As I said last week, I had a few more things coming in and they got here the middle of last week. One is a 500GB Toshiba portable hard drive. My plan is to shoot my pictures, download them first into iPhoto on my MacBook Pro and then back them up to the Toshiba, so that they will be in two places. It’s light weight and has an internal shock sensor for protection. I bought mine on Amazon.
Next were two new memory cards for the cameras. This next trip will be almost twice as long as my previous ones and since I’m hoping to see lots of Mongol horse action close up, races and herders working, I anticipate using the burst function more than ever. I already know that I can fill a 4GB card in less than a day. The price of memory cards has continued to drop. My new SanDisk 8GB Extreme SDHC Class 10 High Performance Memory Cards cost less than the 2GB ones I bought a few years ago. I buy the “Extremes” because I can never be sure what weather conditions I’m going to encounter and I need a fast card that won’t hang up in the middle of the action. These came from an Amazon seller.
The third item I described as an “indulgence”. What I wanted were portable speakers for my iPhone, for listening to music when I was in a hotel or ger camp. I ended up ordering Livespeakers and returning them. Maybe my really good quality earbuds have spoiled me, but the sound just didn’t cut it. My husband, who understands how things like speakers work, explained why it’s physically impossible to get a real bass tone out of small speakers. I knew they would drive me crazy and I can use the fifty bucks for something else. Voices sounded ok though, so for someone who wants to watch movies I think it would be fine.
So, that’s about it. One pair of LL Bean tropic weight pants with cargo pockets still to arrive. I’ll do a packing dry run this weekend.
Susan Fox, American Artist 
Sorry if you’ve addressed this in another post, but what file format do you shoot in? JPEG?
LikeLike
I hadn’t, actually. I shoot Camera Raw, Nikon format, since I have two Nikon D80 bodies. Each image file is 10.2 megapixals. I always shoot at the maximum resolution. The problem with JPEGs is that they are what are called “lossy” images. As in, because the image is compressed, there is “loss” of pixels. This matters if you want to manipulate them or do corrections in a program like Photoshop because every time you save and re-open a JPEG, there is a little image degradation due to more pixels being compressed out. Your picture just looks worse and worse.
I always shoot RAW and then convert to JPGs for posting on the web, email, etc. I can endlessly open and close the RAW files with no loss of quality, therefore a RAW file is considered “non-lossy”.
The consumer point and shoot cameras all seem to only shoot JPG format, so one is stuck.
I store my images on a hard drive and manage them with Aperture, the Apple image management program. Photoshop’s version is called Lightroom. All the “masters” are stored as RAW images. I work with what Aperture calls “”versions”, so my masters are never touched, so to speak.
Please feel free to ask any other questions you might have and I’ll do my best to answer them.
LikeLike
I do the same: shoot and store in RAW and display in JPEG. I wondered because my camera (Canon EOS-350D which is obviously lower quality than yours!) can’t handle doing ‘burst’ very well when shooting RAW. Obviously this isn’t a problem for you…
LikeLike
Memory card speed makes a difference. You might consult your local camera store folks and see if a faster memory card might help your RAW “burst speed”.
LikeLike
My only disagreement with you so far, ever: portable speakers for the iPhone are NOT an indulgence!!!! To me, they are a NEED. Like you, have not found a decent set…and continue to use earphones. =)
Otherwise, I’m enjoying your packing posts.
LikeLike