I finally got my new iPad this week, and I’m in love.  I ordered the 64GB, wi-fi+3g version…figured I might as well go all the way if I was going to drink the Kool-Aid.  I’ve spent the last 48 hours getting it configured, downloading apps, movies, music, videos, and surfing the net to my heart’s content.  The last bit of content that I had to add was photos.

I had decided that I just want to keep my best work (or at least my favorite work) on the iPad, along with any recent photos of special events or vacations, so I started going back through all the work that I’ve done since the first of the year when I got my new Nikon D5000.  The very first photo shoot that I did was at a local historical park called Saguaro Ranch, back in January of this year.  The park consists of orchards, old farm buildings and houses, a rose garden, lots of chickens and peacocks, and farm equipment scattered around.  I was just learning to use the camera that day, and took a lot of shots, but they were all pretty so-so.  I probably did just about everything wrong that was humanly possible that day–I was shooting at in the harshest sunlight of the day, using the camera’s automatic settings, and it was before I found out anything about HDR.  I was a pure neophyte (not that I’m “experienced” now), and didn’t have a clue about what I was doing…I just knew it was fun.

Since then, I’ve had a lot more experience using my editing software–Photomatix and Paint Shop Pro X3.  As I was going through my old photos tonight to select the ones to go on the iPad, I came across the shots from Saguaro Ranch and decided that I was play around with a few of them to see what I could do with them in Paint Shop Pro.  Here are the results:

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After editing:

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These are all just basic edits in PaintShop Pro X3–adjustments for brightness and contrast, some local tone mapping, level adjustments, and some sharpening.  But what a difference a few little adjustments make, right?

So, after I got sidetracked playing with these images from Saguaro Ranch, I got back to the task at hand and selected the photos to go on my iPad.  The problem with the iPad’s photo sync is that it is folder-based and it doesn’t allow any granularity in individual file selection.  You have to select a folder on your computer, and then that entire folder is copied to your iPad (same with the iPod Touch, by the way).  So in order to get a selection of my best/favorite shots onto my iPad, I had to first copy the files that I wanted into a folder on my hard drive, and then sync up the iPad.

The photos look great on the iPad’s large display.  However, I found that the “child” folders I had used were not supported when the sync took place.  The iPad creates “albums” from your folders, and it only recognizes the “parent” folder as an album, and then it puts all the photos in the “child” folders into the “parent” album (have I confused you yet?).  So the photos are all there, but I don’t like having them all in one album…so I’m probably going to split up my folders again.  I promise you, I WILL figure this out!