Gnarbox Product Review: A Wireless Portable Hard Drive for Mobile Workflow
As I find myself exploring the world with my camera, my need to “go light” has ramped up. While I still prefer to use my DSLRs, one area where I can really save some space and weight is by exchanging my laptop for an iPad for overseas travel. My mobile workflow on the iPad is still evolving, but Lightroom CC (formerly Lightroom Mobile), is quite competent for most travel photography. The Gnarbox portable hard drive is a potential complement to the traveling photographer looking to stay light and use a tablet instead of a laptop.
Gnarbox is a portable WiFi SSD backup solution for mobile workflow.
The Achilles heel of most tablets is storage space. While the iPad Pro can be configured with 512GB of memory, that’s not a lot when it comes to RAW capture with my Nikon D850. In the field, it would be nice to not only have a file back-up solution that integrates with the tablet, but also a way of previewing and triaging images before moving them to the tablet to use in editing apps. Enter the Gnarbox, a portable hard drive with WiFi connectivity.
Gnarbox (gnarly name, dude) is a portable solid state hard drive (SSD) that connects to your mobile device via its own local WiFi hotspot. This means you can use it with mobile devices that do not support USB drives, like the iPad. I got my hands on a Gnarbox from B&H Photo to test, and what follows is my experience with it using iOS mobile devices. Continue reading Review: Gnarbox WiFi Hard Drive→
Last week, Apple rolled out iOS8, the latest version of their mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads. Of all the new features mentioned, somehow the photo editing tools managed to escape notice. Check out my video above, and read on to learn about these new features.
In previous versions of iOS, you only had three editing options:
Crop
Auto Enhance
Filter effects
Personally, I really only used the crop/rotate tool and occasionally used the filter effects. I found the Auto Enhance option to be mostly useless. But with iOS8, users gain a full range of image editing tools. To access these tools, click the “Edit” button from any photo. Then click the “knob” icon located at the bottom of the screen. Continue reading New Photo Editing Tools in iOS8→
If you’re on vacation and want to travel light, consider capturing RAW+JPEG with your camera to let you play with the JPEGs on a tablet and leave the laptop at home.
A long time ago (as in 2005, when I got my first DSLR), I routinely shot RAW+JPEG when I traveled. The big reason for this was because at the time, most laptop computers were just not capable of rendering RAW previews fast enough to make browsing lots of images feasible. Since then, computers got faster, and software got better, and a RAW-only workflow became a viable option for travel.
Fast forward to today, and I find myself considering circumstances where RAW+JPEG might not be a bad idea when traveling. The proliferation of tablets and smart phones and their on-board editing apps creates a situation where you might consider shooting RAW+JPEG combined. (Continued after the jump) Continue reading Workflow Thoughts: RAW+JPEG Revisited for Travel Photography→
