Get a group of photographers together and they will talk about photography. Leave them for ten minutes and they will argue about computers, file formats and software. Twenty minutes later blood may well have been spilled.

I now spend about a third of my working day staring at a screen. I'm on my fifth Apple laptop, but I'm not going to get into the whole Mac versus PC nonsense because these days I am happy using either. I choose Apple because they suit me. It isn't advisable to spend too much time staring at a laptop screen, but it beats racing back to the office to edit pictures when deadlines are a real issue.

My current laptop is a MacBook Pro 15.4" with a 2.33 Ghz Intel processor, 120Gb hard drive and 2Gb or RAM running OS10.5.3. I also have a Mac Mini with identical specification with an Eizo Coloredge 19" monitor and a whole range of external drives and back up systems. Like most computers used by photographers, mine are stuffed full of the right kind of software with the following taking the backbone of the work:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 with Adobe Camera RAW 4.4
• Photo Mechanic 4.5.3.1
• Microsoft Entourage (email, contacts and calendar)
• Panic Transmit (FTP client software)
• Roxio Toast 7 (CD burning)
  
  

Like most editorial photographers, I have to send my images to the picture desk from a variety of remote locations. I try to use Broadband wherever possible and I find that the Apple Airport Extreme card fitted to the MacBooks will sniff out any signal that's available. The proliferation of public access Wifi sites from BT Openzone, T-Mobile and others makes shifting images pretty easy.

For those times when there is no easy access to broadband I have got a Vodafone (Huawei) HSDPA USB modem which uses mobile phone technology to connect to the internet. There are three levels of signal: The best is the HSDPA or "3G Broadband" as Vodafone call it. This gives average upload speeds in excess of 256 kbps and the coverage is getting better every day. If that isn't available it defaults to 3G with upload speeds of about 80 kbps in the real world. Finally there is GPRS which has almost universal coverage in the parts of the UK where work and has speeds of around 48 kbps in the real world.

My bags are stuffed full of all sorts of gadgets and goodies. I have a couple of "point and shoot" cameras (Canon G2 and G6), an HP iPaq PDA loaded with the latest version of Pocket Phojo so that I can edit and transmit images from it. I have Tom Tom Navigator satellite navigation software on both the iPaq and My Nokia N70 mobile phone and I have the adapter to use my iPod as a photo storage device in a real emergency.

My Mac on my desk has lots of other software too:

• Dreamweaver (building web sites)
• Flash (still learning this, but watch this space)
• Soundslides (multimedia slideshows)
• Final Cut Express (video editing, still learning this too)