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I've got a trip planned for the end of the year - 10 weeks travelling to wonderful places such as Mexico, Peru, Spain & South Africa...... all great places to take lots of photos.

My questions are:

As a newbie - what is the best way to approach learning how to take good shots (rather than just the hit & miss approach)

Any suggestions of things to do/not do with regards to care of camera. I hear about things such as mould, dust and bugs invading lenses. Any suggestions on preventing all of these?

How should I store my photos - should I buy a couple of GB cards or should I try to burn pics to disk at internet cafe?


I have about 10 other questions but will ask those later.

Thanks so much to all of you for sharing your wealth of knowledge. I really appreciate your help.

Hi Natz,

Not sure what type of camera you have, but in terms of storage, you have a number of options:

1. Portable storage such as the Epson P...something, ipod or other portable hardrive.
2. Burn to CDs - although, with the possibility of taking in excess of 700mb per day in photos, this could easily mean you have to burn 70 CDs and either mail them home or carry around with you.

When we spent 2 weeks in NZ, we had an ipod to hold our 8gig worth of photos. It worked well, but it seemed unstable. In retrospect, for our trip, I would have taken our laptop. However, given you will be going to places which are less, shall we say, developed, taking a laptop may not be suitable.

In terms of taking care of your camera, I would guess one of the areas where dust and other invaders bacome a real problem is continually changing lenses. My advice (I'm a newbie as well) would be to try to get the most out of your current lenses to minimise the need to change lenses in dusty environments just to get a bit more reach or angle. As they say, taking a few steps forward can be a powerful zoom!

I would suggest taking a few cards and at least one spare battery.

Get a good camera bag, maybe even two - a large one for all your gear and a smaller one for just walking around (depending on the quality of the accomodation you plan to stay at - I wouldn't leave a big camera bag in a dodgy hotel!).

Other more experienced heads will provide better advice I am sure.

Good luck

P

Hi Natz, if you haven't done so I would highly recommend the courses at the sydney community college - Photogrpahy intro, photo extension

These teach you the basic principles of your camera, group photo shoots and help you to critique and get feedback on your shots in a classroom environment. My teacher was Jenny Templin - recommend if you can get in her class.

PD70X is a damn fine unit. If you only want to store images and not want to view them, then this would be a great unit. It runs on AA batteries + standard AC power as well.

You can get it from http://www.jaldigital.com.au/

natz wrote:I've got a trip planned for the end of the year - 10 weeks travelling to wonderful places such as Mexico, Peru, Spain & South Africa...... all great places to take lots of photos.

Most VIP thing is to have good travel insurance... As to backup of files, I burn CDs overseas, if they are very valuable, burn two of each, then post one home. Then again, I'm not a shutterholic, two big CF cards would last a long time for me.

Max

Hi Natz. On my recent trip I shot photos in RAW and saved them onto my laptop. I then would copy them to a dvd (4.7gb) before formatting and stating all over again. On the laptop I then converted the RAW files to JPEG so that we could view as slide show.
Cheers,
Mick

Hi Natz...

New-bee-ish here as well...

I travel nearly every month for both work and personal...I find for short trips (1 to 3 days) I carry extra CF cards and for the longer I take my laptop...I have checked out most of the storage options about and have found something wrong with them all!

My last trip to Singapore in April I stocked up on 2GB CF cards and now have x4 2GB, x5 1GB & x2 half GB's MORE than enough for me and I only shoot in RAW which takes the most space need!

AS for my luggage...I travel with two bags...one with ALL my gear which is a big metal hard case (lockable) for air transport, and my lowepro back pack for walking about

Hope that gives you a few ideas...

Have fun on your trip

I have the "Travel Photography Second Edition" book in the Lonely Planet Travel Photography series

It gets a highly recommended from me. Most aim to help the average traveller achieve more than the normal 'travel snapshot'.

Your local Dymocks should have a few of them in stock.

Hi Natz

From the list of places you mentioned, I'd suggest you on travelling light. That is a camera body, a multipurpose zoom lens (18-200VR if you have it), and a flash. Take plenty of large CFs along with a spare battery. A light and small tripod if you can fit in.

Try to keep yourself as light weight and low profile as possible. By means of security and health (heavy bags) concerns.

Im not trying to say that you will get your stuff stolen there on the trip, but as this can happen anywhere you travel and you wont be keeping all your luggage with you at all times, some of them stays in the hotel and you go out only with a few pieces of gear which you going to use.

But keeping your bag small and unsuspecious keeps plenty of trouble away from you.

Purely on the storage/backup side:

I carry a 40Gb ipod-equivalent with about 25Gb free when I'm on holiday. If I need more space, I delete more music. That's enough for three weeks plus easy. I also have 2x1Gb cards on which I keep the best shots. That way if anything happens to the storage device, I'm not lost.

I think you should try to estimate how many photos you'll take (and then add another 20% perhaps) and see how much storage that would require. Your strategy should revolve around that. Unless you're happy to ruthlessly cull photos before you back them up, if you're going to average 700Mb a day (and that can easily be done) you're probably going to run short. I wouldn't bank on having easy computer access everywhere (I couldn't even get it in the USA!) so you may have to swallow the cost of burning to DVD at the occasional photo shop. I haven't been to South America, but surely there's places... I'd take a laptop only if I could seriously see myself carrying it everywhere and keeping it safe. In my case that was to New Zealand, and outback NSW.

I'd check online and see where you can get access to computing and DVD burning facilities along the way. Burn two copies of everything, mail one home and keep one with you.

Enjoy the trip though!!!

And take a small P&S as well. These are very handy for pulling out and taking shots when a carrying a DSLR is awkward.

And Natz, remember to make sure your travel insurance actually covers a good quality camera. I called my travel insurance company last night to query the 'doubles economy' plan we signed up for as soon as we booked our NZ trip.
Turns out it only gives cover for electrical stuff/cameras to the value of $500! I'm glad I checked the fine print!
So, will soon upgrade cover from basic cover to the next level to accommodate camera equip worth $2000.
Would be v.sad if I dropped/lost or had my new camera stolen within a month of getting it!

sky wrote:And Natz, remember to make sure your travel insurance actually covers a good quality camera. I called my travel insurance company last night to query the 'doubles economy' plan we signed up for as soon as we booked our NZ trip.
Turns out it only gives cover for electrical stuff/cameras to the value of $500! I'm glad I checked the fine print!
So, will soon upgrade cover from basic cover to the next level to accommodate camera equip worth $2000.
Would be v.sad if I dropped/lost or had my new camera stolen within a month of getting it!

I have my D70S and lens covered 24/7 worldwide travel with GIO as an add on for our home & contents; as the fine print on my pol is that camera gear is only covered up to 2k and doesn't include lens AT ALL... make sure you check!!!!

We had covermore insurance which provides basic cover to about $2,000 or so, but you can buy more - we bought about $6000 cover for an extra $150 or so (for 2 weeks in NZ).

P

Natz, depending on your budget, a portable storage device (PSD) may be suitable, but its just another thing you have to carry in your backpack. Also, if it gets stolen, you've lost all those images.

For my backpacking trip later this year, I'm thinking a mixture of technologies is safest. I don't have a PSD or laptop (I'd rather save the money and weight) so I'll be burning CDs as I go. The most valuable shots may be burnt onto a second disc and sent home.

I'll also be uploading to my Flickr account where possible so at least I have a low res version somewhere. I currently have 3GB of memory cards but suspect I might need another couple GB!

Jonas wrote: so I'll be burning CDs as I go.

Pat & I did this when travelling around Vietnam, and it was fine. Very easy to find places to burn CDs, and we found that we enjoyed spending that time checking our email and reading the papers anyway.