Why I won’t subscribe to Creative Cloud

Friday, May 10th, 2013

This week, Adobe formally announced that it would cease development of Creative Suite and focus all its efforts on delivering its collection of apps via Creative Cloud.

The outpouring of rage has been considerable. Twitter has been ablaze, with the majority calling for human sacrifices in the Adobe boardroom. Others who are already using Creative Cloud have been wondering what the fuss is about, claiming it’s a great service.

I’m not using Creative Cloud yet, but I’ll eventually be forced to if I want to update Photoshop and the other apps I use as a professional photographer. So what’s the problem?

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Poor service killed Jessops, not the internet

Friday, January 11th, 2013

Jessops has announced the closure of all of its stores. The story on administrator PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ website points to obvious factors such as competition from the internet and supermarkets, and the fact that it has been in financial trouble before. But there is another story and it’s the one told by the consumers.

I am a professional photographer and, as such, walking into high street photographic stores used to mean receiving good advice from like-minded and competent individuals who were not trying to “pull any wool”. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, and online retailers or specialist stores are the only places where I feel that the technical support actually has something to offer above and beyond my knowledge.

Aside from technical competence, I really want to see a company that is hungry to please me as a consumer and keen to offer something extra on delivery, and perhaps even bail me out when I need urgent help.

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Is Apple right to leave old Macs stranded on Mountain Lion?

Monday, February 20th, 2012

So here we go again. Another Apple OS with a name that clearly shows that it is running out of big cat monikers.

And ever so quietly, another list of Macs bites the OS X dust, as they tell us that the new OS has such fantastic new features that only newer Macs will be able to cope. If you have a Mac bought before 2009, you may not be able to upgrade to Mountain Goat… I mean Mountain Lion. Sorry.

The list of systems that won’t run the latest developer release of OS X includes late 2006 iMacs, all MacBook Pros released prior to June 2007, the original MacBook Air and the original Mac Pro. Conceivably, the final release might work on some of these systems, but nothing’s been promised.

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Will smartphones kill off compact cameras?

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

The renowned American portrait photographer, Annie Leibovitz, recently whipped out her iPhone 4S on a US chat show and proclaimed that the device was “the compact camera of choice”. Is this the Steve Jobs distortion field at work from beyond the grave or has the iPhone really cracked point and shoot?

To be fair, Leibovitz’s comments were more about extolling the multitude of virtues that the iPhone 4S brings and less about its camera. “It’s so accessible and easy… It’s a pencil, it’s a pen, it’s a notebook,” she claimed, suggesting that the value of the device lay not only in its ability to take very passable pictures, but also that the use, manipulation, uploading and storage of those photos was now a very compelling package.

High praise indeed! But what would it mean for the compact camera market? Are people happy with passable camera phone images or do they still want the little extra that the purpose-built compact camera brings?

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RAW vs JPEG: it’s not a decision for life

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

I’m fed up of reading the bunkum that is written in articles about whether you should shoot in RAW or JPEG on your digital camera. Thousands of column inches have been devoted to the pros and cons. I hope you read all those articles because I won’t be wasting my time repeating them here.

The long and the short of it is that RAW vs JPEG is a choice, not a war. Too many people feel the need to draw a conclusion as to which format they have finally settled on, and then blindly shoot in that format going forward.

I recently lent a camera to a young aspiring photographer at my cricket club and forgot to switch the capture to JPEG from RAW. She spent the afternoon taking images of the batsmen and then handed me back the camera. I was distraught to find that all 600+ images had been taken in RAW.
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