Traveling with the iPad

Traveling with the iPad
Originally uploaded by neil_gaudet

I don't know if I'm just bored, or if I'm bordering on insanity, but I'm sitting here in my hotel room and in between typing I'm staring at this painting on the wall. It is of trees and is a landscape print maybe 36 by 14 inches. I'm loving it, I'm really loving the way it is framed with a white matte that is about double the size on the bottom as on the top. What does it mean about your artistic sense when you start enjoying the artwork in a hotel chain?

I'm travelling for work and decided to take my iPad with me on the trip. My first journey with it. It packed up so nice and small and I even threw in the keyboard stand in my suitcase. I checked into my room and decided it was a good time to tackle a couple of projects. I have Pages, Apple's word processor installed in the iPad and thought I'd try and get some use out of it. Before we photograph a wedding I often spend time with a couple and answer all the same questions about timelines, our style of photographing, and generally what to expect from us. I thought it would be nice to have a pdf to send them about a month before their wedding to sort of answer some of those frequently asked questions. Not to stop them from calling me, on the contrary I enjoy talking with them before the wedding, but more to just give them the comfort of having some tips and a list of things that need doing in writing. Maybe most wedding photographers do this and I've been missing the boat, but anyway....

So the iPad. It works brilliantly for this type of thing. I sat it on the hotel room desk with my cup of coffee and typed it out in about an hour or so, and it looks mighty pretty too! I also surfed the web and answered some emails. This device really does a nice job as a laptop replacement for me. Of course it isn't suitable for photo editing, but that isn't why I bought it. I have a big shiny iMac for that and I don't really feel the need to edit on the go. Anyway, I took a photo of the iPad with my really bad iPhone camera to share.

Speaking of iPhone's. I love mine. I keeps me organized, has fun games on it, some cool photography apps (My favorite is PhotoBuddy) and is a pretty good phone too. But the camera is bad. Most cell phone cameras are bad aren't they? I've been hearing people talk about the new iPhone 4 and how the camera is so awesome. I hear Chase Jarvis talk about the 'Best Camera,' but for me the biggest use of the iPhone camera is to take snaps of something at Costco to then send to my wife as an instant message to see if it is the thing she wants me to buy. I also use it to help my failing memory, for example I took a photo of my home printer model number so that when I go to buy replacement ink I can remember what printer I have at home. But if I want to take photos, even just snapshots, then the iPhone pretty much stays in my pocket. Am I just a photo snob? Am I just a crappy iPhone photographer? Dunno. But I do believe that cell phones are absolutely going to replace the tiny point and shoot cameras for most people, and why not, most of those are overmegapixeled pieces of junk anyway. An endangered species if I ever saw one.

Well, one of the perks of sitting alone in a hotel room without my family is the ability to surf the TV, read a book and sleep diagonally on the bed without making my wife mad. So off I go.