What the Apple Tablet Will Mean to Photographers

Apple’s new tablet may be just the ticket for serious photographers. Like all things Apple, it’s cool, well-designed, pretty and yes, expensive if you order the top-of-the-line model, although the entry-level product is very competitively priced and in my opinion, downright affordable.What the Apple Tablet Will Mean to Photographers

But imagine how hot for you the photo buyers will be when you waltz into their offices with the new tablet and ask, “Care to look at my portfolio?”

The portable portfolio will get an amazing jump-start because of the new tablet, and all the competition that follows it.

And there are more possible practical uses of the tablet. For some, it may be all the laptop they need. Photographers might be able to use the tablet as a portable field monitor for stills or video. Imaging shooting tethered to a tablet!

If all the new Apple tablet did was offer us a cool new way to display our portfolios, I’d be happy. But there’s something much more important to talk about here.

The tablet will save the newspaper, magazine and book publishing businesses. All of these industries have been having tough times. Lots of newspapers and magazines have folded. So have several book publishing houses. One big reason is that printing presses, paper and postage stamps are all more expensive than ever. And the electronic delivery systems are preferred by at least one major segment of the population – young people.

With new outlets for photography that will flow from the movement away from print to things like tablets, photographers will start to see more jobs and it’s possible that at the very least, the blood letting we’ve seen in some news rooms and other places where photo journalists used to be employed will stop.

These are early days yet. We need to wait and see how the device actually works in the real world. There will no doubt be many future iterations of this product. But I am betting that this leads to good news for photographers.