Lots of Photos

[Mike Farley]

I took a great many shots during my Photo a Day project last year. Amazingly, I could have got all but the final few days worth on this memory card which has just been announced.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/581360 ... uhs-i-card

[davidc]

And then the plastic mount will shatter in your camera just like the 16gb cards

I do love watching how storage grows, my first ever memory card was 32mb!

[Mike Farley]

And then the plastic mount will shatter in your camera just like the 16gb cards

Does a high capacity card disintegrate into more bits?*

I do love watching how storage grows, my first ever memory card was 32mb!

I think that mine was something similar. I remember paying £80 to get a 256 MB compact flash card which gave a real boost to the number of shots I could take on my Canon G2.

When I broke open a failed SD card, I was amazed how small the actual chip was in relation to the size of the card.

* Techie joke.

[Rose]

I really don't like the idea of large volume storage cards as they're a single point of failure ! I've been bitten once by a CF card that corrupted during the download process and I was unable to recover any of the lost images

[Mike Farley]

I really don't like the idea of large volume storage cards as they're a single point of failure ! I've been bitten once by a CF card that corrupted during the download process and I was unable to recover any of the lost images

That's always going to be a risk, regardless of the size of the card. The only effective safeguard is to shoot with one of the few cameras with two memory slots and write to both cards simultaneously. A partial solution is either to use more than one camera and/or a number of small cards so that if there are a lot of shots from the session, at least some will be retained. Of course, that strategy does mean that a card could be become full at an inconvenient moment, requiring some careful management to avoid such an occurrence.

[davidc]

Well, inadvertently, I found myself stuck in the position of having a single card for our trip to Cambodia. Though I don't normally have "large card fear" I do have single card fear and I had planned to take my 64gb Samsung card and a 16gb Lexar card. After the first day of shooting I tried swapping the cards to spread the load across them and found I didn't have the 16gb card... I was convinced it must have fallen out of my bag on the plane and wrote it off as a lost cause

Over the course of the 4 day trip I therefore needed to rely entirely on the 64gb card and it did not let me down. Despite shooting 100% in RAW and having "only" ~1700 shots available, I ended the trip with 8 shots remaining and the card has been flawless in the year I've had it. So Samsung gets my recommendation!

I'm now looking for a portable backup solution for when I can't take a laptop.

And the 16gb card? I'd left it in the computer at home after I wiped it ready for the trip

[Mike Farley]

We have all done it, gone on trips without properly checking our gear before setting out. I have discovered* missing chargers, memory cards and that small plate to attach the camera to the tripod I have been lugging around. Worst of all, on one memorable occasion I travelled 50 miles only to discover I had left my main camera behind and ended up shooting the colourful autumn foliage in infrared.

I travel with a small laptop which I find convenient for all manner of uses, including backing up images, so is worth the effort of taking it. A tablet woud be an equally convenient and more portable solution for most purposes, so at some point I could well be looking for an alternative method of duplicating my shots while on the road. I'll be interested to see what you decide to do.

* I am not sure that finding something is absent can be truly classified as "discovery".

[Tina]

I also have a small laptop, which I think is called a netbook, that I travel with. It seems to be able to store enough for my needs and also records RAW.
Its a Hewlett Packard Pavilion purchased in February so probably updated by now.
Tina

[davidc]

that small plate to attach the camera to the tripod I have been lugging around.

I forgot that too but the temples at sunset are so heaving with tourists I didn't feel it's loss.

[Rose]

I used to have an Epson portable drive / viewer which I used for holidays, downloading my CF cards onto it each night. It was fantastic but my camera equipment outgrew it and there was no firmware update for that model. It was also cheaper to replace it with a netbook so I used that for a few years. It's rather heavy though and as the cost of memory went down I stopped using it in favour of just carrying a bunch of CF cards. I now have an iPad but the capacity is not big enough to function as portable storage. You can connect a SD card reader to an iPad but not a CF card reader, for some reason I don't understand and Apple won't explain - but they do camera connector cable enabling you to view thumbnails and download jpgs. It won't read RAW files of course. As for processing on the fly, I have Photoshop Express on the iPad which is ok for basic editing. If I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud then I could of course use the mobile version of LightRoom which would also sync with my desktop... at the moment I'm reluctant to pay for something I already own though, just so I can use it very occasionally on my iPad. Maybe when the next LR update comes out I might take out a subscription. Or more likely next year, to go with the laptop I am finally going to buy. I hate laptops for anything other than web browsing but if I want to do a bit of work after I retire I'm going to have to have one. Ho hum...