Thanks for the great list. Utah really does have a photography community to make other states jealous.

Busy busy!

Talk about a packed entry! So many good things to be a part of this summer. I have no clue how to get to the Saturday excursion — have to google it and see if I’m feeling adventurous.

Wow! So many fun things coming up! Work has been so crazy lately, and I’ve been tending a lot, getting to bed late and getting up early! Good luck at 5:00 a.m. Sounds like an adventure, but I’m sure I’ll be way too tired!

Those yellow flowers are so pretty. Looks like I picked the wrong week to go to California. Lots of photo stuff going on this week. I would love to assist on another wedding, all of my pictures are looking so much better.

You are right about the best photo community here. Every person I have met at the photowalks has been stellar.

Hey Scott, I would love to assist with your wedding next Friday.

Wow- some fun things going on! JaG

Do you secretly work for Microsoft? I think you should start these rants with “Hi I’m a PC”.

Yeah that’s the weakness of Mac– they don’t have midrange towers. I sourced the price of the processor used in the quad-core 2.66ghz Mac Pro a couple months ago and the processor alone was $1600! (we’re talking server class Xeon processors here.) This is why your PC is so much cheaper, and certainly that i7 is a lot better performance / value ratio by comparison, though technically the processors in the Mac Pro are more powerful.

(Does photoshop really max out all 8 cores?)

Alas. I used to be like you building my own screaming PC for half the cost of the closest comparable Mac. Built PCs for years. I have to admit that I miss the flexibility of building your own machine– there really is nothing in the middle range for Mac. iMacs and MacBook Pros are underpowered, as you mentioned, and frankly I don’t need a Xeon class processor. Something for about $1k-1.5k with an iCore7 would be perfect for my needs.

@ Scott Smith – Except I’d be a bad rep, because my last computer rant about laptops ended with me owning a Mac.

So I like mac laptops but I wouldn’t really consider editing prolonged time with a laptop.
And like mike said… mac has nothing midrange. (worthy discussing, unless you’re not doing tons of editing in which case those bigscreen all in one thingies could be nice)

I love the freedom and flexibility of building a PC.

Because this setup like mike mentioned isn’t even the most extreme… it’s just the newest tech at the best bang for buck.

And yes Lightroom uses all 8cores and it’s not just every blue moon… it uses it all the time and it comes in handy and it saves time.

What about a good monitor? I love the Dell ones, and the Apple ones are smashing too, but what would you say is the best monitor out there? Looking for opinions…

You have me convinced… When I change computers I will be having one built.

So Scott – when is the review of video cards coming out?

Hey Scott,

I built a PC desktop. I’ve always built my own desktop systems. I’m that techie friend that everybody hired to build their PC’s. However, Abode Lightroom’s import and export actions DID NOT take advantage of extra cores under Windows XP – and the overhead of the Windows XP OS bogged down the Lightroom UI, tremendously. And Vista is 20% slower than XP for photo processing! 3GB of RAM, 2.6 Ghz dual core CPU, and it absolutely crawled.

And then I edited on a 1.6 Ghz iBook with 2GB RAM, and Lightroom was snappy, responsive – dare I say it? FAST by comparison. On paper, those Windows boxes just toast the hell out of the Macs, but in real life, the Macs are clobbering the PCs in actual performance.

I was sold. Lightroom is even faster on my new Core2 Duo MacBook. Oh, and the beast of a computer cost twice as much as my Apple certified refurb MacBook. And I couldn’t take it ANYWHERE. It just had no sense of style whatsoever. How embarrassing!

I take my MacBook everywhere, and everybody is always telling me how pretty it looks.

PC’s suck.

- Eric

Hey Eric that’s cool. But maybe you just weren’t good at building comptuers haha

I’m kidding… Kinda…

I have both and the new macbook is slow in performance compared to my quadcore. I think there are several things that are important.
You need a good quadcore to really crunch those previews and exports… you have to have more than 4GB of ram to handle large catalogs of pictures and the speed really comes into play with a fast HD.
So perhaps that’s my downfall having a macbookpro with a slower HDD

On the other hand I have the fastest rated HDD in the world on my desktop PC.

Yes… guess which computer looks better. You’re right the macbook.
Guess which one I take on trips… yep the macbook.

Guess which one edits better and faster… and cost half the cost? Sorry… but it’s the truth.

I bet a macpro 4-8core machine could perform on the same level. (Granted it doesn’t have an option to use the fusio IO drive… but with a good SSD drive it could be right there and perhaps better… for 2-3 times the cost though… that’s what I’m saying)

And my hopes are to sell off this machine and get a new i7 machine.

Jarvie,

Next time you import or export, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and check out your CPU core usage. You’ll get a graphical percent usage chart for each core. On my Pentium D machine (admittedly, a couple years old, which is why it needed replacing), it only ever used one core for batch processing. Luckily, it was a fast core, even by today’s standards.

Also, I had less RAM, and frequently had Lightroom open for several hours. There was a known memory leak on the Windows build of Lightroom through version 2.something-or-other, which bogged things down on the PC considerably – not so on the Mac. I have frequently left it crunching and come back hours later to find it still snappy as ever.

In short, the Mac version still managed to do a lot more with a lot fewer resources – and my PC was running a hardware RAID 5 system that did 110MB/sec read / 100MB/sec writes (no single drive at the time could come anywhere close to that performance), compared to the Mac system with about half that HD throughput.

Maybe that was all due to a Lightroom bug that has since been squashed, but whether that’s true or not, I’m still very happy to be free of Windows. Long live OS X!

- Eric

Thanks for the info. and equipment once again. I doesn’t really help with my big dreaming! JaG

Good Rant Scott. I agree that a desktop is mandatory if your want to get some serious work done. Glad to hear you bought a 17″ MacBook Pro to show a little love to Apple.

Scott – do you have recommendations for which monitors are the best for photo editing? I think often it is hard to know which features are good for photos other than just “get something big”.

Hmmm which monitor is a question I would like answered as well.
Yet another question I wish someone else besides me would blog about.
I bet it’s out there somewhere but would probably take forever.
But I do know of a couple that are sure fire, and maybe a few people out there can add a few more that they are sure of.
I am using a samsung syncmaster 220wm and i think it does me well.
I am planning on the dell 30″ and that’s a photographers standard along with both the 24″ and 30″ apple brands if money is floating out your butt… haha

For something like a monitor for a photographer I am a bit cautious.
I wonder about the 28″ hanns that is selling for sooo cheap at costco. I’ve heard good things about it, but I haven’t heard it from photographers per se.

You realize you CAN connect an external keyboard/mouse to your laptop to get better control I usually just bring a mouse and use the laptop keyboard, as that isn’t where time is really lost. But a mouse is a tiny addition to the gear pile to get back the main time complaint you have.

For the monitor I might offer a suggestion. Get an LCD Harness. Granted this probably won’t work for flying to Alaska, but it allows for safe travels when you are in a car. I got mine back in the days I use to go to LAN parties all the time, and always felt very secure with no damage to my LCD in dozens of outings.

Thanks, Scott, for the advice as I am about to buy a new computer and really really want a good screen for editing. What do you think of a mixed marriage: a fast muscular laptop hooked up at home to a large monitor (I am tech-dead but assuming one can do that).

Very Nice shots on your site… esp liked the B&W of the woman near the top and the abstracts created with fireworks. (Finding that I like my Abs more than the public does. Oh well. Im new at this (alleged) Pro stuff.) Also my self-built Yahoo website is lame, so welcome any suggestions as to outfits that offer photo websites.

If you have a pal in eastern or northern VA, I might be able to use him/her to build a computer. Thanks for your time, Scott and look forward on your suggestion as to laptop w/monitor.–Hank aka Trainor

I like hearing your choice for equipment. I’ll use it as a reference if I ever get to that point. JaG

very nice opinions on laptops for photographers, and aspects that don’t always get touched on, but I was wondering if you had checked out the Sony Vaio AW?
This is what I’ve ended up with my eyes on, I’m from south africa, and find myself in chicago at the moment, laptops are much cheaper here than back home and I’ve suddenly become overrun with options, but the Sony has

A: a big ol screen
B: a decent amount of horses under the hood
C: a GOOD screen. a screen that can compare against many desktop monitors.

Now I’m not saying that a laptop screen will ever be the better choice, all it does is display 137% of the greys and shades in your photos, which will constantly be affected by ambient lighting, but do you think, coupled with an adaptive colour calibrator (i.e.: huey/pro) you’d be able to get away with it?

I’ve had a mac. yeah they’re great. but I find that they completely fucked everything up these days. sure, sexy computer, but why must I pay more now, to get a matte screen, when that was the standard 3 years ago?

It’s now absolutely wrong to say that desktop PC is in all ways but portability better than a laptop. Go and read something about RGB gamut displaying
http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:4I64e-uGoXYJ:www.markzware.com/blogs/top-5-laptops-for-review/2008/10/14/+sony+vaio+AW+hp+lenovo+w700+rgb+gamut&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de

Sony AW with it’s 3 LED RGB chip with it’s 137% of Adobe RGB just really beasts the shit out of many professional monitors as well!

I loved reading through your workflow- Wow. 5-30 seconds on each photo is all? You really have it mastered!

Great work! Love it! I’d love to hear more about the off camera flash technique, too!

Love these pictures!!!!! Incredible work!

So “the constant struggle to find the correct exposure” — does this mean you always shoot manual? I’ve actually wondered for quite a while now.

(JaG)

It makes for some interesting pictures. Love the contrast on that last one. JaG

Beautiful- love the fall colors in the background.

LOVE the colored wall! Great captures.

Just skip those to get to mine