The iPad and Your Camera

I'm a recent convert to Apple's iPad. Bought one a few weeks ago and absolutely love it.

With Apple's camera connector kit and a great photo app, I can now, no matter where I'm at, take images off my camera, crop, color correct and caption the photos and send them to friends or to a client's ftp site - all from the small, 1.6 lb tablet. No more lugging around my 6 pound MacBook Pro!

After nearly 40 years as a photojournalist, I feel naked without a camera with me at all times and without a quick way of transmitting photos. Didn't matter if I was working or not, I always needed to be able to shoot and transmit photos, no matter where I was or what I was doing. So, I lugged around a laptop with me everywhere. No need anymore. Not with the iPad, the camera connector kit and an app called Filterstorm.

Since the iPad cannot support the processor intensive photo apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, etc., third party developers have come up with some great solutions. My favorite among them is Filterstorm which is one of only a few photo apps I've found that attaches IPTC tags to your photo - an absolute must if you are sending the photo to most clients and any news publication.

Apple's camera connector kit consists of just 2 small connectors - one has a sd card slot and the other a usb connector. They plug into the bottom of the iPad. With the usb connector, you can either attach a card reader to it or skip the reader and just run the cable from the camera to the usb connector.




Filterstorm Features :

• Adjust brush size, softness, and opacity
• Email images
• Post images via FTP
• Save edits as automations to apply to other images
• Export images up to 3072x2048px
• Curves
◦ Luminance
◦ RGB
◦ Red
◦ Green
◦ Blue
◦ Cyan
◦ Magenta
◦ Yellow
• Brightness
• Contrast
• Color balance
• White Point Picker
• Saturation
• Text tool
• Black and white fine-tuning
• 10-step Visual History
• Cropping, with the ability to specify aspect ratio
• Scaling
• Rotation and Image Straightening
• Vignetting
• Sharpen
• Tone map (Simulated HDR)
• Blur
• Noise Reduction
• Clone Tool
• IPTC tags available for E-mail and FTP (does not work with saving to photos)
◦ Caption
◦ Headline
◦ Title (byline)
◦ Keywords
◦ Instructions
◦ Subject
◦ Category
◦ Supplemental Category
◦ Author
◦ Creator
◦ Source
◦ Provider
◦ City
◦ State
◦ Country
◦ Job Title
◦ Job ID
◦ Copyright
◦ Date/Time

All this for $3.99!

Another option that works well comes from Adobe, the makers of Photoshop. They offer iPad users a free Photoshop Express app.  Not nearly as robust in features as Filterstorm but if you want basic controls and don't need to caption your photo, then this may work for you.

Note : iPad processor speeds currently preclude the possibility of running a RAW workflow.

Anyway, there are many, many more photo apps to choose from - most either free or very inexpensive. Have not looked into the video editing apps but I'm sure to find some. If I find any that look interesting I'll let you know.