There are many great ways to set up your workflow - I found one that works for me after a lot of trial and error. The goal of this page is not to endorse a particular platform (Mac vs. PC) or a camera manufacturer (Olympus vs. Canon or Nikon). Nor is it a "look-how-much-money-I-have-to-spend-on-toys" kind of page. The goal is to share the few tricks that I learned with others, and to explain my choices. Here we go:

Camera - Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and Olympus all make great DSLRs. To my taste, Olympus has the best color without the need to post-process the pictures. Its biggest weakness is noise at ISO 800 and up, but it is compensated by the "Oly color" and the great value for money on the two lenses, that are superior to Canon and Nikon kit offerings in the same price range ($700). The Nikon D80 that we have at work has a superior AF system, better viewfinder, more buttons (=less need to use menus), better high ISO - but these advantages are not big enough to justfiy a very significant difference in price.

Computer - I found the Mac OS and Apple hardware to work extremely well for me. I haven't had a single major hardware or software issue in 5+ years. This doesn't mean that you can't have a problem-free PC for that period of time. As they say, you pays your money and you takes you choice. The iMac at work runs PowerPC software under Rosetta (my top use application is Dreamweaver 8) and Photoshop CS2 under Parallels, and it does it very well and very fast - but not without an occasional glitch or two, which is to be expected with emulations.

Tablet -The little Wacom at home was purchased for three different reasons: 1) to be able to draw custom graphs for teaching online statistics; 2) to get a mouse to work with the Powerbook; 3) to get Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, that supports Adobe Camer Raw plugin, allowing to process RAW photo files. You get all three (tablet, mouse and software) for $80 - less than what you would pay for a standalone copy of Elements. The monster Intuos at work spends most of its time turned off - in general, a tablet's greatest advantage is the ability to do artistic work. Since I hardly do any of that, I get by just fine with only a mouse.

Photoshop - the version I have at home is two generations old now (and about to be three generations old once CS3 is out), but since I only use about 1% of its functionality, it is more than enough for me. I could get by with just using Elements, but its overly user-friendly GUI (a la Microsoft paperclip office assistant) is hardly attractive. The CS2 version at work is running in emulation mode under Parallels Desktop - and for the simple tasks that I feed it, the performance on the 2GHz iMac Core Duo is very good.

File browser - Graphic Connverter came bundled with the Powerbook. It is excellent for managing digital photos and for batch-processing them (for example, adding a watermark with your contact info before you share your images). It doesn't create a ton of service files like iPhoto, and leaves the user in full control of the photo library. At work I use Aperture - it indeed works very nicely with both RAW and compressed formats. In tandem with Photoshop, it is a good all around solution for managing and post processing images. My favorite feature is the crisp sharp JPEGs that it produces for web galleries (that can be exported to any site, not just to .mac). The least favorite is the speed - even on the dual core iMac it often takes a few seconds to load an image preview full screen or inside the loupe tool.

Hosting - For 4 years, I had a domain name registration with Yahoo! and forwarded the traffic to the OU student server for file storage. I also used a .mac account for image galleries. The whole package cost $140 a year - ridiculous for the level of service you get. In August 2006, I cancelled my old account and started one with icdsoft.com (about $60 a year). Now I have full control over my domain, don't have to worry about violating university regulations, have much more space, and most importantly can run dynamic web content on the site. I chose PHP / MySQL for dynamic content because it is free and open source. There are other options that cost money (like ASP or Flash) or are a lot more difficult to learn (like Perl).

Server-side software - I use Pixelpost to run my photo blog, Serendipity to run the dissertation blog, Moodle for course management, Phorum for discussion boards, and XOOPS for a content management system. All of these are open-source, free PHP-based packages. Each one is fully customizable (templates, themes, modules, addons, etc) and runs on a separate MySQL database. For each of these solutions, there are other options; I chose Pixelpost because most photoblogs I like use it; XOOPS, Moodle, and Serendipity because other options didn't give me the ease-of-use (=minimum need to re-write PHP code) that I wanted; and Phorum because it runs the board that I used to like a lot (until it got bad). The only little bit of code that I had to write was to hide the database calls in a private directory. Most of these took less than an hour to setup.

Counter - after a lot of looking around, I found a great unobtrusive counter at statcounter.com. Mine is set up to be visible only on the front page, but it registers hits on all other pages as well. The look is customizable so it can be integrated seamlessly into the style of your site. The counter provides detailed statistics about your visitors (only the last 100 in the free version, perfect for a low traffic site like this one).

Backup software - I have tried several backup utilities (such as Dantz Retrospect that came with the OWC hard drive and the free Apple Backup) but stayed with Silverkeeper. It is free, reliable and lean. Moreover, it can be used to create bootable clones of your system on an external hard drive, which means you could connect your hard drive to any Mac capable of running OS X and have your system with all the applications running on it. I use it both at home and at work.

Backup harware - I used to have two separate external Firewire hard drives at home. Each came with its own externatl power supply, and a whole mess of cords. Now I have a 4-bay Firewire 800 box with two 500Gb drives in it. Plenty of storage and plenty of room for expansion. One power cord. One Firewire cable. No external power supply. At work, I opted for the miniStack to have an all-in-one backup / USB hub solution. With an iMac, going around to the back to plug in a USB device is not always convenient. And there is always a risk of yanking out another connection (like the flimsy USB/Ethernet adapter) or simply not having enough ports. The miniStack solves both problems at a very reasonable price.