I returned last night from a week-long visit to New York City. While this wasn’t just a photography visit, enough photography was part of the plan that I had to carry a reasonable amount of equipment. Typically I would bring along my Macbook, but this time I decided to leave the laptop at home and see if I could get by with just an iPad instead.

I knew that this would necessitate some compromises in the way I usually operate on the road. For example, serious photography applications like Photoshop and Lightroom simply don’t run on the iPad, so there would be no possibility of doing real post-processing work on the road. The iPad doesn’t have a “real” keyboard, instead providing an on-screen “virtual keyboard” – more on that below. On the positive side, the iPad is positively tiny compared to any real laptop. It makes my 13″ Macbook seem terribly bulky by comparison. The iPad slips easily into the external pocket of my Crumpler Eight Million Dollar Home camera bag, and doesn’t add enough weight to the package to be worthy of note. The battery life is tremendous and the charger is very small.

What follows is an early report on certain aspects of iPad use by the traveling photographer – or at least this mobile photographer.

iPad as a laptop replacement: Here there is, for me at least, both good news and bad news. In my situation the good news trumped the downsides, and I would carry the iPad instead of the laptop again in quite a few, but not quite all, situations.

Pluses:

• The iPad is so small in comparison to the laptop that I usually didn’t even notice I was carrying it. As noted above, it slipped into a side pocket of my camera/lens bag and the very small charger fit into the bag as well. A laptop typically requires a bag of its own or else takes a big bite out of the space in your camera bag, and external chargers for laptops are typically much larger. The size advantage is also apparent when traveling by air in several ways: the iPad fits comfortably onto the seat tray on the plane, and it slides easily into the seat-back magazine holder on the seat in front of you when you need to get it out of the way.
• The thing seems to run forever on a charge. On my flight out to New York I was using the “iPod” app to listen to music/podcasts, and at one point I noticed that after listening to some time the power was still at 100%. Ironically, I began to worry that perhaps something was wrong with the iPad and that it wasn’t reporting power consumption correctly! On the return flight my wife was listening to some music that she is going to perform soon, while viewing the score in pdf form. Eventually her laptop (that same fine little 13″ Macbook that I own) battery ran down to empty and she had to stop. At about this point I showed her the “power remaining” display on the iPad… which reported a charge level of more than 80%!
• With some cautions that I’ll mention below, the iPad works well for general email, web browsing, and social media software. The email app let me receive and reply to messages on my half dozen or so email accounts, and I had access to my full bookmark list in my web browser. I was able (for the most part) to update my own web site and to post to Facebook and so forth.
• Network functionality is simple and effective. I was able to connect to a wide variety of wireless networks with no problem. (I do not have the 3G version, though I can see how that could be worth it for some users.

Minuses:

• The iPad’s “virtual keyboard,” which pops up at the bottom of the screen  when needed, is not a full replacement for a real keyboard. You certainly can use it to type just about anything. In a few cases I even managed to (somewhat painfully) edit some html code on a web site. However, such keyboards provide absolutely no tactile feedback, and typing on them is a much different experience that typing on a laptop. The best description I can think of is that it is somewhat but not exactly like typing on your cell phone – especially if your cell phone is an iPhone. I tried traditional touch typing, two-finger “texting” typing, and a sort of ad hoc hybrid. In the end, the latter is probably what I used most often. I have become reasonably good at this, but it is not as fast as touch typing and it is very easy to accidentally hit a wrong key. (Other users also report that they frequently hit “n” or “m” instead of the space bar.) The iPad attempts to auto-correct your sometimes faulty typing – it is correct more often than not, but it is wrong often enough that you really need to carefully review material before posting. (Example: It turned “managed to” in one post at this site into “magneto do.”) Bottom line for me: OK for email and social media posting… but not a great solution for extensive typing. (Some report that things are much better with the external bluetooth keyboard… but that seems to defeat the goals of simplicity, small size, and low weight.)
• Some things can only be done when you are connected to your “real” computer. I had downloaded some videos from the iTunes store before leaving, with the plan being to watch them on the trip. On the plane I realized that I had somehow neglected to transfer them to the iPad. I thought that I might just connect to the iTunes store later and re-download… but this turned out to be impossible, at least if I didn’t want to buy another copy. In other cases – unless I’m just being dense! – installing and removing certain types of files seems to have the same issue.
• While the browser and email app – the main tools I used on this trip – are generally well-designed and very functional, there are a few gaps here and there. For example, the well-known lack of Flash support does impair the experience – and in some cases usability – of certain web sites. And some aspects of the email app confuse me even though I’m generally pretty adept at this stuff. Example: one message could not be sent due to some sort of error… but the location of outgoing mail in the app is opaque to me.

Summary: The iPad is a great traveling “computer” for those who do “the usual stuff” on the road and who want to carry less stuff. It is not a full laptop replacement, nor is it meant to be.

iPad as a photography-specific tool: Here things get interesting and complex, and in the end different photographers will come to differing conclusions.

• It is fairly easy to move photographs from your camera to the iPad using the Apple Camera Connection kit. The kit includes two small adapters that plug into the iPod-style connector at the base of the iPad. One lets you load files directly from SD cards, and the other lets you connect the iPad to your camera’s USB port and download directly from the camera. (Note to Apple: One either needs the SD card adapter or one needs to make a direct USB connection to the camera – so selling the two as a package forces almost everyone to buy a useless piece of gear in order to get the adapter they need, unless I’m missing something…) Since my camera uses CF cards I made the direct camera-iPad connection. Once you connect both and turn things on in the right order the iPad constructs a list of thumbnail images from your camera files, and than you can transfer the files to the iPad. (You choose whether to keep or delete the original files on the camera. I keep them since I want more than one copy of everything.) The transfer process via the USB cable is very slow. I did not measure the transfer time, but it is several times longer than transferring files to my computer using a USB card reader – transferring a full 16GB card takes quite a long time! And, yes, RAW files are supported.
• The built-in photo app is quite basic, offering no real editing capability. It does a fine job of displaying the images and gives you some control over their organization, though for archived photographs this is better done on your computer before “syncing” them back to the iPad. You can create “folders” of related images and view them by selecting manually or by using “slide shows.” The image quality on the iPad screen is excellent. The iPad is a very fine way to share images with a small group of people. The experience of handing the iPad to someone to let them see the image is natural and in some ways approximates (but doesn’t equal, of course) the experience of handing around small prints. It is much less clunky that showing your photos to a small group on your laptop screen.
• Add-on photo apps are available. While we all wish for a full-on Photoshop or Lightroom substitute, those sorts of capabilities are way beyond what is currently available. I used two basic photo editors on my iPad. I tried the little Adobe Photoshop wannabe app, but was not impressed. Its capabilities are very limited, and it seems at least partially designed to drive sales of upload space at Adobe. In the end, I did not choose to use it for any serious work. I also downloaded the Photogene app. Photogene is admittedly pretty basic, but with its limitations in mind it is a competent tool that can accomplish some real, though basic, work. It opens the RAW files from my 5D2 without any problems. It provides a basic set of controls over parameters including cropping, color, contrast, black point, curves, sharpening, BW conversion, and so forth. It also provides some “canned” effects settings. You can do some basic editing of EXIF data, so it is possible to add copyright and other data to your files. Edited files can be saved in a number of sizes in jpg format. So, what can you do and what can’t you do? There is no way that you can do full-on post-processing with this app, at least if you are used to doing serious work in an application like Photoshop. However, it is still useful while on the road. I used it to make some initial modifications to images that I wanted quickly share, and it worked more effectively than I expected for this purpose. (I do wish that Photogene provided a way to overlay simple text on the photograph – I’d like to add a visible copyright “watermark.”)
• Many people speculate about using the iPad as a portable “field backup” tool for their photographs. To some extent the ability to download using the connection kit provides a basic level of backup. My approach is typically to carry enough CF cards that I never will have to erase and re-use them. If that is how your operate, you can simply take time during the day to let the leisurely download process complete and you’ll have two copies of all files – those on the CF cards and the copies on the iPad – along with the potential to share basic versions of the transferred files on the iPad screen and by uploading. One limitation for very productive photographers might be the relatively small amount of memory in the iPad, which ranges from 16GB on the least expensive model to  64GB on the top end model. I have the 64GB model and after I load all of my iTunes files I have about 32 GB of free space. (You probably have fewer such files than I do, and would probably have more free space remaining.) 32GB is quite a bit of space, equivalent to perhaps 1200 21MB RAW files from my 5D2, and this will be sufficient for many users.
• There is a lot of buzz about other potential applications on the web. Lots of people have mentioned that it would be very cool if you could preview your composition live on the iPad while connected to the camera, perhaps using its better display to check focus and so on. As far as I’ve heard so far, this is not really possible at this point. I recently read an article by someone who managed to get the iPad to function as a sort of external monitor for his laptop – he used it for on-the-road Photoshop work with menus and palettes on the computer screen and the image on the iPad. It sounded like an interesting kludge that would perhaps be more trouble that it is worth at this point.

When I started this “little” post I didn’t intend to write quite so much – but the iPad, representing a new computing paradigm, seems to require a lot of explanation at this point. To sum up my feelings as of this date:

• The tiny size, light weight, and great battery life are very valuable on the road.
• The iPad is quite functional for basic email, web, and similar uses – here the limitations for the virtual keyboard are not major issues.
• It is probably not the best tool for serious writing and it certainly cannot to full-on photographic editing.
• In some cases it can be a useful file storage tool for creating a second copy of your photo files, though transfer speed and storage space limits may be issues for some.
• Basic image editing is available and can let you share cropped and moderately edited images right away.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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