EDITOR’S NOTE: Cross-Posted at Photofocus.com

Last week I wrote the first in a series of posts about the iPad’s impact on photography.

In this series, I will start to lay out the case for how and why I think the iPad will change photography. Now before you get too excited, I’m not talking about major change, but IMPORTANT change.

Last week I mentioned that the iPad is a CONTENT machine – aimed at consuming it not creating it. Today, I want to talk about the interface.

The iPad doesn’t come with a pointer, a trackpad, a trackball or a mouse. It relies on multi-touch technology. If you’ve seen the Tom Cruise movie where Cruise uses his hand to interact with a computer while hunting for a criminal you understand multi-touch. If you have an Apple iPhone or laptop you probably use multi-touch right now. And that is one very crucial factor in the iPad’s ability to share photographs.

Millions (and I do mean millions) of people are already familiar with Apple’s multi-touch technology. They use it every day. So that means the iPad will come to their door ready to use. No training required. Heck, you won’t even need to read the manual.

Laptops, tablet computers and such are much more complicated. Small children can use a mult-touch device right out of the box – as can elderly folks who think “learning” a computer is too big a task.

I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. When I first got the iPhone I put a portfolio of my wolf pics on the phone. I knew my neighbor’s five-year-old daughter loved wolves so I just handed her the phone and asked her if she wanted to look at some wolf photos. She got excited, literally grabbed the phone from me, turned it horizontally (since the first pic in the show was horizontal) and started enjoying the photo. Then I simply said, “Go on to the next one now.” She looked at me funny but then back at the iPhone and sure enough, she just organically knew to try swiping the image. When it worked she let out a little yelp of happiness. I then showed her (one time) how to pinch to zoom in and within a few minutes she had mastered the whole thing.

This is the stuff Apple does very, very well. And you can bet it’s going to make the iPad one of the most consumer-friendly pieces of technology we’ve ever seen.

Apple has worked to expand multi-touch on the iPad. There are numerous new “gestures” planned for the iPad.

Bundles (or piles or stacks) can be made by holding a finger on one picture and then tapping others to group together.

New Resize handle makes it easy to tap and grab one or more images and resize them.

New page navigation sidebar lets you see thumbnails of pages to select.

New context-based keyboards will automatically resize to fit the app you’re using.

There are many more like floating control panels, optimized views, more spread and pinch options, popovers, dragging to create lists, etc.

And this doesn’t even count all the new gestures we’ll see once the third-party developers get into writing new ones.

In short, I see the ability to interact with the iPad via multi-touch as a new opportunity to show off your photo portfolio with flair. Not only will you be able to show pictures, but if you become skilled at multi-touch gestures, you’ll be able to do it with style.

The ability to use the iPad as a portable portfolio is probably my main attraction to the device. And portability is the next thing I’ll cover in part 3 of the series.

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This post sponsored by the Digital SLR Store

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cross Posted at Photofocus.com

I’ve been talking about the iPad.

As expected, the usual cast of Windows fanboys, link-baiters, Apple haters, etc., jumped up screaming about all the things the iPad WON’T do. They talked about all the features it DIDN’T have. And that’s exactly the wrong approach. People NEVER, EVER buy anything because of what it WON’T do – they buy because of what it WILL do. They don’t buy it because of what it DOESN’T HAVE – they buy it because of what it DOES have. If the iPad spit gold bars at its owners and cured cancers, then there’d still be the contingent of haters who would bash it. Don’t let that detour you from checking it out.

I’ve looked at the same feature list as everyone else. No the iPad doesn’t have a web cam or a video cam or any kind of cam. It doesn’t support Adobe Flash. It doesn’t have a removable battery or hard disk or CD/DVD player. You can buy a laptop if you want all that.

I get a real chuckle out of people who say you can’t use the iPad to show off your portfolio because it doesn’t run Flash. P L E A S E! Apple will ship the iPad with a wonderful photo viewer and you can bet your last piece of pizza that there will be LOTS of photo slide players, etc., written for the iPad by third-party developers. Showing pics on an iPhone has landed me more than two dozen jobs. I have no doubt that showing pics using the same OS on a larger, brighter screen will be just fine.

Back to what the iPad won’t do? The iPad won’t make you a linear algebra expert just because you own it. It won’t make you two feet taller either. If you’re bald when you buy an iPad, you’ll be bald afterwards too. But what it will do is give you a chance to do all sorts of things that make your photography more valuable and enjoyable. And that is what people should concentrate on.

I was fully prepared to buy one of these just for the heck of it no matter what. I admit that. But when I saw an entry-level price of less than $500 and the iBook store, I realized, the iPad wasn’t just going to be a tool for the well-heeled technology junkie. This thing is going to have legs.

If Apple opens up the iBook store to self-publishers, all the photographers who think their book should be published will have a chance to go out there and build an audience and sell a book. Imagine the pictures we might see that wouldn’t be profitable for a big book publishing company to publish, but may be very realistically self-published via the iBook store! Or perhaps we’ll find the next Photoshop guru! Just as podcasts democratized radio, the iBook store could democratize publishing. I felt like the Kindle was a very good first step in this direction and at one time thought that it might be a way for photographers to self-publish. But the Kindle looks like it’s in trouble to me now. Apple does things like the iTunes, App and now iBook stores better than anyone else. Millions of people will already be familiar with how to use the iPad when it ships. This could mean that an unknown photographer could sell thousands of iBooks without the need for a publisher and do as well or better financially. It’s very exciting.

The iPad is available at a price which costs less than my first iPhone. That is exceptional. As I said yesterday, it’s still early. We have to see if the performance matches the hype. But if it does, this could be the first step to changing everything. I am sure we’ll see future iterations. It’s unlikely the first iPad will be the end. Just as the iPhone has evolved and will continue to evolve, so will the iPad. And I predict that just as the iPhone became the fastest selling smart phone ever, so will the iPad become the fastest selling tablet ever.

One last thought – most of the people bashing the iPad are people who really want a laptop. Well buy a laptop. The beauty of Apple is that they are good at figuring out how to put a device into your hands that works well, right out of the box. The simplicty of the iPad will help it win the day.

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This post sponsored by the Digital SLR Store

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cross posted at Photofocus.com

Apple’s new tablet may be just the ticket for serious photographers. Like all things Apple, it’s cool, well-designed, pretty and yes, expensive if you order the top-of-the-line model, although the entry-level product is very competitively priced and in my opinion, downright affordable.What the Apple Tablet Will Mean to Photographers

But imagine how hot for you the photo buyers will be when you waltz into their offices with the new tablet and ask, “Care to look at my portfolio?”

The portable portfolio will get an amazing jump-start because of the new tablet, and all the competition that follows it.

And there are more possible practical uses of the tablet. For some, it may be all the laptop they need. Photographers might be able to use the tablet as a portable field monitor for stills or video. Imaging shooting tethered to a tablet!

If all the new Apple tablet did was offer us a cool new way to display our portfolios, I’d be happy. But there’s something much more important to talk about here.

The tablet will save the newspaper, magazine and book publishing businesses. All of these industries have been having tough times. Lots of newspapers and magazines have folded. So have several book publishing houses. One big reason is that printing presses, paper and postage stamps are all more expensive than ever. And the electronic delivery systems are preferred by at least one major segment of the population – young people.

With new outlets for photography that will flow from the movement away from print to things like tablets, photographers will start to see more jobs and it’s possible that at the very least, the blood letting we’ve seen in some news rooms and other places where photo journalists used to be employed will stop.

These are early days yet. We need to wait and see how the device actually works in the real world. There will no doubt be many future iterations of this product. But I am betting that this leads to good news for photographers.

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This post sponsored by the Digital SLR Store