Apples and Nikons

In September 2006, I bought a white Apple Macbook laptop. It wasn't my first Mac, that honor went to a little Powerbook G4, two years previous, it wasn't the most powerful computer I had ever owned, my previous windows desktop was infinitely more powerful. It was however a life changing purchase. You see, although I loved my G4, it was to slow, had low memory and had a small 12" screen which made photographic editing use very difficult. My desktop PC had whatever screen I choose to join it to, plenty of memory but unfortunately ran Windows. And so I walked into a large technology store in Lithuania with a vague idea of buying a Mac laptop and 30 minutes later was the proud owner of an Apple Intel powered, Macbook.

Its screen was only 1 inch bigger than my G4 but my photographs just popped out of it. The operating system, Apple OSX was an absolute joy, very little learning curve, and no annoying messages. If I plugged something into the USB, it just sat up, paid attention and said, "oh a Canon Printer, very nice, heres a good little driver that will make your lovely printer work" Of course it didn't say this but you felt that if it had a mind, its the sort of thing it would say. Plug anything into a Windows machine and its silent voice will shout "What the f**k is this, are your going to tell me, or am I going to have to have a tantrum and get all blue screen about it?"

You see this is the thing about Mac's. They just work! No dramatics, no questioning, no nannying. The operating system sits quietly in the background, looking pretty and working hard. I just plug my Nikon or any other camera in and get on with my work. Efficiently, effortlessly and dare i say it pleasurably. Most of my images are shot in Nikon's NEF raw format. OSX recognizes the files, lets me see thumbnails and full size previews and , lets me catalogue or adjust them them in iPhoto.

Of course as a professional photographer the pleasure of using my first Macbook has led to me buying a beefy Macbook Pro, 20in Apple display and now my collection of 20000+ travel images is managed by Apple's pro application Aperture.

My raw files are stored and backed up on Firewire 800 external drives and of course when I plug them in, my Mac silently says "ooh, a Western Digital firewire drive, lovely, your ready to go" Could i ask for anything more?