Rick Sammon's Digital Photography Secrets

Chapter 7. Home and On-Location Digital Darkrooms

Digital photography is part image capture, part digital darkroom work. This section covers getting properly equipped for the latter – you'll find tech talk here on computers, hard drives, memory cards and accessories that gives you some ideas for your own digital darkroom.

Computer – The Heart of the Digital Darkroom

Here's a picture, courtesy of Apple, of the home computer I am currently using. I'd show you mine, but it's under my desk and it's surrounded by a rat's nest of wires and cables – which does not make for a nice opening illustration for this chapter. So please forgive me for using a product shot.

It's a Mac Pro with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor and 4GB of RAM. Here's why that info is important: speed. The combination of the Quad-Core processor and 4GB of RAM lets me process my RAW files at speeds that were unheard of just a few years ago.

The computer has a 500GB internal hard drive and a 700GB internal backup hard dive. Time Machine, an Apple application, automatically backs up my hard drive to the backup drive. With all that space, I have plenty of room to store my many thousand photographs. However, as you'll read in a few pages, I also use additional back-up drives as a precaution – because hard drives can fail.

When buying ...