Jo – www.centmagazine.co.uk
I spent last night hanging out in the Minnie Weisz Gallery in London’s Kings Cross celebrating our Spring Summer Issue, Showing Stories, Telling Pictures. We held a little event at our guest editor’s gallery space where we showed off the new issue’s photography offset with past illustration commissions. An intimate celebration with friends and contributors! Now why am I telling you all this? Because what was the one thing I carried around with me all night, besides some wonderful Spanish wine? My Asus Eee Pad of course! And boy did it come in use! I think it has become a natural extension to my hands now too.
So firstly I did all the pre-event photos on it. We had several different drinks options for the night, and part and parcel of working with a drinks sponsor is to show them lovely images of their produce in situ. So before the night got into full swing, I waltzed around the gallery snapping away with the Eee Pad Camera function. One of the things I really love about taking photos on this is that it has a large screen. Because for so long we have been talking pictures on our mobile phones or digital cameras, where the screen is only a few centimeters wide, but the Eee Pad feels so very luxurious to take images on a wide flat screen that’s over 20 centimeters wide…brilliant.
The Eee Pad is so light and easy to hold in my hand I was able to chat with folk and snap along the way, which meant I got the best action shots of the night, and the fun little smiley images of our friends and contributors joining in the fun.
The highlight of the night however was when the Jeremy Reed, performed a live poetry reading. I caught this on the Eee Pad just standing behind him while he acted out his poetry and threw purple glitter on all the guests. Of course now I was in film mode and again because of the large screen I didn’t have the horrid moment of missing the action only getting to watch it after. We’ve all wanted to capture moments on film but only to experience the event through a camera/computer screen after it has happened. The screen is big enough so you can film and enjoy the experience, so I didn’t get to miss out at all.
My last part of the job was to get the images to everyone the next morning. Now that may sound easy but when you have this many images that you need to get round to a whole realm of folk it can take a long time. A really simple way that works best with the Eee Pad is to use the Dropbox App that I downloaded. It saves me so much time. There’s so much choice when it comes to transporting files to and from the Eee Pad, I can bluetooth, email, use Asus’ own web-storage but the Dropbox App for me is the easiest and the most time efficient.
In next month’s review I will reveal how I’ve been using the Eee Pad as a mini computer with the keyboard.
All images taken using the ASUS Eee Pad Camera, Images and Text by Jo Phillips.
Guardian