Jeff Carlson
Jeff Carlson is an author, photographer, and freelance writer. Among many other projects, he publishes the Smarter Image newsletter, which explores how computational photography, AI, and machine learning are fundamentally changing the art and science of photography. He’s covered the personal technology field from Macs and PalmPilots to iPhones and mirrorless cameras, publishing in paper magazines, printed books, ebooks, and websites. He’s also the co-host of the podcasts PhotoActive and Photocombobulate, and has spoken at several conferences and events. He lives in Seattle, where, yes, it is just as gray and wet and coffee-infused as you think it is.
The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus aren’t your typical ho-hum “s” iPhone updates, and they will forever change how you interact with the iPhone. Jeff Carlson explains why.
After limited initial supplies, many Apple Watch models and bands are now available in retail Apple Stores, though you must still initiate orders online.
We want photos on the Mac and on iOS devices to seamlessly find their ways into our photo libraries, but until recently that was essentially impossible. Apple’s Photos for OS X and Adobe’s Lightroom CC include cloud-based options for synchronizing photos among devices, but take different paths to reach that goal.
“Go for the gold” is no longer just about the Olympics, as Apple introduces 18-karat gold “Apple Edition” versions of a number of its popular products for the burgeoning luxury tech market.
If you want to view photos that are saved to iCloud’s My Photo Stream feature on your Mac, you need to do it in iPhoto or Aperture — two Apple applications that are scheduled to be retired. MyPhotostream is a new alternative that intentionally does just one thing: displays your My Photo Stream photos in a simple environment.
If you accidentally recorded a video in Slo-Mo mode on an iPhone or iPad Air 2, you can’t easily save a real-time version. Jeff Carlson shares a couple of workarounds using either the free Slow Fast Slow app or iMovie for iOS.
Wondering why configurations for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus start at a pathetic 16 GB instead of jumping to the more logical 32 GB? The answer is most certainly profit for Apple, and that higher profit comes from a bit of clever psychological marketing.
Apple is retiring Aperture, its professional photo software, in favor of the new Photos application for OS X. Jeff Carlson examines why the transition isn’t like most software and what Photos will need to do (and may fail at) in the future.
The Roost laptop stand resembles scaffolding more than the typical slabs available to raise your portable computer, but its light weight and compact storage hide a sturdy lift.
OmniOutliner users have waited a long time — since before Apple switched to powering Macs with Intel processors — for a major-version update of the versatile outlining application. Jeff Carlson looks at what’s new in OmniOutliner 4.
Apple can be utterly mysterious. Jeff Carlson received a tube of Mac Pro posters with distinctive Apple touches, of course.
Not only did Apple add a few new features to the built-in Camera app under iOS 7, the company revamped how the Photos app works. Jeff Carlson explains what’s new and different with both photo apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
If you’ve been using iPhoto for years and want to switch up to either Aperture or Lightroom, this final chapter of “Take Control of Your Digital Photos” is for you! In it, Jeff explains how to migrate your photos from iPhoto to Aperture, which is incredibly easy, before showing you how perform the same task with Lightroom, where the migration requires more effort if you want to retain all your metadata from iPhoto (which you do).
An old printed photo is precious often because it’s the only copy that exists. In the digital age, that type of scarcity isn’t a problem. You can easily make copies of a photo or have inexpensive prints made. And yet, digital photos suffer from a different type of scarcity: one hard drive failure can wipe out your photos — all of your photos — in an instant. The solution is to ensure you have a solid backup system in place. You also want to make sure you can view your photos in the distant future. Unfortunately, as I discuss at the end of this chapter, that isn’t an easy guarantee given how software and hardware will change over the years.
So much of the information about photography out there focuses (pun intended) on the art and practice of capturing images, but very little addresses what to do with the shots once they’re in captivity. This is where the work you’ve done so far in terms of shooting smart, assigning metadata at import, and applying keywords and other metadata later on pays off. Armed with a photo library chock-full of metadata, you can locate images in a fraction of the time it would take to scan through them visually. I’ll show you how to search for specific metadata — such as keywords and ratings, and even camera-generated data such as aperture, shutter speed, and camera model — to track down shots. Then I’ll cover how to make that search capability work in your favor by building smart albums whose contents can change based on criteria you specify.