Photoshop guru Kelby unpacks his bag
— -- Photoshop guru Scott Kelby, the No. 1 best-selling photography book author for the 6th year in a row, according to Nielsen, traveled extensively again in 2011, giving nearly 30 how-to photo seminars in different cities. We caught up with him on a stop in Los Angeles, where he was teaching at the Convention Center, to find out how much gear a working photographer brings with him while on tour.
While there were the predictable cameras, lenses and lighting kits, even more interesting, once we started talking, was all the stuff he referred to in his beloved $149 Think Tank Airport laptop bag. Like a magician with a never-ending string of flowers, Kelby wowed us by continually reaching in and showing us all the tech goodies he could fit in there.
The complete list:
Computers: A 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro, from which he projects digital photographs during the seminar, and an Apple iPad. The MacBook — which is fueled with software like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Apple's Aperture — runs the seminar, with photos displayed primarily from Photoshop and Lightroom. The iPad is his fun tool, he says. "I rent movies for flights, follow my favorite sports teams with apps, read books and magazines. The MacBook is for work, the iPad is when I want to play."
Photoshop stuff: A Wacom Intous 4-inch drawing tablet and two stylus pens, which he uses for refined Photoshop retouching. "I never go anywhere without it."
Internet. A MiFi card. "When you go to convention centers, what they would charge you for one day of Wi-Fi is what you pay a month for with this." He pays $30 monthly for access.
Storage: A 16 gigabyte flash drive and 750 GB OWC drive, a bootable mirror-backup of his laptop. He keeps the entire seminar on both the flash drive and OWC drive — just in case. "My laptop hard drive crashed in Denver recently, and we ran the entire seminar on the OWC drive without missing a beat."
Mounts: A small tripod with a slot for an iPhone; a stand to hold up the iPhone while he teaches, showcasing the "Presentation Clock" countdown app, which keeps the show running on time.
Ear candy. Bose headphones.
Accessories: A Lexar memory card reader, a Kensington USB light ("so I can see my outline in the dark seminar room"), a pen for signing books, an iPhone car charger, an Apple Compact Flash memory card adapter to import photos to the iPad, 3 AAA batteries for his Bose headphones, two Apple DVI cables to connect the MacBook and iPad to projectors, a white balance card, for color temperture and hand sanitizer (because "I shake hands all day long").
Communication: Twenty business cards.
Old school paper pages. His seminar outlines are printed out for the seminar tours, just in case the batteries fail him on the computers.
"It has a pocket for everything," he says of the Think Tank bag.
He does admit that the bag is "fairly" heavy, so he uses the little slot on the back of the bag, which is designed to let you slide the bag over the handle on your rolling bag, "so you don't actually have to carry it. You can kind of roll it along."
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Friday on Talking Your Tech: A look back at how consumers across the USA lived with technology in 2011.
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