For the record, I am shooting with a Canon 1D MkII, an 8 megapixel, very low noise, camera; and a Hasselblad 501CM. I use a scanner to make really big files of those 6X6 negatives!

Brent

It’s a useful bolting-together of Bridge and ACR, but I still find it a clunky beast. The one killer feature is the Brush Tool, for nondestructive local correction of brightness, sharpness, contrast, saturation, clarity & color.

If it weren’t for that I’d run FAST to Aperture, which lets you do anything from wherever you are in the app, without having to be in a ‘module,’ and which has great automation capabilities for quickly applying changes to multiple images. Aperture also has a super plugin architecture, but plugins don’t access the RAW stream so you need to create NON-nondestructive TIFFs for work. And good plugins cost $$$.
On the other hand, for ultimate RAW correction work I need to also use the almost criminally borked Capture NX, whose RAW tweaking and local corrections are superior to Lightroom’s … assuming the thing doesn’t lock up and assuming I don’t need to work on more than an image at a time. If Apple or Adobe ever opened up their apps to drop-in 3rd party RAW conversion, I’d probably cry and kiss someone.

So I’m starting to think that from a business point-of-view, the camera is not that critical. Not compared to the printer, the software you use — for me Lightroom has paid for itself many times over — and whatever speeds up your workflow.

I’ve sold tons of shots that I did with the 8MP infrared converted LifePixel Rebel. It doesn’t mean don’t run out and get what you want, camera-wise, but simply that from a financial point of view, I’d put the money into lenses, printers, software etc.

I had never thought of this before. Sure the camera captures the image, some better than others. Resolution can make a difference, but there are programs to increase resolution. When I was shooting professional baseball, I had images on billboards, images taken with a 6 megapixel Canon 10D.

The printer, on the other hand, makes the products the customer buys. This is where resolution really counts! And the size of the print, like you said, generates the revenue.

Brent

There are two options (as I see it) for backup in the field: DVD or external HD. Your Dell has the DVD burner, so just carry blank DVDs with you.

I bought a Western Digital 500G USB external hard drive to back up my work in the field–providing me with two copies of work–one on the computer one on the USB HD. About $100 for 500G of external HD. It’s pretty fast. Faster than burning DVDs.

Brent

Modifying the Leopard install DVD is no piece of cake, but there are other solutions.