This week I talk about how constraint breeds creativity, but… how we also want to have the right tool for the right job, but also… how we don’t want to come down with gear acquisition syndrome.

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The Weekly Briefly: The Double-Edged Sword of Awesome Tools

Yesterday morning, Nicholas Felton shipped his new iPhone app: Reporter.

I’ve long been a fan of Felton’s work. Heck, I have every single one of his Annual Reports, and as a matter of fact they happen to be sitting here right next to me.

My first impressions of the Reporter app (after just 24 hours with it) are great. The app is very well done, and seems to do a great job at removing as much friction and annoyance as possible for an app that’s designed by nature to ping you every couple of hours and ask you a series of questions about what you’re doing.

An app like this is meant to be used often for an extended period of time. In fact, it was used by Felton himself to build his 2012 Annual Report.

You don’t have to use just the stock questions it comes with. You can add any of your own. What questions should you add? Ones that would lend themselves to interesting data when aggregated. Here are some examples I saw used in Felton’s own 2012 report but that I didn’t see in the app:

  • What is your current mood?
  • What are you wearing?
  • What are you drinking?
  • What are you eating?
  • What tools are you using?

(And, ironically, as I was just finishing up this link post, my iPhone buzzed letting my know it was time to fill out a report — my second of the day so far.)

Nicholas Felton’s Reporter App

Speaking of “you don’t need newer gear to be a better photographer”, Robert McGinley Myers on the pursuit (or not) of better headphones:

The perfect headphone set up always cost just a little bit more. Audio nirvana was always just out of reach. […]

I would occasionally spend an evening listening to a song on my new set of headphones and then on my old set, or with my new amplifier and then my old amplifier. I would make my wife listen to see if she heard a difference. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t. Every once in a while, I’d read a post on Head-fi about someone who was selling everything he’d bought because he realized he was listening to his equipment rather than music. I finally had the same realization and made the same decision.

(Via Marco, of course)

Placebo-philes

CJ Chilvers gave a 5-minute presentation based on his essay about how to make perfect photos.

I love his rule for perfect photography:

The only rule in photography is to tell a story with a compelling subject – for you.

Think of it as a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Photographic Needs. Every decent photo needs to tell a story. Telling a story with a compelling subject can make the photo historic (as seen above). But a step above even those photos, is a photo with a subject compelling to you specifically. That’s what makes your snapshots even more important than the most important photos ever made.

Perfect Photos Every Time

True story: last month, my wife and I loaded up our two boys, drove to Colorado, and spent the whole month of January living in the Denver area. We are from Colorado and all our family is out there. We stayed with relatives, and it was a great chance to let our two boys spend time with the cousins they rarely see.

During the month I was able to borrow some table space at an office building in town, and that is where I worked from.

But here’s the kicker…

After three years of working on this site as my full-time job, I have a pretty good idea of what I can accomplish in any given day. My work routine in Colorado was no different than it has been: brew some coffee, scrub my to-do list, get to work. And yet I was regularly finishing up with my day before lunchtime — nearly every day for an entire month.

In a nut, I was getting done in 3-4 hours what I am used to taking me 8-9 hours.

And it really got me thinking that perhaps working out of my home office isn’t the best setup for me. I already have a schedule of leaving the house once a week to work from a coffee shop, but now I’m thinking it should be more.

There is a new coworking studio that opened up not too far from where I live, and once all this snow melts I’m going to start commuting there for a month or two and see what sort of impact it has on my day-to-day productivity and morale.

My biggest concern: I can’t bring my clicky keyboard.

Workstation Popcorn

This is a nice article by Jeff Abbott (writing on The Brooks Review) about Writer Pro’s syntax highlighting feature:

Do you really want to improve your writing? Share it with a friend or colleague and ask for real feedback.

My initial impressions of Writer Pro still stands 6 weeks later:

Is Writer Pro an impressive, beautiful, and useful piece of software? Absolutely. Is it going to find a place in my iPad writing workflow? I don’t think so.

Six weeks later and Writer Pro still hasn’t stuck for me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, maybe I just don’t get it, or maybe I’ve simply become more curmudgeonry about changing the tools I’ve been using for years.

Naturally, if there is a better tool available to me — something that would help me and save me time and energy — then I want to take advantage of it. But yet, as I get older, I feel far more concerned with doing the work than with finding the next great thing that will finally empower me to do that better work I always wanted but could never produce.

When I feel my work isn’t at its best, I never point the finger at the tools I have. It’s always about improving how I spend my time and what I’m focusing on. Tools do not an artist make.

Does Syntax Highlighting Actually Help?

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On episode two of my new podcast, The Weekly Briefly, I talk about what a “Pro iOS” means anyway, some of the low-hanging fruit that would make iOS more “powerful” (such as better inter-app communication), and the importance of a 3rd-party app having a worthwhile and sustainable income in the App Store.

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The Weekly Briefly: Professional-Grade iOS

The E-M10 is the first new M43 camera to genuinely tempt me to upgrade from my E-PL5 which I’ve had for about a year and a half now.

I’ve rented both the E-M5 and the E-P5 but wasn’t blown away by either of them in such a way as to upgrade my current camera. Though I was initially very excited about the E-P5, after renting it I didn’t feel that it was a significant enough upgrade from my E-PL5 — and at nearly twice the price, I felt that was money better spent on a good lens.

However, after reading a few reviews, my first impressions of the E-M10 may be a different story — this may be my next camera.

Here’s what is compelling to me about the new E-M10:

  • Price: $700 for the body, which is a bit more than I paid new for my E-PL5 and is $300 less than the list price of the E-M5 and E-P5 (though the latter two cameras are both 20-percent off on Amazon at the moment, making them just $100 more expensive than the E-M10).

  • Size: the E-M10 looks stellar, and is just slightly larger than the E-PL5, and smaller than the E-P5, E-M5, and E-M1.

  • Manual Controls: after size, having a few manual dials to quickly adjust aperture and shutter speed is what I most wish the E-PL5 had.

  • Viewfinder: Though I don’t long for a viewfinder, I’d welcome having one.

  • Image Stabilization: the E-M10 has 3-axis in-body image stabilization (for pitch, yaw, and roll) compared to the 5-axis of the E-M5 and E-M1. My E-PL5 has 2-axis IBIS (pitch and yaw only). In usage, I never found myself in deep need of the 5-axis IBIS when renting the E-M5 and E-P5. I always felt able to get just as good of images from my E-PL5 and its “measly” 2-axis IBIS as I was with the nicer cameras and their 5-axis IBIS.

In short, the E-M10 looks to have enough compelling features, in a camera body that is still small enough, at a price that is still low enough, to be exciting to me. But we’ll have to see. Once it’s out (Feb 12th), I hope to rent one from Lens Rentals and give it a spin to find out for sure if it’s as exciting as it looks.

Mathieu Gasquet’s First Impressions of the new Olympus E-M10

And speaking of The Sweet Setup, we just published our latest app review/recommendation. It was written by none other than Duncan Davidson himself:

The upside of photography in the digital age is that it’s easy to make as many images as you want. The downside: Once you’ve made all those photos, you have to do something with them before they pile up faster than you can sort through and share the best.

The Best Photo Editing App for the Mac Is Lightroom

This week’s Sweet Setup interview is with our good friend, Myke Hurley, talking iPhone. I think more and more people are in a place where they’d agree with his sentiment (though “stooge job” not required):

With the way I live my life, my iPhone is my most important computer. Whilst I’m attending my stooge job during the day, my iPhone becomes my window to the other side of my life.

There is quite a bit of conversation around if the iPad is a PC or not (it is, of course), but we could just as well be having the same conversation about the iPhone.

Myke Hurley’s Sweet iPhone Setup