This first series of photos from Costa Rica will consist of iPhone shots because I can process them the fastest. In later posts of my full-size camera shots, some similar images may occur.

I found as we hiked and boated around Costa Rica that many times when you had your long lens on a strap, photo ops would occur. These shots are not the quality you can usually achieve with a full-size camera, but many times they are the only chance you will get. As a group, we became very adapt at even passing iPhones when the photo op was on the wrong side of a boat, zodiac or even some trails.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

The most important thing you want for photography is at least 16GB of Unified Memory. Either of these choices checks that box. The next thing you want is to be sure you get the most storage you can afford ABOVE 512GB. If it were my choice, for photography, I'd get the first option with at least 1TB Storage. I'd rather have more storage than an M3 Max. Other than giving you extra memory, the M3 Max option provides marginal performance gains for photo processing. Now, if you do a lot of video editing, the Max is the better choice. Those extra graphics cores and performance cores really help for video.

The reason you want a good amount of storage is that the operating system uses storage as virtual memory when you open so many applications that you run out of main memory. You will want at least a third of your drive empty at all times, to accommodate virtual memory demands.

Frankly, there is no reason to use Photoshop Elements if you are paying $10/month for Lightroom, Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and Bridge. I ignore Lightroom and Bridge. I use only the latest versions of Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. Lightroom Classic is the hub, and Photoshop is one spoke of the rest of my workflow. All my images go through Lightroom Classic and come back to Lightroom Classic if they go out to another application.

I'm running a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 16GB Unified Memory and 1TB SSD storage. It is plenty snappy for 98% of what I do. Neural Filters in Photoshop do take a bit of time to process, but I haven't waited longer than half a minute on anything. Rendering files from Lightroom to disc is so fast that I was able to quit drinking too much coffee! The only thing that slows this thing down is exporting long-form 4K video from Final Cut Pro.

If you really want some thorough test videos, head on over to YouTube and the MaxTech channel and watch all their reviews of various configurations of the M3 MacBooks.

The one thing you want to be sure to do is think ahead to three or five years from now. Be sure you get the memory and storage options you will need then! The new Macs CANNOT be upgraded later. Memory is soldered onto the System on a Chip, and storage modules are soldered to the motherboard.

Apple Silicon Macs are a huge leap forward in performance from Intel Macs. The biggest differences are increased speed, far less power consumption, and less fan noise. The M1 and M2 MacBook Airs don't even HAVE fans. Mine barely got warm once, rendering a 45-minute video.