For my whole life I’ve been a PC user so you may just guess how frustrated I have been at times while at it. Change-over to any other platform has not been an option to me though as formerly I’ve been very into computer games and still am doing minor programming and stuff like that which in my opinion just aren’t very well supported for example on Mac.
In the near future I’ll be travelling a lot so I thought a laptop would be a neat thingie to have. Just imagine how much time would it spare if one had the opportunity of browsing through his or her photos while being on the run. Also when I’m on a serious(ish) assignment after that one striking picture it’s important to me to actually see how the work is coming out. Especially after I’ve experienced some catastrophical photo shoots because the photo looked sharp on the camera’s teeny weeny LCD screen.
I was actually becoming very keen to the David Tejada’s idea of using an external DVD player as a bigger screen as seen in his blog entry here but eventually was turned down by the lack of all right DVD players’ availability. They were always too good or too bad. Having just a portable screen with me would be a bit restricting too I thought but that’s another story.
So this year my christmas present came very early to me and oh boy how excited I was. It was the Apple MacBook 13″ 2.4GHz with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive and the reason I was in such a hurry with it was its irresistible price. Less than 900€ - what a bargain! So obviously they were sold out in just a couple of days.
My first impression on MacBook was totally positive. It’s light, powerful and has a bright, clear screen which is just perfect for my needs. Portability is a must for me and I have a bigger screen at home if needed so the 13″ (33 cm) screen size is just fine. The computer starts up and is ready to use in a blink of an eye compared to anything else in the price range and it stays alive quite a while too as the battery should last at least for 4 hours.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard succeeded to impress me with its simpliness and lightweight which leaves more resources to the programs I’m using and less confusion to me. Using Lightroom is absolutely painless as what goes to the performance. Pointing the cursor using the trackpad only is of course clumsy and takes patience if you’re in the need of accuracy but I’m ok with that as far as I don’t have to carry a mouse with me.
Have been trying out shooting in tethered mode too, straight into Lightroom by having folder watching function enabled. I had some serious problems using Canon’s CameraWindow with Mac software as it just gave me an error: “Cannot detect camera.” So if you confront this same issue make sure you upgrade into EOS Utilities which is downloadable from Canon’s website. That worked for me and now I’m able to burst away with my camera and watch how my work of art simply pops up onto the vivid screen of this beauty. It can’t get much more simple than this!
So yeah… So far I’m loving it!
Below following two pictures there’s three more of my mum burning those candles away few days later. You may click those thumbs to view the photos in their full size.
