Keeping Your Images Safe When Travelling

August 27, 2010

One of the hardest things to deal with in the digital age is what to do with your images when you are on the road for a long time. You have saved your vacation time, your hard earned money and arranged a 4 week trip to – oh, I don’t know, let us say India.

So for 4 weeks your normal life will be suspended as you find yourself moving through someone else’s normality. A barrage of smells, sounds, sights and experiences will assault your every sense, rendering you almost speechless at times with amazement, concern, wonder and delight. As a photographer, you cannot help but record as much of this as you can in your own unique way.

Shooting JPEG will of course increase your storage – a Nikon D3 will store over 5,800 basic JPEGs on a 16Gb Compact Flash Card, but if you shoot JPEG you are allowing the camera to decide what is important and to delete forever much of the original information the sensor captures. Shooting RAW is the best option but it does take much more space – that same 16Gb card will only hold 640 RAW files on a D3.

If you need a new 16Gb card every 2 or 3 days, you would need the equivalent of 240Gb of storage for a 30 day trip. You would also need to allow some extra capacity ‘just in case’ and so perhaps 300Gb is more sensible. If you shoot video as well you may need to double that!

300Gb is far larger than most laptops have on board and 600Gb is not even available. So taking your laptop will help with editing, viewing, culling and other tasks like email or note taking, but certainly won’t solve your storage requirements.

My personal solution is to pack an Adata Sport A10 external HDD that connects to my Mac Book Pro via USB (Firewire would be faster but is not an option, sadly). I use the 640Gb version although a 500 and a 320 are available. The Adata Sport is a US Mil Spec tested rugged drive that has passed transit drop tests, liquid splashing tests and so on. It is covered with soft rubber which also makes handling it a non-slip operation.

It has – theoretically – been tested to survive full immersion for 30 minutes, but I don’t really advise putting that to the test on the road deliberately! At least you know the odd splatter of rain, dust or rough baggage handling probably won’t upset it though.

I also take a stack of blank DVD’s as well and burn back up copies when in a quiet hotel room or guest house – or, once, tent in the desert! CD’s are no use – you must use DVD’s because they have far greater data capacity (over 7Gb on a dual layer one). You can burn multiple redundant back ups and keep them in different bags to guard against baggage theft/loss and of course you can mail them home when convenient en route.

If you are booking an overseas photo tour be sure to check out our excellent website offering unique photography holidays throughout New Zealand