I recently purchased the iPhone 7 Plus and today installed the beta for the 10.1 iOS software.  This beta gives you access to the forthcoming feature of the camera app called Portrait Mode.  As explained in the September 2016 Apple Keynote, the dual cameras on the new iPhone are used at the same time, the wide angle capturing the background and the telephoto capturing the subject and through software are combined into one image that looks like a DSLR with a wide aperture lens took the image.

I must say, I’m fairly impressed, especially with the camera doing this in real time, even as you are taking the photo it’s showing you what it’s going to look like.

Here’s a link to some sample images I took today.  These aren’t fancy awesome photos, I was just testing this depth of field feature.  What’s interesting is Apple saves the image twice in your photo library, once as the normal photo and once with this depth of field applied.

I was recently contacted by the USB Memory Direct company about trying some samples of their flash drives.  After choosing from one of their many styles available, and working with them on my logo, I was very quickly (11 days from ordering) greeted by a package of these pens at my door.

I decided to go with pens as I could load images for clients or a slideshow for future clients on the drive, and then they could use this for more than just a usb stick.

I found the pens to be of high quality.  I was very pleased with the logo and website printing on the sides and the overall feel of the pens was excellent.

The pens were individually wrapped in plastic which will help protect them in shipping and storage.

I felt the logo was very nicely printed on the pen.

The model I chose reveals the USB port by unscrewing the pen.  This came to me in a 8GB model which will work great for delivering the average amount of images from a typical photoshoot.  I would definitely need a larger type to deliver something like a wedding.  They offer these in up to 64 GB sizes and that size would work great for any possible delivery I’d need to do typically.

I did some testing with the pen and noted that the interface was USB 2.0.  That would be adequate for the typical usage.  Even better would be to have it be a USB 3.0.  Most computers these days have a USB 3.0 and having the faster interface would make this more useful.

In my testing, the write speed was perfectly adequate for the usage I would give these pens.

I wrote a 192 MB file to the stick in 30 seconds.

I then wrote a 440 MB file to the stick in 1 minute and 7 seconds.

Read speeds were also fine, it took 29.4 seconds to read that 440 MB file back to the SSD on my macbook pro.  That kind of read speed gives me confidence that I’ll be able to share video files with clients and they will be able to watch them directly from the stick with out an issue.

This is also a ball point pen and I thought it wrote very nicely.  Overall, I’m quite happy with these USB pens and would recommend them to you.  If you have a photoshoot with me soon, you might end up getting your photos delivered to you on one of these!