There are apps that provided more extended Do-Not-Call functions. Call Bliss is one example. I haven't used it, but noticed it offers a location-aware mode, so it will activate/deactivate depending on where you are. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/call-bliss/id575698521?mt=8

Not that I would ever step in the way of another man's rationalisations, but the crux of your dilemma seems to be the need to have a monitor with superior colour calibration to your existing iMac? Is there a problem with your iMac/Photoshop/printer/paper pipeline that couldn't be more easily addressed with a ColorMunki? I would have thought the iMac's screen to be good enough to not warrant premature replacement.

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I think this is a great idea. Hope if works. Maybe you could explain why you chose this lens to crowdsource, given that your current camera is a Fuji?

"With simpler, more common words, that version communicates meaning to more people." Given Nabokov's status as one of the greatest writers in the english language, and his explicit choice of obscure words in your example, perhaps his intention wasn't to communicate clearly about Catholic fruit-sellers? Maybe he was playing with words (and/or the reader) for some other aesthetic end?

Sigma DP2M. Just astonishing when used for what its good at. But it would be hard to live with as your only camera. I have high hopes for Panasonic's LX100. I think this combo would complement each other well. And the mighty Holga - the 120GN is my favourite. When the stars align, the glass lensed Holga can produce some really smooth, beautiful negs. Its small enough to squeeze into a coat pocket and light enough to go unnoticed.

A mint (used) Canon EOS 3 coupled to the 50mm f1.4 lens. Coming from the Olympus OM1, it's shockingly big. Looking forward to putting a roll through it once I venture out of the house. And I got the Vivian Maier book too. Bit of a trend there?

Thanks Ctein. I was looking for something a little different to buy my wife for Christmas and a introductory collection of fine teas from raretea.m6.artlogic.net in the UK seems to fit the bill nicely. I'll have to help her decide which is the nicest of course...

Just wanted to add my appreciation for a great article about photography & art - there is so much noise on the online forums about this that your essay (and blog in general) is a sensible, rational breath of fresh air. I think I can extend that appreciation to your readers comments too. I don't think I've seen comments on any of your essays disintegrate into the usual childish name calling that surrounds discussions of art attempted in other forums. Perhaps you are keeping the sh*t out of the comments too :-) I'm definitely in the shoot-for-myself category and have developed a much deeper relationship with photography since I moved from digital to film photography, specifically because it has allowed me to fall in love with the craft & art of darkroom printing. What a joy. Not in any way trying to raise the tired old film-v-digital debate. But the comments above that discuss role of craft and artisanship really resonated with me. I find physically making prints with my hands rather than an inkjet creates a relationship between me and the image that just was never there when post processing on a computer. That has definitely helped me filter the sh*t from keepers.

Sad news indeed. I was taken by your choice of photograph - the wedding on Tory Island. I happen to be going to my favourite holiday location tomorrow in Donegal which looks onto Tory Island, an island I've been taking pictures of for years but have yet to visit. My mother, who also passed away this year after a protracted illness, painted the beach and harbour from which a ferry services the island. This was a recent gift from her which has pride of place on my livingroom wall. Seeing Martine's photo on your site makes a small world feel closer, and the familiar view a little more poignant.

Mike - you had the honour of seeing the Pogues in concert? The lead singer, Shane McGowan, is a horribly sick alcoholic yet one of the greatest lyricist/poets of our age (says me). I grew up on the punk/Irish-trad of the Pogues and Shane is a bit of a tragic hero of mine. But an acquired taste, for sure. http://www.pogues.com/

Haven't seen any of them in person, but the cameras that l like the looks of are the new OM-D and the Fuji GW670W (not the one with bellows). The K-01 looks pretty good, especially the top and rear, but I would never buy one. The only style that I really detest is the Sony NEX range. Great cameras, but ... ugh.

Can I ask why you think it will be full frame?

Sorry Brookes, but your iPad/Goodreader experience just isn't the same as mine! Don't understand how it can differ so widely. As an experiment (which you might want to try), I just downloaded a magazine PDF from www.blur-magazine.com. They too zip their PDFs for download. I waited for the 58mb zip file to be downloaded by Safari. When the download completed, I was automatically asked if I wanted to unzip the file with Goodreader or to choose a different app to unzip it with. I choose to unzip it with Goodreader, Goodreader launched and copied the file into it's list of files, with the filename preserved (blur21en.zip). The file didn't automatically unzip, so I tapped it and it unzipped into blur21en.PDF. I tapped the new PDF file and was reading the magazine within 60 seconds of originally requesting the download. That was all pretty seamless. I was surprised that Goodreader preserved the file name, which it hasn't in the past. Perhaps I'm running a new version with that bug fixed. I don't think it's quite fair to blame Apple/iOS/iPad for file name errors in a third party app, but I do agree wrestling with different video formats must be a royal pain. Anyhow, thanks for persevering on behalf of us unfortunate iPad users. PS: To add irony to insult, I was unable to submit this comment via Safari on the iPad as both the post & preview buttons were visable but disabled! I had to email the text to my macbook and post it from there. *sigh*

Aristotle listed courage as one of the Virtues - can shooting slide film & jpeg be at least regarded as courageous - especially for working, commercial photographers?

As much as this isolated approach to file management protects the iPad from badly written apps, I think it is also an attempt to remove file management altogether from the user experience. Other than syncing the iPad to move files to and from a desktop computer, the notion of files largely goes away. It's an attempt to make it more of an appliance than a small computer. I'm not going to argue whether this is a good or bad thing - but if you look at the file management interface in Goodreader, you can see how clunky file management can get with a touch-only interface.

To over come the flat, 2D look, the direction of the flash has to come off camera; either literally or by bouncing the flash. For manual, off camera flash tutorials, you can't go wrong with the Strobist site. For TTL mode, on-camera bounced flash tutorial's, I would also recommend Neil van Niekerk's site (http://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques). To overcome the inverse square law, I think you'll have to go off-camera with a pocket wizard. It's actually quite easy to get good results with either manual or bounced TTL techniques, but I guess it takes time and practice to master. Studying both these sites really grounded my understand of exposure and improved my photos dramtically; everything from at-home snapshots to my carefully crafted 'art' :-)

Olympus 410 with 25mm pankcake lens. Holga 120 GN plus close up filters. Both of these cameras fit in my coat pocket, so I usually have one of them with me.

That's excellent news - just what I've been hoping for! I'm currently downloading 2009's pdfs (at a fair price too, may I add). I had hoped the pdf-only version of the LensWork magazine would be an easy 'win' as far as iPads go. Good luck with the extended version.

>My primary use a computer is not as passive entertainment, but rather as an active production tool. That's the crux of the matter. the iPad is primarily for consumption of media rather than production. So in that sense it is not supposed to replace a laptop. But outside of my day job 80% of my computer use is passive - surfing the web and reading books/PDFs etc. It's fine for light weight typing like emails, note taking and Twitter/social media. But I would turn to my laptop for any serious writing. I don't think the iPad is as 'vital' as a smart phone and laptop/computer but it is a super convient and fun way to do the light weight computing. I do use it at work for running between meetings. The keyboard is perfectly good for notetaking and accessing internal systems which are all web based. At home it has more or less replaced TV for me, but that might be more an indictment of TV these days. I hold it by resting the bottom edge on my lap and tilting it towards me by having it rest in landscape mode in both hands. Quite comfortable - much more so than having a heavy, hot laptop sitting on me. I suspect the lack of USB ports etc reflects the appliance philosophy behind the design. Adding a USB drive would require a file system and a file management application etc. I'm not arguing whether this is a good or bad thing but the iPhone/iPad design has gone to great lengths to avoid the whole notion of files and filesystems for the end user to worry about. The iPad is designed to switch on immediately and just work. It's not supposed to be as complex as a traditional computer. It's a media consumption appliance. So in that sense damning the iPad for not having all the features of a notebook is like damning a point'n'shoot camera for not being an SLR. It's not trying to be a notebook. The lenswork pdfs are a good example actually. There is a certain amount of hoop jumping I have to do to get the lenswork PDFs to work on my laptop which is awkward and off putting. It doesn't work well out of the box. I have to download and install software I have no other need for, and be aware of various gotchas associated with it (as per one of your recent posts) and keep on top of security updates associated with the new software etc etc. In this USB, Word & Excel world of traditional computing that's an unfortunate but accepted fact of life. And something I have to do on my Macbook Pro. It is the result of generations of computing compromise and it is just the reality of where we are today. But it's also the opposite of the iPad experience (or aspiration at least) of having things 'just work'. I get the feeling you won't like the flashless iPad (other than for viewing photos on - yummy). You seem more geared towards cranking out work on a laptop/netbook and to be honest, if my wife hadn't bought me the iPad as a gift I doubt I would have bought it for myself given concerns similar to yours. But now that I have it I would definitely miss it if it was taken away from me.

Obviously the full audio/visual extravaganza of LensWork Extended would be ideal, but I *totally* agree with your response about just not wanting to get involved in iPad app development. That would be a high-cost gamble to take (until Adobe introduce a simple PDF-to-Extravaganza tool). Which is why I was suggesting the simple PDF magazine-only option. I would expect that producing this kind of PDF would be a simple addition to your current workflow, and so a low risk, low-cost experiment worth trying. > I have a hard time thinking people would prefer these to the actual paper magazine, but maybe I'm simply out of touch with the needs of iPad users! This might seem a bit of an underwhelming option to those within the US, but to us poor sods in the rest of the world, it is a great option. An electronic version of the magazine is better than no version of the magazine. To my mind, it is similar to people buying books via the Kindle instead of buying paper copies. And at the risk of repeating myself, knowing the display characteristics of the device would allow you to afford the same degree of obsessive care you take in producing the highest quality print editions of the magazine to the PDF version. I suspect there would be more work in creating the subscription/download workflow than the actual PDFs. I'm not suggesting this as an alternative to the downloadable formats you originally suggested. Just as a simple, low cost option for those with iPads. Please don't be disheartened by the intensity of the feedback you're receiving. I don't think any of it is negative - we're just all keen for such a venture to succeed.

>Simply taking the visual content of LensWork or LensWork Extended and putting it on-screen just doesn't make sense to me. A large part of the magic of LensWork is it's printing quality;...Neither of these translate into the iPad paradigm You currently offer LensWork as a paper magazine with no DVD. I think a lot of customers with iPads would be glad of a PDF version of just that. I would, anyway! I don't see how this doesn't translate. I agree the iPad represents a tiny minority of web users (leaving demographics aside) and so this tail should not wag the dog. But. In addition to offering a full flash based LensWork Extended downloadable edition for those happy to read/watch this on their desktops & laptops, why not offer the 'reduced' PDF as an iPad edition as well. In terms of print quality, photos on the iPad are top notch. And wouldn't it be much easier to target a well known screen resolution/color balance etc of a known device than the unpredictable spread of desktop/laptop monitors? Seems like a perfect parallel to the magazine-only option. >I know the iPad is today's hot device and lots of you are all agog about it. But, are we certain that iPads will never play flash video? Flash & Macs in general have had a sorry relationship - I can't see it being supported. But that's besides the point - the reality is that iPads don't support flash, there is no realistic chance of them supporting flash in the near future.

As one of those who 'nagged' about a downloadable version, I have to congratulate you on responding to feedback so quickly. I look forward to subscribing. I would, however, second the concerns about not being able to download (or have the option to download later) the video. And I'm not too keen on using Flash as a video format, given the current HTML5/Flash war. Personally, I think I'm more interested in the magazine than the video, but I'm saying that without having seen the video content. If the choice of Acrobat 9 is driven by the desire to embed video, I think that's a bit of a shame. I'm fairly sure I would be converting the downloaded files to whatever PDF format is supported by my shiny new iPad. I don't know what it takes to produce what you produce, so I feel a bit cheeky making these kinds of criticisms. But my ideal would be a downloadable version of the magazine that plays well with my mac (at a minimum) and my iPad (preferable). Whatever format(s) you choose to run with, best of luck with the project.

My first and only SLR is the Olympus E-410, which I bought with the twin zoom kit lenses (14-42 & 40-150). I've since bought the 25mm pancake and the 50mm f2 macro and have been won over to the prime point of view. The pancake in particular gives me the freedom of being able to carry the camera with minimal baggage and fuss and is my general purpose, day to day choice. The 50mm delivers superb IQ and I'm using it more often now that I'm getting used to the 100mm efl look & feel. The result of moving to the primes is that I now use the two kits lenses effectively as a 14mm prime and a 150mm prime - in the sense that I only need them for one focal length each. Typically, I use them for landscapes, and I use the 25/50 for more general purpose photography. And to veer off-topic for a moment, I find having a cheap manual (wireless) flash to hand trumps any concerns about carrying the perfect lens combo. The quick and simple manipulation of the lighting of a scene vastly outstips the benefits I'll see from investing big money into buying higher quality, faster glass. But that's a highly subjective point of view.