Storing Pictures While Backpack Travelling?

Amgine007 asks: "A friend of mine will be leaving in January 2004 for a 12-to-18-month 'around the world' trip. He's pretty technically saavy, but not really much of a computer-and-gadgets geek. He has an interesting problem: How do you live out of a backpack for a year (or more) and manage to take and save a lot of digital pictures (say 10,000), if you will have very few connections to the outside world -- few sources of power (at the odd hostel or train station outlet), no internet, and no USB?"

"He hasn't yet purchased a digital camera, so any camera or convergence device to be available in the next 6 months is fair game.

We've thought of a few scenarios. Bringing along a ton of CF cards is neither cheap nor reliable -- suppose the media gets lost or damaged. An ideal solution might involve being able to mail media home, while still having a copy 'on the road' in case that media gets lost in the mail.

And isn't it about time we see consumer devices with support for firewire drives, such as the iPod? I envision a digital camera that can talk (and backup) to an iPod -- this would be more than enough storage in a 15gb model, and small enough to take backpacking painlessly. However, the new models feature a proprietary dock connector, which makes one the iPod's old great advantages -- charge from any firewire port! -- a thing of the past.

A camera that burns images to a CD would be nice, but only if the CD was secondary storage -- ie, save pictures to internal buffer, burn to N CDs, erase internal buffer. This would allow the easy creation of duplicates, but might require a lot of CDs.

How would you plan your gadgets, given 6 more months of advancement of new technology (and price-cuts on old tech)? There's a whole lot of neat camera-ready devices coming about about now, so there could be quite a few creative ideas. Winning solution is the simplest and most portable."

Comments

Good point

[Glonoinha]

-Sure, you can take 10,000 pictures. But 9,000 of them are probably going to suck.

Actually this is the best part about digital photography. Want a good picture? Take ten pictures of the subject and then pick the one(s) you like the best. With regular cameras this just isn't cost (or time) effective as you have to wait for prints, then wait for reprints, etc... but on a digital you can pop the CF card into your laptop to view the series and pick the good ones, then delete the stuff you do not like - doing this a few times throughout the trip will help reclaim 80% of the CF capacity if necessary. Of course if you have access to a laptop with a CDR, burn the entire CF off to CD and send it home in a mailer, make another copy for your backpack.

Re:You've let technology cloud the issue.

[damiam]

It is also far cheaper than CF cards or self powered hard drives.

It is? Film costs about $1.50 a roll at US retail, but it can cost much more in other places, especially tourist sites. We'll say the average price is $2.50, including tax and such. When you add in developing (around $4 per roll) and postage (I have no clue - international postage can be really expensive. I'll say $2 per roll), that's $8.50 per roll. Assuming these are 24-exposure rolls, 10000 exposures would cost about $3500.

Meanwhile, 10000 pics on a good-quality digital (around 3MP) would take up about 4.8 GB (at 500k per frame). A 512MB CF card can be had for $100, and it would take about 10 of them to hold it all, yielding a final price of $1000. So the price of digital comes to less than 1/3 the price of film (plus, at the end, you still have $1000 worth of CF cards to do whatever you want with).

Even those numbers are being quite generous, because 90% of the pictures people take (even pros) are shit. With digital, you can erase them and get back the space. Even if he only deleted 40% of his pictures, that would be enough to let him take the rest at 5MP instead of 3MP. Also, CF cards are quite rugged, and a little bit of rain won't hurt them. And, if he's really worried about losing pics, he can stop at a local Internet cafe every so often and burn a backup CD or upload them to a file server.

Re:I've travlled alot taking that many photos....

[evalhalla]

I tend to take about 100-200 photos per week when travelling/backpacking. 10,000 in a year is alot (1 photo every 30 minutes of being awake)

With a digital camera they're not that much: when I bought one i noticed that I took about twice as many pics as before, if not more. Usually when I'm on a short trip (1/2 days - no storage problems) I take about 50-100 pics per day, if I'm in a good place.

Of course most of them are duplicates and when i'm home I select slight more than half of them for keeping, and maybe 3 or 4 for "public view", but I've found that the camera display is just too small to allow me to decide whether a shot is worth keeping or not.

If you're traveling in first or second world countries, I would say go digital.

1. Theft: is an issue both with digital and non digital, if you have an mid/high-level one, it is less if you have a low-level point and shot camera, but the only thing that probably won't be stolen is a one-use camera, and I won't suggest to use that.
2. Repairs: go for a commonly available model, of a widespread brand, and you'll have good chances to find service for it in most mid sized towns.
3. Quality: if all you want to do is show your pics to friends when you're back home, and have a couple shots printed (not in poster size) most digital cameras will suffice, if you want to sell your pics to magazines a point'n'click film camera won't do anyway
4. Storage: to store 10000 pics at 1MB each (2Mpixel, hi-quality lossy compression) you only need 20 512MB CF, and they can be stored in a couple of those specific wallets, about 20x10x1cm big, in films they're about 415 ones, and they become quite bulky.

Of course third world is a different matter, unless you're only traveling in big towns.

Re:Don't discount CF cards quite yet

[matt_wilts]

A colleague of mine found a Fuji Finepix in a river in Wales last year. Whilst the camera was damaged beyond repair, the smartmedia card was fine. According to the pictures the camera had been in the water for 3 months.