Like many of you I’ve been testing LR Beta 4, and so far I’m quite impressed. One of the coolest features is LR’s new soft proofing option. This will save you the headaches of making multiple prints, or trying to see what an image will look like when uploaded for web use. Anyway this is a very cool new feature. You can watch Julieanne Kost’s tutorial.  Don’t forget I offer private Lightroom Tutoring in the Toronto area, e-mail me for further info.

Being  Full Time Product Manager for Vistek in Toronto, I get to try out all of the latest equipment, and I have to say although allot of hard work, I do love my job.

On November 2nd, we hosted the Phase One 5 minute Fashion shoot out, at Pink Panther Studios in Toronto. This time I made sure to get a half hour on at least one of the sets before getting started so that we could have a good portfolio of images to share around with potential clients, and show off the great features of the IQ 180 Back .  For those of you curious about the lighting, I did a classic clam shell light, consisting of an Elinchrom Octa Lite as my background (300RX), and 44 CM Mini soft Reflector, (600RX) with silver Deflector, as the Key Light,  and some Lee Tough Spun as diffusion. The kicker light was a small Chimera soft box at 45 degree angle aimed up, (300RX).

Below are a few examples of the lighting setup, and a few of the finished Phase One Files.

For more info on the shoot, you can see the post on ProPhotoblog.ca

Every year I post some of my images that I’ve taken of the twin towers on this date. I cannot believe it’s been 10 years. This year I ask that you take a look at Andrea Booher’s photos, the links are below.

This is not an anniversary that we celebrate, this is anniversary that we reflect upon and remember the heroes of that day, and the days that followed. Being a photographer I find Andrea Booher’s photos to be the most significant from this event. She was the official FEMA photographer and was the only Still Photographer granted unlimited access to the disaster scene.  I’ve linked to the FEMA Website with a search of her photo library, I’m sure that you will recognize many of these famous images, although you may never have known who took them.

I’ve posted enough of my own images of the twin towers over the years on my blog, all you have to do to find them is to search for Twin Towers, in the search box.

Below is a sample of Andrea’s work. More images on her website.

This image below was taken 8 days after, on Sept. 19th, as you can see the fires were still burning, the biggest complaints from Fire Fighters were that there boots kept melting.

A friend of mine turned me on to Mac Performance Guide Website several months ago. I finally bit the bullet last month, when my Macbook Pro started throwing out some nasty hiccups. If you’re considering buying any type of Mac System, I highly recommend Lloyd’s site as a huge reference for all hardware, and advice on customizing your mac. He is specifically speaking to Photographers, but the information is valid for anyone that wants performance from there Mac. I opted for a Macpro, because I wanted the expansion capabilities.

So here is my current system:

MacPro

Processor 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

Memory 24 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC

Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

Boot drive is a 120 GB SSD from OWC- which has the fastest read write speed that they sell in this size. I also opted to buy there bracket kit, so I could mount this in the 2nd Optical Bay Slot, in the MacPro, this allowed me to take the 1 TB boot drive that came with the machine and use it for something else. Now if you read Macperformance guides site, you will see that if you put your Lightroom Catalogs and Previews file on your SSD drive, you will see dramatic increases in your workflow. I also bought there (OWC) RAM upgrade kit for 24GB, the more RAM you throw at a UNIX based system, the faster everything is going to run. I can see that the price has since dropped on this since I bought it. Maybe I should buy the extra 8GB simm, and be done with it. There are 4 slots in the MacPro.

I also purchased the NEC PA-241W 24″ monitor with spectraview software. This is one of the best monitors I’ve ever owned, and I have to say that the Spectraview Software, did the best calibration on this monitor. I spent about 4 hours testing 3 different calibrators, the Eyeone Pro, Colorvision Spyder Pro Elite, and the Spectraview. When comparing all finished profiles, I had the greatest colour, and shadow details in the profile generated with the Spectraview software. Needless to say that is what I’ve opted for using.

As for hard drives I filled all of the bays.

Bay 1 has a duplicate of my operating system 1TB,  Bay 2-1TB is being used for Media(iTunes, Movies, etc.) Bay 3&4 has 2X1.5TB raid  drives, using Softraid software, set at Raid 1 for backup. I’m using the raid setup for all of my photo files. I’ve also dropped Boot Camp onto the SSD drive, running Windows 7 home edition, and this is the fastest Windows computer I’ve ever run. I opted to drop Parallels on there after, and it boots up in about 30 seconds.  You must own your own copy of Windows for this to work. Yeah I still need Windows, because I like to use Quickbooks. So all said and done there are 5 drives inside of this machine. I took my old Lacie 2TB D2 Quadra Raid drive, and I have it hooked up as a Time Machine backup.

So how fast is it. My Phaseone IQ 180 file which weighs in at about 460MB, opens in Photoshop, in about 6 seconds. The machine boots from being off, and launching Mail, Address Book, and Calendar,( I have them set to launch at startup) in 23 seconds.

If your considering an upgrade I highly recommend the 6 Core MacPro, don’t waste your money on buying anymore cores, they will not improve your speed, in fact tests will show they’re slower. Two thumbs up, and I’m sure this is going to last for quite a few years.