Well I made it back. To warm, sunny, green grass, flowers blooming, birds singing Minnesota. Oh wait that’s where I came from. I tell you it was hard to put pants and shoes on for our return flight after eleven days of shorts and flip flops. I have had a couple of days to sort of get back in the swing of things. Man its good to be back but…
So I took just over 36 GB of photos when it was all said and done. That works out to 2698 photos. I got them all transferred over to my main computer and now its time to work on the images I took. I thought I would take you through my work flow for when I am shooting away from home. This is my work flow it probably isn’t perfect and it might not work for everyone. But it dose work pretty well for me at this time. My work flow is constantly changing and getting faster, better and more efficient. As should yours. So here we go.
My camera takes CF flash cards. I have several cards from 1GB cards all the way up to 8GB cards. I try not to get too large a card. I like not having all my images on one card in the event that a card gets lost or broken or for what ever reason stops working. If all my images were on one big card and something happened to it than all that days photos would be lost. So my thinking is worst case half my images might be lost. And I say worst case. I personally have never had a card fail. But I have forgotten them in pants pockets and they have gone through the wash and dryer before. Another testament to buying quality gear. The couple of times this has happened all the cards were fine. Images still on them and they reformatted ok and they still work today.
So like I said I format all my cards directly from the camera. Find in the menu where it says format and that is how I erase my cards. I have all my cards in a little CF card wallet that holds 12 cards. I have six cards in the wallet and one in the camera at all times. I have all the empty cards on the left side of the holder and as they get full they get put in the right side. That way I know what ones are ready to go and what ones are full, with out having to load the card in the camera and check. All my photos are shot in RAW format so they can take up some space on a card. I can fit give or take 75 images per GB and I have 19 GB worth of cards. For a total of something like 1425 images possible before I have to download to a hard drive.
At the end of the day I sit down with my full card and a laptop. I have a folder that the photos go in. On this trip it was :Maui ‘09” I then make folders for each day, day one, day two…I copy all photos to an external hard drive that I have. It’s a 180 GB self powered hard drive. It gets its power from the computer so it’s one less cord to try and find a plug in for. Notice I said copy all the photos. Done transfer or cut the pictures from the card to the hard drive, incase something happens while you are transferring your data. Once I have all the photos copied to the external hard drive I will copy that folder to the laptop hard drive. So at this point I have three copies of every photo I took that day. Now I will go and verify that all photos got copied to both the laptop internal hard drive and the external hard drive. Once I have verified everything got copied, all cards get reformatted by the camera and put back in the card holder for the next day. This gets repeated for the length of the trip. Once you get used to making this part of your routine it’s not so bad. You load a card, go do something, copy a folder, take a shower. You get the picture. The best part is you have two copies of all your images and empty memory cards for the next day.
The laptop I travel with is a bit out dated. So I just run Canons Digital Photo Pro. A very basic Raw converter. Basically all it gets used for is viewing images and basic edits on copies if images for posting in this Blog and sending e-mails to family back home. Other than that not much gets done on location. I save all the major editing for when I get home. If I had a newer laptop I would have Lightroom, my main program for photo organization and RAW editing, loaded and might do some key wording and rating of images that’s about it.
Next I will talk about what I do when I get home with 36 GB of images.
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