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Great New Books To Improve The Mind and Body

by RR Jr on March 9, 2011

I’m always on the look out for new books to read, whether photography related or otherwise. They provide inspiration, fresh perspectives, and can spark so many new ideas for work or personal life. I do have a “book” habit, but luckily there are only good side effects (if you discount my diminishing bank account!)

Here are a few of my favorites from the past few months:

Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing - A real eye opener to the profound health benefits of a daily yoga practice, written by Timothy McCall, MD. While I have known about the physical and mental benefits of yoga since I started my practice, this book really explores the medical side, listing over 20 common ailments and how yoga cane help improve, and sometimes cure these issues. Everything from IBS to cancer and arthritis is covered, and I was really amazed at the depth of the research and information this book has to offer. Want a powerful quote?

“I am a physician, a board-certified specialist in internal medicine, who came to yoga in middle age and found it-and continues to find it-incredibly challenging. But in this challenge, I have seen steady growth in what I can do and how good I feel. My bodu has changed in ways I wouldn’t have believed possible, as has my mental state.”

I hope that caught your attention, especially because this is a doctor from the west. If you have ever thought about trying yoga, and especially if you have any health or medical issues, I can’t recommend this book enough. The accompanying website lists even more medical conditions that yoga can help improve.

Mac at Work – If you use a Mac for your business or work related activities, this book is a must read. I’ve been using Macs for over 20 years, and while I thought the material would be old news to me, there were many valuable things I learned. Covering everything from useful applications, to backup strategies and hardware choices, this is a great resource for all Mac users if you really want to get the most out of your system.

The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression – while I have read many, many how-to photography books, there is always something to be learned from a different approach of perspective, and this book really provides both in abundance. This is a revised edition of the book that was originally released in 1994, and the photographs that accompany the text are beautiful and inspiring. I re-read the chapter on composition alone several times just to digest the ideas and concepts presented, and many of them will find their way into my workshops and hopefully my own work as well.

“A musical note is meaningless unless combined with others. Rhythms, harmonies, timbres, and other aspects of musical composition must be added before a musical work appears. The same is true of photography. A line, by itself, is not a photograph, nor is a texture. Balance or imbalance implies a relationship between at least two elements. Photography flowers when a relationship exist, when they are made evident either subtly or boldly.” -Bruce Barnbaum

Great stuff for sure, and rang so true for me as a musician and photographer. This is perhaps what I like most about the book- it combines both the technical aspects of the photography with the philosophical and the creative. I’ll keep this book close by for a long while!

As a side note, while I purchased the first two book for the Kindle (and iPad) the Art of Photography is one of those books which needs to be experienced in a physical book form. The size and photos need the printed page, and this is a good example of where a “book” will never become obsolete, IMHO.

Read any good books lately and care to recommend? Please let me know, I’m always looking!

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Home > Beyond the Lens > mac

A New Mac Pro Arrives At Last

by RR Jr on January 23, 2010

After six years of almost daily use as my dedicated photography workstation, I decided it was time to upgrade my trusty and dependable Apple Power Mac G5. It’s been a workhorse for everything I do in my studio, from photo and video editing, to printing and graphic design. But it has been showing its age, especially given that Apple now uses Intel processors, while this model is based on the past generation IBM power pc chip. More and more applications and plugins are now only available for Intel, and that includes the upcoming version of Photoshop and Lightroom 3. It was also becoming very sluggish, probably due to the increased processing power demanded by the latest versions of the applications I use, as well as my growing library of RAW and large 16bit Photoshop files generated by my Canon 1DS mk III. I think I got my money’s worth after 6+ years!

Apple’s latest offerings are all very attractive, especially the new 27″ iMac’s which were very tempting. However, in the end, I opted for a Mac Pro Quad-Core 2.66GHz tower with 10GB RAM. I decided to go this route for a few reasons. First, I have a an NEC MultiSync 2690W 26″ monitor, which I love for its color accuracy and beautiful display quality. Second, I don’t buy computers very often, so expandability is very important to me, whether that may be adding additional video cards, memory, or eSATA cards for increased storage and speed in the future. Also, I love that the Mac Pro’s have 4 internal drive bays, which allowed me to install several drives I already had that were in external firewire cases. This means they’ll perform better since the internal connection is faster than firewire, and I get rid of extra cables, power adapters, and free up the external ports. I also have the option of creating internal RAID’s in the future. Finally, the overall speed and performance is hard to beat with any other Apple computer with the exception of the 8-Core Mac Pro (unfortunately out of my budget.)

Upgrading and transferring my data and settings was amazingly simple using Apple’s Migration Assistant. I started the new Mac Pro, and was asked if I wanted to transfer data from another computer. At this point, I started my old Mac holding down the “T” key on the keyboard. This puts the Mac into “firewire” mode which means it just becomes a huge external drive. I connected it using a firewire cable to my new Mac, it recognized it and asked me what I wanted to transfer. I checked off everything (applications, user accounts, network settings), clicked ok, and about 3 hours later, it was done.

When I logged into the new Mac, it was like home sweet home, with everything as I expected it. I did have to upgrade all of my printer drivers to the latest Intel versions, as well as a handful of applications I use regularly. And I was finally able to download and use the latest Lightroom 3 Beta which I had only been able to use on my MacBook Pro laptop until now.

I have four hard drives inside my new Mac Pro configured as follows:

System HD (640GB)- Snow Leopard OS X operating system, all applications, and all my personal and studio data.
Lightroom Library (1 TB)- contains all of my original RAW files
Image Files (750GB)- all processed files from my library; basically everything I output from Lightroom or Photoshop for printing, products, or web use.
Lightroom Library backup (1TB) – a backup of my Lightroom Library hard drive (#2) which gets backed up daily.

In addition, I have a 2-bay Sans Digital external case that I can swap in three more drives for backups of my System HD, Image Files drive, and a 1 TB drive dedicated to video. Finally, I have a separate external hard drive that I backup my Lightroom Library to each week and keep off-site for additional safety.

I’ve also started to use online backup for additional safety of my data files, and really like Jungle Disk for ease of use and long term reliability since it uses Amazon’s S3 storage system.

In my next post, I’ll cover my favorite Mac, web, and iPhone applications and how I use them for personal and professional purposes. Thanks as always for reading, and feel free to leave comments or questions about my setup.

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