Of course there will be someone out there who has no idea what this device is. Just for you, here is the link to the best explanation of it www.apple.com/ipad by the people who made it. The hype and expectation that seemed to dominate the technology pages of every website, newspaper and blog has finally been replaced by the minute analysis that I mentioned before. Type the word "iPad" into any search engine and you get plenty of hits. As of this morning Google was showing 11.8 million and Yahoo had over 80 million!

The first thing to say is that the iPad is not ready to take over from a laptop for remote editing, captioning and transmission of news photographs. We already have a device that does that very well - the laptop. A lot of fellow photographers were hoping for a cheap and lightweight device to take over from their expensive and heavy laptops. Apple is not in the business of creating niche products. What they have done is to create something that isn't going to directly replace something else. I find myself thinking back to the arrival of my first mobile phone in 1987. It did mean that I could dispense with a pager and it also meant that I could start to forget about how a telephone box worked. The mobile phone was, essentially, something new - something that changed everything.

The jury hasn't even been selected to pass judgement on the iPad but the concept of the tablet running an operating system and applications in the way smart phones do has arrived and that particular genie is never going to be forced back into it's bottle. E-books, e-newspapers and a whole range of other e-stuff is going to be part of our lives later this year, next year or in a few years time and photographers need to wake up and smell the coffee. These devices aren't aimed at us to use as business tools - they are almost certainly the format that a huge percentage of our work will be viewed on. If that doesn't sit comfortably with your world view or your business model you have a huge problem.

What I intend to do is to make myself familiar with tablets and the way that my work will be used on them. This is my new market place and I want to be right there in the market. Before I shot my first pictures for newspapers and magazines I had had my whole life to familiarise myself with the medium. Newspapers were there at my home every day. We subscribed to magazines and had secondhand copies of National Geographic delivered by friends of the family. They were inspiring and they are the reason that I wanted to take pictures. Along came the internet and I started my own website to learn about how things worked on the world wide web simply because knowing how the printing process worked had made me a much better photographer a few years previously.

So my opinion about the iPad is this: I am going to embrace the concept, learn how it works, make judgements about the way that my images will work best on it and try my best to keep up-to-date with the technology as it inevitably develops. If the iPad isn't the answer it has to be the biggest clue that our profession can have been given about where our future lies. I hope that I've made some sense. If I have, great and if you are still wondering can I suggest that you read what Steven F thinks?

© Neil Turner, January 2010