Perfect Practice



Winter Grass, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’ve been writing more than photographing in the last few months. I’ve set up the MacBook Air as a fast and light photo processing station.

I’ve moved Aperture and Photoshop CS3 over to the new machine. Nikon Capture NX2 didn’t make it because of serial number issues, but I’m fine with that for now. Based on Thom Hogan’s recent recommendations I feel pretty comforatable with RAW conversion in Aperture with a Vincent Versace influenced OZ 2.0 post processing in Photoshop.

The speed of the workflow is perfectly fine as Derrick Story described soon after the release of the new Airs. I was a bit hesitant about ordering this base 2GB model, but would have had to pay too much of a premium for the 4 GB. And it was suggested to me that with the SSD serving as scratch disk and memory paging there wasn’t going to be a huge hit compared to a conventional HD system.

I like the Tamron zoom with Nikon D7000 combination for image capture and I’d prefer to practice with my favored tools- a DSLR and fast lens, rather than try to get by with a compact. Switching to the Sigma DP1 hasn’t worked because of the fixed wide lens. Its a great travel camera, but not flexible enough to grab a shot like this one from a car window in very dead overcast light.

Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

2 thoughts on “Perfect Practice”

  1. The price of D7000 with body only at $1,200 is considered quite steep and there’s not much improvement as compared to the D90.

    I will still stick with my D90 for sometime.

  2. I’ll defer to Thom Hogan on this. His thought was that if you have a D90, it may not be worth the upgrade. I actually moved “down” from a D300 which I sold. Loved the D300, but get marginally better quality in a smaller, lighter package.

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