Beta Testing the Future

Full disclosure, I love the iPad. After a great house warming gift from a friend, I’m typing this on a 64GB 3G iPad, rumbling down the highway going 70mph. (Don’t worry, someone else is driving.)

This device has all but replaced my iMac. I only fire my old love up for heavy tasks, such as photo editing, layout and design. All my emailing, Tweeting, surfing, researching, TV show watching and most of my writing happens all on here.

Today though, while bored riding along, I discovered the future of this device for me. Photography.

Chase Jarvis, a great commercial photographer, has been talking for the past few years about how the best camera you have is the one with you. From that thought spawned a photo iPhone app, a book and an online ecosystem.

Today, I’m going to come out and say it. The best computer you have is the one that’s with you. And no folks, your laptops don’t count. Anything that takes too much time that it can be considered a task ruins it. This is something you should be able to do between layovers in airports.

While outside of Temple, Texas at a Shell station, I started taking pictures for fun. It’s been a while since I just played with my camera. The results are the start of a revolution in how I look at photography and, hopefully, how you do too.

43 photos later, I got back in the car. The camera adapter for the iPad had finally arrived and I wanted to test it out. Plugged it in, selected 20 shots, imported and sorted down to ten shots I liked in about five minutes.

Just for the hell of it, I opened up Best Camera, Chase Jarvis’ iPhone app. Within five to eight minutes, I was done. Ten images that I was happy with, just like that. Are they the best images I’ve taken? Of course not. Best images I’ve edited? Hell no. But that’s not the point.

Within 30 minutes, I had taken, sorted, edited and posted photos while driving down the interstate to Austin. Imagine with me for a second the possibilities.

Let’s say that Apple releases an iPad version of Aperture. You’ll have a few brushes, your synced presets from your desktop, your library of photos at your hand. And you’ll physically be editing your photos! I can start selecting and uploading pictures from a wedding while my assistant drives us home. The barriers of communication are falling, the time it takes for you to get information to coworkers and clients is dropping and you have to be ready.

Posting this is just a start, a beta test. I edited the images on an iPhone app and posted this blog using Squarespace’s great iPhone app. But, the results and speed in which I could do it was alarming and phenomenal.

Yes, I’m beta testing. But I’m beta testing the future. What are you testing?