Digital photos on tour: batteries and backup

[Enogeze]

Thinking of tours where you might be doing a lot of camping - without only occassional access to electricity.

1) Batteries: AA's vs proprietary batteries.

Cameras with AA batteries versus cameras that use a proprietary battery. If your rechargable AA's run out I guess it would be easy enough to buy some AA's somewhere to tide you over to the next time you have access to electricity. But if your proprietary battery runs out - well you'd have to wait until you have access to electricity to recharge. If using a proprietary battery I guess you could carry a 2nd battery with you and charge both when you have access to electricity. Hopefully 2 proprietary batteries would keep you going until your next recharge opportunity.

Any further ideas on pros/cons of AA vs proprietary batteries?

If you need to recharge loads of stuff (camera, mp3 player, batteries for shortwave, batteries for bike lights, batteries for torch, etc) is there some kind of plugboard that you can recommend for dealing with, what might be, a single socket in a dodgy hotel room somewhere?

2) Photo storage: loads of memory cards

I guess you could just buy a load of memory cards and when your memory card gets full of photos simply pop in the next blank card. Then when you get an opportunity to get to an internet cafe - download all your photos and burn some DVD's. Possibly burn 2 copies of each DVD - one to send home and one to keep with you. (Those photos you send home don't always get there!) A downside of this is that you might be inclined not to label your photos as it's time consuming job that you'd need to pay for in the internet cafe.

3) Photo storage: some kind of hard drive with memory card slots

So it looks like you can simply slot your memory card into this thing and it copies everything onto it's 40GB hard drive. Probably best to have 2 of them so that when you have a crash you've double the chance of saving all your memories. Downside is that you can't label your photos unless you do that in an internet cafe - but now with even more photos to label you might be less inclined to label them as in (2) above.

BTW I have no idea if the product linked to above is any good nor am I recommending Jessops. Anyone have any experience of using a device like this?

4) Photo storage: take a laptop

Taking a laptop means extra weight and is also prone to drops and bicycle crashes. But you could use it's DVD burner to make backups of all your photos. Or you could get a little external hard drive and store backups there (this one fits in the palm of your hand - again I'm not recommending this - just providing the link as an example). Assuming you have occassional access to electricity you'd be able to label photos at your leisure and do rudimentary editing aswell.

What laptop would be good for cycle touring?

The Toshiba Portege 500 weighs just over a kilo and has a DVD burner with a battery time of 2-3 hours. But it's pricy - over £1200.

What about a Asus Eeepc 1000H running Linux by default has no hard drive - just an 8GB solid state drive. This is supplemented by a 32GB SD card giving you a total of 40GB. This computer seems indestructible - I can't find the link but on the net these guys pushed if off tables, left it on a 40 degree radiator for hours, etc, etc and it survived. I guess you could use it to transfer photos to an external USB drive. It only costs £368.

Any other ideas?

5) Photo storage: uploading to Flickr

If I understand Flickr correctly, if you get a paid account you can upload photos in their original resolutions. So with a laptop you could (assuming you have internet access and electricity) upload your photos to the net. But realistically I imagine this option is not really feasible as the upload time for loads of photos would simply be toooo looooonnng.

Any pointers for what might be a good way to store photos and make backups on an extended tour (where you don't return home at night) would be much appreciated!

 

[Kirstie]

For battery life, I take two batteries and a charger. One battery usually last 5-6 days if you use the camera a lot and dont replay or view the pics. Also I don't take video but if you do it will run down the battery and use a lot of storage space. I also take a USB charger (which runs on AA batteries) if I'm going somewhere remote. This is also good for the GPS and phone.

For photo storage, you can now get huge amounts of memory on very tiny memory cards, so just take a load of those. They hardly take up any space or weight. I take 2x 256Mb cards with me but they're quite old now and you must be able to get much more nowadays. I'll add that I am really meticulous about the physical storage of my stuff in my panniers ie have a carefully worked out system, so I know that I wouldn't lose a memory card, but you may not be like this!

 

[Bigtallfatbloke]

One thing I seriously regret buying is a camera that does not run on AA batteries. Memory storage is so vast these days on a small card I can tsee that I would ever need more and if I did I would carry a memory stick.

 

[rich p]

I use a camera with 2 AA's. I use the lithium ones which last ages.

 

[marinyork]

I am impressed with the current generation of rechargable AAs such as the uniross hybrios or others.

 

[psmiffy]

AAs and buy enough to keep you going day to day
4Gb SD card - difficult to take sufficient photos even over a long time to fill one

my latest touring camera is Vivitar 6200 - 6Mp ugly as hell, and no optical zoom, but dust, water proof and touch wood seems not to worry about being dropped repeatedly - 99 from aldi

i got quite fixated by having some sort of electronic solution to photo storage and note taking plus occasional internet fix, the problem of charging these things in a tent/on road took over - so AAs, SD cards and waterproof notebook were this years solution

 

[Cathryn]

My camera has one of those really thin ones..li-on? or something? On our summer trip, I downloaded photos onto a memory stick every couple of days which was absolutely perfect!!! Have to admit I didn't feel safe until I'd downloaded them at home...but it was fine.

Normal batteries are just so heavy! Those li-on ones are much better.

 

[andrew_s]

Lithium AAs are good
Alkaline AAs (as bought in your random corner shop) have a very low capacity in a digital camera as they won't give the brief bursts of high power required after relatively little use.
Rechargeable AAs are good, but you need a charger unless you just take a fistful of them (bulky/heavy compared with camera li-ion).
Spare dedicated rechargeable camera batteries are probably best if you can get them at a decent price. The official camera manufacturer's versions are usually expensive.

For storage, I've usually just taken spare cards. This can be cheaper than the external drive solution, and is battery free. 4GB cards are now around the £10 mark.
Ideally you'd do both - backup used cards to the external drive but don't overwrite the card. Both cards and hard drives do on occasion fail, and losing your photos is highly irritating.

 

[P.H]

And think where the power goes. Switching the monitor off and using the viewfinder will at least double and maybe triple the number of non flash photos you take per charge.

 

[ufkacbln]

Power Monkey!

This is my answer to everything!

Single device which charges quickly and has a fair whack of power.

It can run a camera, GPS, Ipod or mobile phone and can also charge these.

 

[andrew_s]

And think where the power goes. Switching the monitor off and using the viewfinder will at least double and maybe triple the number of non flash photos you take per charge.

but how many small cameras have viewfinders these days?

 

[xilios]

We use rechargeble (2300mA or higher) AA's on everything, (including camera). Going into Strassburg in '06 the camera did not work anymore so we just replaced the betteries from our tail lights untill we found a gas station for some alkalines.
On our camera we use SD cards, they come as big as 32 GB's, thats a lot of pictures.
We just bought the Asus EEE pc 901 (xp) and have a 16 GB SD card on it which is enough for our needs. We took it to Greece a couple weeks ago and it worked great, got free internet everywhere we went but it was in Athens though.
I also installed the microsoft autoroute express and the ANWB camping select programs on it and played around with next springs tour. Many options with an altra portable pc, and with a solid state.
Still playing with it to figure out what programs would be nice to have along on our next tour.

 

[Brains]

I bought a second set of batteries off e-bay from a HK based camera supplier. so even if main set goes flat I still have enough poer for another few days.

I recharge whenever I get a chance, camp sites, pubs, cafes, there are always places that don't mind you recharging.

I also take along one of those 3 way plugs, so i can do phone, camera and GPS all in one go

As for big storage as you say it's either camera shops making you DVD's or the AEEEE £300 laptop

 

[Rob S]

What decent camera runs on AAs these days? My fab Olympus C40 did but it uses Smartmedia cards which are rather too small capacity at 128MB

 

[rich p]

My Nikon Coolpix L15 for one. It seems pretty decent to me but I'm no expert