Be sure to check out the bottom of this post for a really cool contest where you could win an iPad!

So the iPad has finally arrived in Canada and I can’t wait for the UPS man to show up at my door and deliver this magical device. Rather than lining up at the Apple store, I decided to pre-order it using my iPhone while we were on the beach in Nice – yes I am a technology geek and I make no apologies for it. Many people (i.e. my wife) will say that the only reason I’m getting one is because I just want the latest and greatest gadget (and they’d be partially right) but I really see it as a revolutionary device for photographers. Here are the top five ways I plan on using the iPad in my wedding and event photography business.

1. The Perfect Portfolio

One of the first things prospective clients want to see before deciding to hire me as their photographer, are examples of my work. This is particularly true for brides and grooms who want to find a photographer who can demonstrate that they have the technical ability to take a great photograph but also the artistic vision and style that matches with their style. In the past, I would always show people a combination of prints, albums and a digital slide show on a laptop. While this worked well, the iPad offers a much better form factor on which to display my work. It is much easier to transport and I can easily hand over to someone and allow them to flip through the photos at their own pace.

2. Portable Backup

We all know how important backing up your data is. As soon as I’m finished a shoot, I immediately download the images to my computer where they are then backed up to a server and removable drives which are kept off-site. With the camera connection kit and the iPad, I’ll be able to backup and preview images from a shoot while I’m in the field which provides an extra level of redundancy and safety for my clients.

3. Impromptu Slideshows

The iPad will also offer a great solution for quickly previewing images from a shoot and creating quick slide shows while I’m photographing an event or a wedding. During a commercial shoot, it will also provide me with the ability to show my clients a larger preview of their images on the iPad’s beautiful 10 inch screen.

4. Photography Applications

There are so many great photo applications for the iPhone and the iPad. One that I think will come in really handy when doing commercial, stock, or street photography is the Easy Release application for the iPad. This is a model release application that simplifies the process of getting models to sign releases in the field.

5. iPad as a Digital Photo Album

I think one of the coolest uses for this device will be as a new way to deliver my client’s photos to them in addition to a traditional printed album. Imagine having your wedding photos or event photos beautifully displayed on your very own iPad! And now you don’t have to imagine it – you could win one from me! Check out my amazing new contest below.

WIN AN iPAD FROM MOMENTS IN DIGITAL!

That’s right, I’ll be rewarding one lucky couple with their wedding images on an iPad. Here is what you’ll need to do to be eligible to win. Just book a 2011 wedding package valued at $2500 or more before October 31st, 2010, and you will automatically be entered to win a 16 GB WiFi model of the iPad loaded with a digital collection of your wedding day images. Total prize valued at $1050. A deposit and signed contract must be received before midnight on October 31st, 2010 to be eligible. All entries received will be placed into a random drawing to be held during the first week of November. Moments in Digital reserves the right to substitute a product of similar value in the event the currently available models are changed or no longer available.

1. Two of David DuChemin’s books: Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision, and Vision Mongers: Making a Life and Living with Photography. Both are fantastic photography books written by a fellow Canadian and super nice guy.
2. Microfibre Cleaning Cloth*: Great to have a few of these in any camera bag. Even if a photographer has a couple they’ll always appreciate having a few more.
3. Rechargeable NiMH batteries*. I don’t think it’s possible to have enough of these things in your camera bag.
4. Gorillapod*. These are one of the most useful little gadgets any photographer should have in their bag. Basically they are a portable tripod with three articulated legs that you can use to wrap around any object and hold your camera or flash. They are relatively small and lightweight and are great when you need to support your camera or flash in some unusual position or location. Recently, they just released a version for the iPhone called the Gorillamobile which is a great little accessory with a number of uses. In conjunction with the Gorillamobile, there is now a new iPhone application called Gorillacam and the best part is that it’s FREE! It features a camera timer, unlimited rapid fire, 3-shot burst and a grid overlay. Used together with the Gorillamobile, you can now take better self portraits or videos using your iPhone.
5. Black Rapid R-Strap*. Hands down one of the best camera straps on the market. Rather than hanging around your neck like a traditional camera strap, the R-Strap allows you to hang the camera at your side and then quickly slide it up to your eye to take a shot. Great for travel photography and wedding/event photographers.
6. HonL Photo Accessories. David Honl makes some great lighting accessories and any photographer who uses flash would be happy to receive some of his products in their stocking. David was kind enough to send me a copy of his Light DVD* and it is packed full of information on how to light like a pro with minimal gear.
7. Subscription to KelbyTraining.com*. Scott Kelby’s training website offers hundreds of hours of instruction on just about every Adobe program including Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, and others. There are also lots of other instructional videos on photography, covering topics ranging from legal and business issues to lighting and wedding photography.
8. Cinema Kit Hoodloupe 3.0. If you have a photographer on your list who has started to experiment with video on their DSLR, this is a great accessory from the folks at Hoodman. This attachment fits over top of the camera’s LCD screen and allows for better viewing outdoors.
9. Memory Cards*. Just like batteries, you can never have enough memory cards. If you are feeling really generous, spend a little extra to get the faster UDMA cards and stick to well known brands like Lexar or SanDisk.
10. Gift Card. Still not sure what to get them? A gift card to their favorite camera store is always a safe bet.

What items are on your photography wish list this year? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Much to my surprise I received a phone call today from Gord the manager of Don’s Photo to let me know that he had one available so I rushed over before the store closed and picked it up. Here is the official un-boxing video shot with my Flip video camera. Keep an eye on the blog for the first test shots once I’ve charged up the batteries and had some time to get out shooting.

Canon 5D Mark II Un-Boxing from Bruce Clarke on Vimeo.

Now I realize that there are inherent risks taking expensive camera gear into a crowded event so I wasn’t expecting said person to compensate me for the damages (although it would have been nice). At the very least however I was expecting him to apologize. Instead he just looked back at me, shrugged his shoulders, put his ear plugs back in and continued to enjoy the race while I sat and fumed. Needless to say I did not enjoy the rest of the race and was tempted on a few occasions to introduce the back of his head to the business end of my 70-200mm lens.

Now with a couple of days to reflect I am going to be the bigger person and look on this event as a learning opportunity. How so you may ask? Well, for one it gives me a chance to try out the Canon repair center in Calgary. For those who ever need to send anything in for repair, here is the contact information you’ll need:

Canon Canada

2828-16th Street NE

Calgary, Alberta  T2E 7K7

Tel: (403)219-5939

I’d rather have to test them out with a relatively inexpensive item such as a $500 flash than to have to use their services to fix an expensive piece of glass or camera body. I will do a follow-up blog post in a few weeks once the repair has been completed commenting on my experience with the Canon repair center in Calgary.

The second thing I learned from this experience is that Canon was actually very smart in the way they designed their Speedlite. As you can see from the photos above, it looks like it was designed so that the hot-shoe mounting plate on the flash would actually break away from the body of the flash so as not to put pressure on the hot-shoe mount on the camera resulting in it being bent or broken. While I am not happy to have to send anything in for repair, better it be the flash than my brand new 40D. Hopefully  it doesn’t wind up being too costly of a repair and my favourite flash unit will be back in action sooner than later.

Heeding this advice, I have begun to build my collection of good glass. I’ve chosen to go with Canon which means I’ll be sticking with Canon bodies for the foreseeable future as you cannot use Canon lenses with a different body (i.e. Nikon). In my collection I have the following 6 Canon lenses and one Tamron lens in order of price from most expensive to the least expensive.

16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM
This is a great wide-angle lens that I just recently purchased so I haven’t got a great deal of shooting time in with it yet. It’s a nice fast lens and it’s also very light. I had the option of going with the cheaper EF-S 10-22mm f3.5 but in the end I decided to give up a bit of a wider angle in favor of a faster lens that could be used on a full-frame sensor if I ever upgrade my body to a 5D or 1DS Mark III.

24-70mm f/2.8 L USM
This is a great multi-purpose lens but I primarily use it for portrait and landscape work. This is a fast, sharp lens which performs particularly well around f5.6. It’s a little on the heavy side but it produces some great results even in low light conditions. I purchased this when I upgraded to the 40D so I’m still experimenting with this lens and finding out when it’s best used.

70-200mm f/2.8
This is probably my favorite lens that I’ve purchased so far. It produces great depth of field so I really enjoy using it for portrait shots and catching intimate moments from afar. I’ve used it to cover sports photography, weddings, travel, and event photography. I also have the 1.4X tele-convertor which extends the range of this lens which is handy when you need to get in that little bit closer to your subject.

Tamron 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3
This mid-range lens is a great multi-purpose lens for the photographer on the go who wants the greatest flexibility in range without having to carry several lenses with them. I bought this lens a couple of years ago and use it quite often when I’m traveling and don’t want to bring my heavier lenses with me. It’s great in outdoor settings with good lighting but it’s not the best choice if I’m going to be in low-light conditions. It’s definitely slower and noisier than my other Canon lenses and the auto-focusing system sometimes takes awhile to lock in on the subject I’m trying to photograph.

75-300mm f/4-5.6
Besides the 18-55mm kit lens that came with my Rebel XT, this was the first lens I purchased. At only $300 it’s a very inexpensive lens which is great for zooming in on far away subjects or for creating a great DOF for portraits, etc. Unfortunately once I purchased the 70-200 f/2.8, this lens rarely makes it’s way out of my bag these days and will most likely be sold off to any interested buyers who are looking for a like-new inexpensive telephoto lens.

18-55mm EF-S
This was the basic kit lens that came with my Rebel XT. I used it for quite sometime until I purchased the Tamron 18-200mm lens. Since then it has sat in my bag alongside my 75-300mm and will most likely wind up in the items for sale pile shortly.

50mm f/1.8
At only $100 this little wonder is fantastic in low light conditions thanks to a nice wide aperture. It is also a great portrait lens producing some tack sharp images – sometimes sharper than my much more expensive 24-70mm. It’s small and light-weight so I don’t mind throwing this one in the bag and pulling it out when I need it. Being that it’s a fixed focal length, it’s not the best lens to use in situations where the distance between you and your subjects is changing quickly and you need to get the shot. Having said that, I use it often so I am looking to upgrade to the faster 50mm f/1.4 which is still only around $380 which I think will give me good value for the money.

I’m curious to know what lenses you use and if there are any missing from my collection that you think I should have.

With the photo collection growing at a rapid pace, backups are more and more important so I added an HP Home Server with mirrored drives along with 2 new external hard drives. My plan is to backup my laptop and desktop to the server and then backup those backups to one of the external drives periodically. This drive I’ll leave at my parents so that in the event of a fire or theft I won’t lose everything. The 2nd external drive will primarily be used to backup photos only and provide extra storage when I’m traveling with my laptop.

On the software side I decided to make the move to Lightroom. I had been experimenting with Bridge for awhile but after downloading a demo of LR I decided that it was a much better tool and provided much better organizational features than Bridge. I also liked the ability to jump right into the Develop mode and start tweaking photos without having to open them in Camera RAW.

The last big piece of the puzzle was my camera equipment. I contemplated upgrading to the Canon 1D Mark III but just couldn’t justify the $5000 price tag yet. The 5D was my next option but it’s been out now for a couple of years and is due to be replaced so I didn’t want to get stuck buying something that will be outdated the second I buy it so I finally decided to buy a 40D. It has some great new features including Live View, automatic sensor cleaning and it uses the new Digic III processor. Of course I also had to buy new batteries a new battery grip because the one I have for my Rebel doesn’t fit the 40D.

In addition to a new body, I also bought a couple of new lenses including Canon’s 24-70mm f2.8 and my friend Greg sold me his 70-200mm f2.8 along with a 1.4x converter. Both lenses are great and I’m really happy with how they perform in low light conditions.

My last purchase this spring (for now anyway) was a new ball head for my tripod. Until now I had just been using the ball head that came with my Slik tripod and it was enough for the smaller Rebel and the glass that I had. I quickly realized that it was not strong enough to support the larger 40D and the heavier glass so I purchased the Manfrotto 322RC2 pistol grip ball head. It can hold up to 11 lbs and comes with a quick release plate. The pistol grip is great for quickly adjusting the position of the camera to move between horizontal and vertical shooting. Looking forward to testing it out this weekend on a wedding shoot that I am doing for a couple at the Legislature.

Over the course of the summer I’m sure I’ll add some more glass to the collection as well as a portable light meter, a lens baby and a new cable release for the 40D because of course the current cable release that I have for the Rebel wont’ work with the 40D. What a surprise.