Taking photos

Hi.

Cards are getting cheaper by the day so it is worth considering an extra card just as you have purchased an extra battery. The bigger the better!

I would also back up your cards. If you carry a PC and card reader then back up the card to the PC and to a CD. Photo shops will also do a backup from card to CD.

Cheers

Anne-Marie,

I do tend to take a lot of photos and the way I manage the storage of the photos is to down load them to the lap top. That frees up the card to take another 1200 photos.

Like you I have an inverter that will keep the batteries charged in the camera as well as the lap top.

When I get to a stop for more than a day or if I have a bit of time I would then check the photos on the lap top, delete the bad ones and even burn them to disc.

So far I have not lost any photos and it is a lot better to view the photos on a bigger lap top screen.

Wayne

Anne-Marie

Seeing as I have just arisen from my afternoon Nananap, I shall respond...lol No doubt you will get a variety of opinions.

I have a 8mp Samsung el cheapo and Judith has a 4mp Sony Cybershot. We both run 2GB cards and a spare 4GB card. We carry 2 sets of rechargeable batteries and 2 x ac/dc Chargers.

We take Happy Snaps of our adventures and we are not so worried about extreme quality of the shots. I download all the photos to my Netbook Mini laptop every night, make copies onto a\the spare SD Card and then clear the operating SD's.

On our 3 month trek this year we will probably take around 5000 photos. All photos downloaded to the Netbook are put into folders and sub folders.


Cheers

Unless you have a laptop that can be recharged by your inverter, your cheapest option is to buy another high speed memory card or three. You will see much that will give you an itchy shutter finger, so its best to avoid disappointment by having surplus memory on hand.

Is there a reason why you are only allowing 2 - 3 weeks for your trip? What route are you taking, as there are a few options that take in the red centre?

Cheers,

Val

Hi Anne-Marie,

Get a couple of extra 4GB cards or one 16GB or 32GB.

We use a 16GB in the Sony A100 and on 10mp fine jpeg it stores 3800 photos.

Sony A700 raw mode the 32GB cards store 1650 photos.

Last time we were away for 5 weeks took 2500 photos on the A100 only so we usually plan on 500 photos a week when travelling but ours are both reference for artwork and high quality for prints.

As others have said download them to your laptop when ever you get a chance, quickest way is to get a card reader not via usb from the camera.

Cheers
Ross & Belinda

Hi AnneMarie,
we use SD cards (several - as they are relatively cheap), copy the photo's to the laptop, but don't delete from the card. We just use the next card once one is full. We do that so, (1) there is less opportunity for error (2) we still have a backup if the laptop happens to die for some reason (as it did on one occasion). Then as and when we feel like it, we burn a CD.

Enjoy the trip.

Meant to add get one of these chargers:

Sony car charger

Then you don't have to worry about the inverter.

You can also get car power supplies for most laptops as well.

Cheers
Ross & Belinda

Hi AM

It costs a lot to get to the places, so i am paranoid about not losing my photos. Once i had my home computer and my laptop die on me in a short space of time, and although i back up frequently, i lost a lot of data (not many photos as i was not travelling at the time).

I travel with a laptop, and download the photos every few nights. They are then backed up onto a portable hard drive. I do not blank the memory cards until i have backed up to DVD or CD as well. When i do this, i make an extra DVD and post it home.

When we went to Tasmania, there was a problem with my laptop which did not get fixed in time. I have a folder of memory cards in my camera case, and would visit public internet access to download and burn to at least two different CDs before blanking the card.

I always take photos in maximum resolution. My memory cards are 2 GB at the largest - most are smaller. If a card misbehaves on you, there is less lost. Fortunately when we had trouble with the 2 GB card, my daughter back home was able to retrieve the photos.

The beauty of digital photography is that it costs nothing to take hundreds of photos. The culling can come later.


Motherhen

G'day Anne-Marie. I use a 4GB card in sony vid and 4gb in my canon. I download each night to laptop and to Flash drives. A couple of years ago I lost my photos of xmas with the grand kids and I said it would not happen again. On my PC I save all photos on 3 hard drives and 2 flash drives. I say you can't have too many back ups.
When I return home from a trip I transfer all photos from laptop to PC and all drives. It only takes an extra few seconds to do this and you know you many copies of your data.

I use a laptop and ext hard drive.

i try not to get too may photos on the card. if you get back from your trip with a card full you may have a bit of trouble remembering where they came from (although all pics are dated)
if you create folders as you go and empty the card it will make things easier on you when you get back with each stage of your trip easily pulled out for show and tell

Hi AnneMarie,

Without meaning to sound too negative, excuse the play on words, be aware that there are some people and/or communities that require a payment of a "Fee" before any 'images' may be made of people or places of significance.
Permission should be sought prior to bringing out the camera in any area where this may be an issue.

Disco.

Hi Anne-Marie,

We bought a refurbished Dell laptop off e-bay ($360) and a 12volt power supply to suit same ($20) as a platform to down load pictures from the camera on our last trip. We were able to view the images on a larger screen and delete those that were not up to (my wife's) high standard and burn them onto disc if the storage was under threat of being exceeded, camera used is an Olympus E-300 digital SLR and, I have no idea how many megapixa thingies it shoots at, but it takes BIG pics. Also used the computer with wireless internet for communications, e-mails etc and plan on doing lots more trips with this setup, hence spending the extra initially.

Enjoy your trip, yep ....... I'm jealous.

Cheers,
Wayne & Sally.

Hi AM

I am even more paranoid than Motherhen. I download the photos from the camera card to an external hard disk drive. I then back those photos up to a second external hard disk drive. I don't erase the photos from the original camera card until I am convinced that both copies made to the external drives are intact.

I do this because I do not wish to clog up the hard disk inside my laptop with photos and because large capacity external drives are so cheap these days.

You can get external drives that need nothing more than a USB connection (no 240Volt power required) but these are usually around 100 Gigabytes in capacity. Larger drives usually have a requirement for 240 Volts and may or may not run from a modified sine wave inverter. (They will run perfectly from a true sine wave inverter.)

A 100 Gb drive will store many thousands of hi res photos.

I no longer back up to optical disks (CD or DVD) as these are relatively low capacity, are not all that reliable (it only takes one scratch and the photos are gone), are clumsy to store, don't like heat much and definitely shouldn't be left in strong light for too long. Additionally, burning disks uses quite a bit of your laptop's power and if you are rationing power this could be an issue.

Even though several of the previous posts emphasise taking lots of photos and sort them out later, try to make every photo a winner. This will improve your technique as well as making the job of sorting the photos out a lot simpler later on.

Good luck with your trip and may the weather, just for once, not be rainy at Mt Warning so that you can climb the bugger. The last three times I've been there it has been pouring.

Cheers

Russ