Digital photography involves a lot more than buying a camera. It involves a significant additional investment of time and money. You need memory cards and you need somewhere to put the data when the cards get full so they can be used again. What about data security in the field and at home? It would be a shame to lose all your photographs on a trip just because a hard drive got one too many bumps. This article attempts to describe the decision process we used in buying equipment and how we use that equipment in the field. A different workflow may work better for your shooting style, but this is what works for us. Our requirements included compactness, simplicity, and above all safety of the image data.

Darwin Falls, Death Valley, California

A key element in our plan is carrying enough memory card capacity for a whole day of very heavy shooting. This allows us to concentrate on photography during the day instead of fooling around with computers, cables, and card readers. How much memory is enough? Just take the number of rolls of film you shoot on a great day then multiply by 36 to get frames, and then multiply by the file size your digital camera creates for each photo. You may want to add a few rolls to give yourself a comfortable margin of error. Convert the number you get to gigabytes (GB) (1GB = 1000 MB). This is the total capacity you need. Next, decide what the capacity of each card should be by balancing how often you want to change memory cards against how much you’re willing to lose if something happens to a card. For example, when using a Canon EOS 10D six mega pixel camera, a 1GB card holds the equivalent of about 4.3 rolls of film in “RAW/Small” (RAW with small embedded JPEG) mode. If you’re using a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II it’ll hold the equivalent of only 1.5 rolls of film. Many Compact Flash (CF) cards are temperature rated down to only 32º F. If you shoot in very cold temperatures be sure to get CF cards rated for colder temperatures. Hold on to your wallet, they’re expensive. Even so, it is not advisable to scrimp here. Stopping to download memory cards takes a lot longer than changing a roll of film. It is not practical in most shooting situations, especially where wildlife is the subject. Micro-drives, the tiny hard drives that come in CF card format, cost much less for the same capacity and many people successfully use them. The down side is that they shorten battery life and, like all hard drives, they are prone to failure if used at high altitude.
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We download the day’s images every evening so there is a fresh supply of CF cards for the next day. For this we use a laptop computer and a Sandisk USB-2 card reader. After the image files are copied to the laptop's hard drive, they are copied to a Seagate ST9100801U2-RK 100 GB portable external hard drive. The Seagate drive is small, reasonably priced, very well made, fast, and is powered directly from the USB port so it requires no external power adapter. This drive is very convenient and highly recommended. Once the files are safely copied to the two separate devices, the CF card can be formatted for tomorrow's work. We also carry a small and very basic device from Nixvue that consists of a CF card slot, a hard drive, some cable connectors, and a basic text display. It does not display images, but like all similar devices it can double as an external hard drive when connected to a laptop or PC. It downloads CF cards very quickly, and comes with hard drive capacities to fit most needs. There are now many similar devices on the market, many with color LCDs to display the stored images. We carry the Nixvue and its optional cigarette lighter adapter in our vehicle just in case we shoot more than we ever imagined. In addition to adding the ability to download cards in its stand-alone mode in the field, the Nixvue is our backup card reader and external hard drive if one of the devices we normally use should fail.
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You may be noticing that having backups for everything is a major part of our philosophy. All files are kept on two separate physical devices, and we do not keep both devices in the same place, making it unlikely that both would be damaged or stolen at the same time. Further, if our Sandisk card reader fails we can still download cards using the Nixvue, from which they can be copied to the laptop or the Seagate external hard drive. Likewise, if the laptop should fail we can still download cards to the Nixvue device. If the Seagate external hard drive should fail the Nixvue can take its place. It is also possible to backup images to CD ROM using the laptop's CD burner. Because it is a fairly slow and tedious process, it is an option of last resort that might be useful if we had major failures early on a long trip. We have Archive Creator loaded on our laptop for this purpose because Archive Creator will verify the CD after burning it. Reading and verifying a CD after it is written is the only way to be sure its data is intact. We do not carry CDR disks since they are available everywhere. The overall idea is to have as many redundant systems as possible without taking up much physical space. As you can see, the failure of any single device does not jeopardize images already taken, nor does it keep us from taking and downloading additional images.

Florida Sandhill Crane, Portrait

When we get home from a trip the contents of either the laptop or the Seagate external hard drive (both contain the same data) is copied to a desktop computer for sorting and cataloging. The sorting and cataloging process is very similar to what we did with film, except the digital files are easier to view and we are not as ruthless in throwing away marginal images. There are two reasons for this lack of usual ruthlessness. First, long term storage on CD or DVD is cheap and compact. Second, the marginal images, or pieces of them, may find use in web page banners, to document something that is unusual but not photogenic, or for some yet unknown purpose. Once deleted the photographs are gone forever, so we err on the side of safety. Laziness and disdain for sorting images could be a third reason, but there’s no point in talking about that here.
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Digital camera images are archived on a redundant set of hard drives, and then one of the hard drives is stored off site. Data is not erased from the laptop's hard drive or the Seagate external hard drive until after it is recorded on the duplicate hard drives and one of them is safely off site.

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Our image cataloging is done with Photools IMatch. This is one of the most powerful, easy to use, versatile, and inexpensive cataloging programs available. When you need to retrieve an image you narrow down the choices by selecting categories, then search the thumbnail images to find the one you want. The program can do far more than I have described here. Its interface is not the most friendly I have seen, but it becomes quite easy to use once you are acclimated to it.
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After this comes the fun part -- dealing with the results of your labor in your image editing program of choice. After converting RAW files to TIFFs with a program like BreezeBrowser or Photoshop, everything is as if you were dealing with a scan from a piece of film. Although it may sound complex, getting to this point is much faster and easier with a digital camera. It is not necessarily better or more satisfying. Perhaps this is a good topic for a future article…

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Copyright © 2006 Dean M. Chriss, dmcPhoto.com

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