The dream is becoming a reality.

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Before the iPad even hit the shelves I was fantasizing in these pages about the value this tool would add for working photographers. It’s easy to generate PDF files of your work using the simplest tools (Lightroom, Pages and Preview is what I use) or, if you are a real publishing maven like UK photographer Roy Hammans, you can use sophisticated tools like Adobe’s InDesign to craft very professional looking eBooks. Take a look at Roy’s splendid collection of weathered boat hull abstractions which you can download from his site here. Do yourself a favor and move it to your iPad which displays them far better than a regular computer monitor, if my well calibrated Dell 2209WA is anything to go by. Also, I much prefer GoodReader on the iPad as a viewing app for PDFs to iBooks, which is clunky to load and slow to focus and sharpen each image.

I have asked the makers of GoodReader to provide enhanced slide-to-slide transitions (fades, dissolves) – let’s see if they come through. I would have asked the arrogant fruit company to do this for iBooks on the iPad but have you ever received a response from Apple on anything? After all, this is a company whose philosophy is increasingly “That’s how we like it. Take it or leave it, pal.”

I can generate a PDF of, say, 100 pictures from Lightroom (maybe Aperture has a like feature?) in a few minutes, add cover pages in a few more and have the whole thing on the iPad seconds later; imagine how this would work at any magazine with a lot of art directors, editors and photographic content. The photographer bangs away, the pictures are moved to Lightroom and thence to the iPad and the art director, minutes later each of the many team members is holding an iPad in his or her hands and making the decision what to cull and what to keep. Separately, a version is placed on the photographer’s server for downloading to the Big Cheese’s iPad in the sixtieth floor’s corner office. Eventually, the iPad app will have a Keep/Reject function for the editor to use, will be handed back to the photographer’s assistant, sync’d with Lightroom and, hey presto, off we go to press. Or rather, off we go to ePress.

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Anyone looking at the nineteenth century paste-up technology used by Anna Wintour in making the September Issue of Vogue would be blind not to see the possibilities.

Now that I have done this a couple of times, I checked my timing when doing a 24 page eBook of beach pictures. These were all in Lightroom 3 and I simply copied them to a Collection, added the color wash in LR’s Slideshow module, exported to a PDF, opened the PDF in Preview and then dropped in the front and Colophon pages which I made in iWork Pages. Start to finish took me thirty minutes. Had there been 100 pictures the additional time would have been a couple of minutes or so, the most time consuming step being the creation of the front and Colophon pages. I have saved these as template files for future use to make things easier. Click the picture to download the PDF:

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