First off, I have a two computer set-up, I take a Mac Powerbook into the field and have an iMac back at the office which is where I prefer to do the majority of my work.

Powerbook

• Adobe Bridge & Photoshop: De-facto image editor.
• Daylite 3: Daylite is a great Customer Relationship Management project. It handles all of my contacts and calendar. It is also has project manager, notes, and tracks opportunities. What is special is that it integrates all of things and has some automation features for common tasks.
• Cyberduck: A FTP client, A great thing when you want to upload your photos “Old Skool” style to a server.
• Flickr Uploader: An application provided by flickr to upload photos.
• Browsers: Safari & Firefox, I had been a firm believer in Safari but then recently tried Firefox and was very impressed when it worked out better on some sites where I had layout issues when pages loaded.
• Image Rescue: I should knock on wood as I say this, but I haven’t had to use this yet. It came with one of my CF cards from Lexar to rescue pictures from bad CF cards.
• MarsEdit: Another new tool in my belt. MarsEdit is an offline blog editor which gives me more flexibility in my writing of blogs.
• Photo Mechanic: In the field PhotoMechanic is my image management tool. I use it to bring in my photos and image browser as I look for my selects. I also use it for my captioning and keywording. It is killer fast and the work done keywording and captioning isn’t lost when I bring my photos into my main digital asset manager (Aperture, see more below) on my main work machine.
• Photoshelter Uploader: An application provided by Photoshelter to upload photos.
• Soundslides: A great tool that many photojournalists use to create Flash based multimedia shows from images and sound/music.

iMac

• Aperture: I don’t think that my explanation would do justice to all that Apple’s Aperture. Think of it as the Swiss Army tool for digital imaging, it does more than you would expect and then a little more.
• Adobe Bridge & Photoshop: Same as above
• Daylite 3: Same as above
• Cyberduck: Same as above
• Flickr Uploader: Same as above
• Browsers: Safari & Firefox: Same as above
• Image Rescue: Same as above
• MarsEdit: Same as above
• Photo Mechanic: Same as above
• Photoshelter Uploader: Same as above
• Soundslides: Same as above

So Why The Two Machine Set-up?

Doing sports photography means that you are shooting and typically uploading photos from the field. On the upside, I have a laptop. The downside however is that it is an older 12 inch Powerbook bought when my needs were different from what they are now.

To complicate things, I also chose Apple’s Aperture for my main digital asset manager. The technical requirements are too much for my little Powerbook. This is clearly not the optimal set-up, but it is what I have for the moment. I am hoping this will change soon (hint: if my wife is reading this). I am hoping to move to a single machine soon, which means a new Apple Powerbook, that I will use with a second monitor when I am back in the office.

I should also add that I have multiple external hard drives (HD) that I use to back-up my images on. Initially I had used CD and DVD’s for back-up, but as the number of photos taken has increased, increased file size from my Nikon D200, I have moved to keeping my images on redundant hard drives. With the dropping price per gig of HD it makes sense to me and frees me from burning discs. Aperture’s image management has also eased the management of my photos in this way.