storing pictures on a 5 week trip

thepixies · May 3, 2006

Hi,

I'm going on a 5 week trip around the world. and would love to take some photos with my new canon 350d. but at the moment i have only one '1 gig sandisk 11 cf card'. which will not be enough for 5 weeks (how many raw photos fit on a 1 gig card?)

also i'm still deciding to shoot raw or jpeg...or a bit of both, any ideas?

but what should i do in terms of storing all my photos?

Peanuts · May 4, 2006

Welcome to TPF, don't believe I have seen you around.

Firstly, have a wonderful trip and definitely take lots of pictures, when you get home, and start flipping through them all, it helps so much in remembering all your experiences and you won't regret lugging the extra 'baggage' around.

For five weeks, I would probably recommend storing your pictures on some sort of hard drive, whether it be on a laptop or portable hard-drive (which comes up in this conversation: http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43834) A 1GB card will (if I recall correctly) hold around 200 RAWS (Someone correct me if I am wrong, I haven't picked up my camera for a good week and can't recall). The best way to tell is just to pop it in and see what the camera guesses.

For shooting in RAW or JPEG, my advice is to shoot in whatever you are most comfortable with. For a recent two week trip(A total of 8GB of RAW files) I shot primarily in RAW which in all honesty, helped for me to obtain many of the images as I needed a quicker shutter speed and didn't want to open up the aperture anymore, and therefore underexposed about 1/3 so I could bump it back up when processing. For just quick snaps of people on the trip, I usually shot in Jpeg to save space and editing time.

Hope this helped some.

Rob · May 4, 2006

Personally, I shoot JPG, so I'd vote for shooting in JPG only. If your budget permits, pick up a couple of extra cards.

Rob

Amnesia · May 4, 2006

For around £75 you can buy an external HDD (battery powered) which will allow you to plug your card into it, and download all your photos. So.. if on this 5 week trip, you fill your card, you just download it to the external HDD (some come with displays, but you will only need a basic one) then format your card, and you can do this a further 79 times!)

Try here - http://www.allcam.biz/products/camera_storage.html

thepixies · May 4, 2006

that sounds like a really good idea.

but dont you get nervous that something has gone wrong with the external harddrive and your pictures were not safed..or something. does it tell you how many photos are on it.

but still, itd be perfect for what i want

benhasajeep · May 4, 2006

As long as you are not moving around with the drive on and running it should be pretty safe. Other than running over it or having it near a big magnet should not be a problem. You will still probably want a second card.

If you fill your only card. Then you will have to stop what your doing. Download it, format it or at least delete the pics off of it. And then can start shooting again. A second card will allow you to do this later in your room. It will take several minutes to download the card which may or may not be a problem.

I personally carry 2 4gb cards for my 20D, 2 2gb cards for my D50, and have 2 1 gb cards for a Nikon 8700 that my fiance' likes to use. I have not purchased an external drive. I take a laptop just about everywhere I go (useually for work). But I have a 4 week honeymoon / vacation comming up and we plan on taking alot of pictures. And the laptop will be along. But I still would like to have an external drive.

bobaab · May 6, 2006

I also asked about this a couple weeks ago. Im gonna be in Europe for 7 weeks, so I was also thinking about storage. I went with something called an X-Drive. It is basically a harddrive with memory card slots and lets you copy from the memory card to the harddrive.

It holds 30gb of data (it'll copy anything on the memory card), reads many different kinds of memory cards, small size (size of a PDA), and was only about $120 from eBay.

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47466&highlight=digital+partner

Here's an eBay auction of it for more info:
http://cgi.ebay.com/30GB-Data-Bank-...616070918QQcategoryZ15215QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

and here's a review of it which was great info for me:
http://www.aguntherphotography.com/reviews/digital_partner_image_tank.html