Now that Lightroom has been on the market for almost a year, I find myself taking it for granted. My digital workflow has been solidly established with Lightroom as the centerpiece. And with the addition of a new zippy Apple MacPro tower Lightroom hums along nicely without any real hiccups. Sure there are a few things that would be nice to see in Lightroom but as it is I have very few complaints.

In fact, after doing some thinking about my workflow overall, the most serious bottleneck seems to be the download process of getting images off the compact flash cards and onto the computer. Once the images are on the computer, or rather on the hard drives where the images will live, Lightroom seems to be incredibly fast at importing those images. From that point on it comes down to how fast can I edit and process the raw images - which needs a certain amount of time for quality purposes. Hence, that part of the workflow isn't going to get much faster than it already is.

So how do we transfer images faster to avoid the downloading bottleneck? I am sure there are some serious minds working on this at Lexar and SanDisk as I write this. Perhaps the answer is wireless transfers so we just avoid the whole memory card issues altogether but to me that seems ripe with hazzards. One option that I haven't seen yet is a memory card reader with a SATA connection - this would make download speeds radically faster than with a Firewire 400 or 800 connection if the cards could handle that much throughput. The "if" is the important word in that last sentence.

In the end, my hope is that we can stop obsessing about this topic now called "workflow" and just get back to creating images. I remember the film days where the workflow was taken care of for us - unless you were compositing film images in photoshop. Anybody else remember those days? It was all about taking photos - now, don't get me wrong - photography is still about creating images but with the digital revolution we've gotten sidetracked with learning how all this new gear works. It is great for the equipment manufacturers - they are making a fortune as they should for all of their hard work and incredible inventions. But thankfully, the technology has started to level off to some degree and sure - the gear will get even better, I have no doubt - but for the most part we are over the hump and can now get back to concentrating on creating images again. At least this is how I feel.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark