Back around in 2003 I was given a Minolta X-300 for my birthday, my first proper camera, and from there my interest in photography grew. This was and is a great camera for me to learn a bit about composition and exposure control and travelled with me around the UK and for 5 weeks in Morocco where it stood up to all the rigors of life on the road. Starting working life in 2006, I splurged my first pay check on a Nikon D80 with 18-200mm lens which proved to be a great choice. Both camera and lens is capable of a superb quality for my use (I have yet had to print an image larger than A3) and for my more recent travels this combo has been ideal. As I have read and studied the "art" of photography more and more, as well as becoming exposed to a large variety of styles and equipment, I have inevitably acquired more kit. An Olympus Trip 35 has been on the scene for some time now and proved a trusty 35mm street camera, a Lubitel medium format camera was a good introduction to the world of larger negatives (if a bit pricey to get developed) and my more recent accessories have been a Sigma 10-20mm lens and SB-600 flash. These were acquired for our once-in-a-lifetime round the world trip. While they have helped get a few otherwise missed shots, getting them just before leaving meant that I was not so practiced in their use and so not used to their full potential, as well as making my rucksack even more heavy! As I sit and write this my beloved D80 is being returned from the repair shop, diagnosis terminal, so along with learning the valuable lesson that cameras do not bounce (and to always zip closed the camera bag) I am in the market for a new machine...watch this space.
This is a blog about my travels and so while not many people will be interested in what follows, it will be a good record for my own use. Living out of a bag for many months throws up several problems for the photo enthusiast, how to view, store and organise the photos, how to back up and have multiple copies and how to share them with those back home. Gone are the days of filling a bag with film canisters but my solution to the problems did add a bit of extra weight. Many people now travel with laptops or netbooks but even the latter are fairly weighty and delicate, a definite consideration when your bag also has to contain full camping gear. Computer terminals and the internet is widespread in all but the most remote corner of the globe and so relying on this fact I brought 2 external hard drives along. This allowed me to transfer images from the full memory cards to 2 locations, extra security should one crash or be stolen. As I shoot in both RAW and jpeg (more on this later), images were copied into a file system that first highlighted the country, then the location, then the file type. An example of this would be images taken at Everest base camp were copied to:
Travel Pictures -> Tibet -> Everest -> Jpeg Large (or RAW depending on the file)
We were inevitably at some locations for longer than others, sometimes spanning a week or more, and so in the future if I want more detail of a specific photo I can look at the time and date it was taken and refer back to my written diary to see the specifics for that day. This way I always had 2 copies of each image, 3 counting the memory card which was only deleted when all the others were full, and there is a degree of organisation when it comes to look through them all after the trip.
While back home I was happy to spend the time editing RAW files, I was aware that this would be impossible on the road and not a job I would relish once back home. The thousands of photos would take years! This meant making the conscious decision to try and get the shot right "in camera" so that as little would need to be done on the computer as possible. For this reason I set the camera up to take both RAW and Jpeg images so that should I need the extra latitude of the RAW file for any editing of the "killer" shots, I would be able to post and distribute the jpegs straight away. To get really geeky, I custom set the jpeg setting as follows: sharpening = 0 , contrast = medium low, saturation = moderate. This way I hoped to avoid images that were ridiculously contrasty with really gaudy colours.
The result of this decision means that the images on this blog are straight out of the camera and have not touched photoshop, even to alter contrast, saturation or be cropped. I feel that this is important to stateas the advent of digital imaging and photoshop has often led to the unfair assumption that a bad photo can easily be rescued by computer editing, unlike the "good old days" of film. This is a whole separate can of worms but can fairly safely be written off as false. True, cropping and level adjustment will improve some of my photos but as for whether one is good or bad rests on the moment the shutter was tripped, there is nothing I can now do to rescue a failure and convert it to one destined to hang above the mantelpiece. Despite this, for those just browsing the blog, this lack of computer work perhaps gives its contents a little more legitimacy and authenticity. Some will be edited at a later date, maybe for a competition or for my wall, but these will be displayed elsewhere and will make up a small percentage of the hundreds of photos that have made the "best of" file.
Having now got the pictures copied and backed up, they need to go online both to update all those people left back home as well as provide yet another copy should the worst happen. Jpeg files straight out the camera are still large and take a long time to upload, especially if you are trying to get through over a hundred on a dial-up connection in rural Mongolia. This problem was anticipated and so prior to leaving I copied a number of small programs onto each hard drive that would enable me to resize and then upload the better photos. Once a location file was complete I open Irfanview and batch process the jpeg files to resize them to a more manageable dimension of 800 pixels along the longest length. These are also renamed with the text small being added to the end of the original name and then moved to a separate file titled "small for web". These photos then open up easily on old slow computers which allows the provisional best to be quickly selected and copied into a separate folder ("to upload"). Flickr Uploadr would then be opened up and these images transported to my Flickr site before moving them one final time to the best of folder "on the net". It is from this folder that I would then select the images to accompany my blog.
Update - July 2010:
I have just got back from the "Wonderful West" having just previously taken delivery of my new (2nd hand TradeMe special!) Nikon D80. I figured that I am nowhere near pushing the limits of this camera and so why spend more money on a newer model. Anyway, having gone through some of the many photographs taken over the previous 12 months I realise that the Jpeg setting I ended up selecting were not the best for lifelike images. The results were just a bit too flat and dull, a bit of tinkering makes most much better with just a bit more bite. The upshot is that I will be posting edited photos from now on and the Jpeg settings will alter as I try and find a better compromise. The aim is always less computer time but I have come to think that if someone is woried about a bit of light editing then thats their problem. I don't really do anything that could not have been done in an old darkroom. It just takes me less time and involves fewer nasty chemicals.
