex keys and Torx screwdrivers. Ordering the right SSD drive was really straightforward. I went to the Crucial website, then downloaded the app that scanned the computer and toldme what I needed. With the drive and newly acquired tools in front of me I just followed the video. Naturally, the reality was more fiddly than the video – obviously the instructor was an expert – but after 30 minutes the computer was back in one piece. I fired it up in great anticipation and... nothing! Hmm, not that easy then. I retracedmy steps and tried again. I found I hadn’t been forceful enoughwith the connector between the SSD and the computer. Hoping I’d resolved the issue, I put the unit back together and tried again. Hurrah! The performance benefits were significant and immediately obvious. The Lightroom

catalogue’spreviewsrefreshedalmostinstantly. Photoshop opened with lightning speed and I tried working with some very large image files – panoramas in excess of 500MB – and speed here was impressive too. I didn’t make any time tests with the traditional hard drive so I can’t be empirical about it, but the SSD is many times faster. It has made a colossal difference to my workflow and I can now go through catalogues rating and deleting images like the proverbial knife through butter. If your computer and sanity are creaking under the strain, do consider the SSD option. I’m not saying it’s cheap – although SSDs are getting cheaper – but the savings in time are massive. Even after a heavy edit I still had quite a lot of half-decent results to edit and print. I am lucky enough to have a decent home printer so making big prints is not an issue so long as I feed it some ink occasionally. I know many photographers print, but a great number do not and only look at their shots on screen. I’ve always made prints and still have my chemical darkroom kit – it’s all in a box currently but I will fire it up when I get the space. There’s something very special about having something tangible in your hands. It is just my opinion but I don’t understand why so many photographers seem content with on-screen images. You might have the best screen in the world but there’s no haptic experience and for me that’s why I take pictures in the first place. I’m off to delete more pictures and look forward to meeting up again next month.

J N U M R T M M K N M S L M R R S L E Y M U A F B O E R A M S H I L Q R E I O I O S G D F J E R F F R R E D E R T L E I F E Y L H M B O L T D Q A F R D F T O A N O S R C O Y V A N W I M O R M R R B M S B W S I E S R U A R S M T J L F R I C C O O O N A O L E M K K F F C E W B E T U S L C T Y M A D C N H A I W B E P R O T I E C G W O N X D A O R A K H A X O C S E R P D F T P R H V H S A L F U D Capture life’s special moments across all devices with the ultra-reliable Samsung SDmemory cards. Samsung’s latest SD cards can write data at an impressive 90MB/s and read data at an even higher 95MB/s. The cards are also amazingly reliable being water, temperature-, X-ray-, magnet- andshockproof, so shooting in themost challenging conditions isn’t an issue.Wehave onemassive 64GB Samsung PROSD card to award to an eagle-eyedwinner. Just complete the word search below, and you’ll find one word in the list that’s not in the grid. Email us on puzzle@photography-news.co.uk with that word in the subject box by 12 February 2017. The correct answer to PN 38’sword searchwas Ring and the Samsung 64GB cardwas won byGBaillie of Plymouth. Congratulations to him. samsung.comand search formemorycards

Aerial Awards Backlight Flash

Format Frost Grid Head

Honeycomb Medium Memory Mirrorless

Modifier Printer Reflector Rucksack

Snoot Softbox Umbrella Winter

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