Last week, I completed two photo assignments in New York City--a portrait session and a fashion shoot. Things went well except for one itsy-bitsy thing: I didn't have Photoshop.

In that whirlwind of a week, out of all the weeks in a year, it would be that one week when I didn't have Photoshop. I lost my Photoshop because my main laptop's hard drive decided to die, and then my desktop's video card gave up on me at about the same time. And to make matters worse, I had unpredictable Internet connection. All my wonderful, powerful toys were broken. They were useless. I felt the cuffs clamping both my hands. And as you can imagine, I was pushed to the wall.

All I had was my backup machine. My old, trusty PowerBook. After all these years, it was still somehow working. It had a freshly updated OS, and the latest version of Aperture. And oh, thankfully, I also had a Western Digital external hard drive which I bought recently at B&H.

For years, I became gradually and totally dependent on Photoshop. I couldn't do without it. I was addicted. And I was used to running it on the latest and the greatest hardware. How will I ever manage to prepare images and submit them to clients without it? Photoshop had been an integral part of my post-production workflow. It was one of the cornerstones of my digital photographic life. Half of the magic that is in my photographs is produced in post-production, with the power of Photoshop. Without it, I felt exposed to the unforgiving cold of winter with nothing but a flimsy cotton shirt on. I felt a deep chill and in a rising panic. I froze.

On the first day of my location shoot in Central Park last week, as I was getting ready, nearby was another young photographer, taking portraits of two subjects. Every once in a while, whenever he showed the shots from the back of his camera to his curious subjects, after a couple or so quick clicks, he'd casually say: "I'll take care of that in Photoshop ... We will make it disappear in Photoshop ... I'll cure it in Photoshop." How's that for motivation? I braced myself.

All I can do at that point, was to really to focus on my photography, and to do my best. Working with such a handicap, as I shot my assignments, I noticed that I tended to be more deliberate, more reflective, and more conscientious; as deliberate, as reflective, and as conscientious as I used to be whenever I shoot with film. What surprised me, as I absorbed the experience, I actually enjoyed the photo shoots more. I didn't really slow down; I was more involved in the creative process. I shifted my way of creating images into a shoot-to-print mode, instead of the capture-and-correct mode. I know I was forced to do it right the first time, to eliminate fixing it in Photoshop later. I felt I was becoming more of a photographer again, the way I used to be, than merely a digital technician. For me, it turned out to be a great experience. In a sense, I was just being a real photographer.

I have to deliver, I kept saying to myself. That became my mantra. And so, with nothing but my PowerBook, my Aperture, and my Western Digital external disk, I went to work. In Aperture, I started selecting and then editing. I had no idea what results to expect. I was hoping for the best, but I was prepared to accept the worst. I experienced the breadth and depth of uncertainty.

It was the same feeling I felt when I recently shot a night scene for an editorial fashion layout. I was trying to be brave, shooting it with nothing but a weak light from a street lamp to illuminate the subject against Manhattan's darkening skyline, at ISO 1600 with my D2Xs, and no tripod. One of my assistants, a young Cantonese girl, gasped at what I was trying to do. She didn't say anything, but for someone like her who was using a Field Notes branded notebook to record a few of the details of the pictorial as I was dictating it, I know she knew what was going on. Seeing her disbelieving facial reaction, I couldn't do anything at that point but distract her. I told tell her that the best photographers in the world can hand-hold a camera and still get a razor-sharp image at 1/8th of a second. I was still shooting at a somewhat safe, comfortable margin of 1/40th of a second with a very short, wide lens. I'm not sure she believed me. I was actually trying to convince myself that I can be done. Luckily, there were a number of good images to choose from, and one final image turned out to be very, very usable for a spread. (The lesson I learned from this experience? Buy a lightweight but sturdy tripod at B&H.)

And so, after each of the two pictorials last week, I processed the RAW files in Aperture alone. It was scary at first, but really, it wasn't that bad. I harvested a good number of "best" images from the lot, and worked on it. After spending an average of 4 to 6 hours in post-production for each shoot, I felt confident enough that I have something that's more than decent to give to the clients.

This somewhat reaffirmed my recent experience of shooting a couple of sunsets (on two separate occasions) with my iPhone camera, from the Hudson River Park. I chose a shot from each pictorial from the quick succession of images I managed to capture, and directly uploaded it to my Flickr account. Many who have seen the iPhone images were surprised that it didn't go through Photoshop.

Of course, I'm not about to recommend to anyone to completely do away with Photoshop, but from this experience, when something needs to be done, it can be done even with Aperture alone. I know I'd be foolish to say that I don't need it, knowing that I can do it with just Aperture, I'm not in a hurry to get an old version of Photoshop for my PowerBook. Really, if you have Aperture, and perhaps for some photographers, it's not a bad thing to do without it.

[Note: Photo in screenshot by Dominique James of The Studio and The Playground. Model: Michael Seifert. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.]