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2003 was a year of enormous change for us. We decided early in the year that technology was moving so fast it was innevitable that we would be capturing images digitally eventually. Rather than hang on to the "old technology" we decided to get in early and so for most of the year we shot digitally using the Fuji S2 Pro. It was a rollercoaster ride, although we have never regretted the move. In fact it seems inconceivable in 2007 that we would still use film. When they learnt about our decision, Practical Photography magazine asked us to write a series of articles about our experiences. This ran for most of the year in PP and we actually wrote the articles and shot the pictures in real time each month. Sometimes this meant that we contradicted ourselves in later articles and occasionally said things which we later regretted! However, the complete set of articles are reproduced here in largely the same format as they were originally published in PP. Sometimes the writing is a bit cheesy but that's what a monthly photo magazine needs to sell. We hope that you find them interesting and useful. We are about to write a new article with our current thoughts on digital to be published on these pages in the near future

Part 9 - In it for the long haul

Alesund red sail
Alesund red sail
Since we started using the Fuji S2 earlier this year, we've flown abroad on several short weekend trips, but recently we did our first longer trip, this time to Norway for 14 days. Help! What to take, what to leave behind, spare batteries, chargers, laptops, microdrives, and last but not least, two or more travel plugs adapters. Before digital, the only decision was how many rolls of Velvia should we pack?

Camera's and airlines are always a pain, and these two words should really never appear in the same sentence! Either, trust the gear to the hold and pray for gentle baggage handlers, or con the check in staff into believing it's light enough to go as hand luggage. We've always tried to travel very light and hence carry our gear into the cabin. With digital, despite what we said a few months ago, our basic gear has ended up about the same weight as before. Extra batteries and a laptop compensate for the weight reduction by ditching film and filters, however, we won't miss the ritual pitched battles with 'jobs-worth' X-Ray Men over hand checking the film.

We use microdrives for image storage in the camera and carry a total of four 1Gbyte drives (320 pix on the S2 in RAW mode). We have never (yet!) exceeded this in one day's shooting, so we only need to download to the laptop at the end of the day. Downloading a full microdrive takes about 14 minutes via the PCMCIA slot and we have found the microdrives to be completely reliable over several thousand frames. A mains power source every day or two is pretty much essential, just so you can get to use those plug things you always carry but rarely use, to simultaneously power the computer, re-charge the camera batteries, make a cup of tea and shave/dry your hair!

At the moment we use a tiny Sony Vaio laptop which weighs just over a kilo and fits easily into a small backpack. It's light enough to carry around all day when you're not happy about leaving it in your room or car. It has a 20Gbyte hard drive, which means a total storage of around 1280 pictures (or the equivalent of 36 rolls of film). This is barely enough for two weeks of shooting even allowing for the fact that we tend to shoot less frames on digital than film because we get less wastage due to bracketing. The lap top is great for reviewing pictures in the evening, so there is less time for karaoke in the bar (actually a real advantage in Norway if you have ever heard the singing)! It's also great because lap tops have uses beyond just storing images - we are typing this overlooking Sognefjord in Norway - yes its chucking it down without a glimpse of sun all day, but at least we are doing something useful.


However, we are thinking about getting one of the many portable storage devices on the market (see the reviews in a previous months PP) to supplement the laptop, not just for extra storage but also for security. It dawned on us recently that our laptop is far more likely than film to be stolen whilst travelling and also if the hard drive were to fail then we might lose all the pictures from a trip.

The storage problems are only just beginning, however, what do you do with all the image files when you return home? We now have almost 400Gbytes of disk space on our home computer and we now back up all the RAW files using DVD-R. CDR's have just proved to be too small and time consuming to offer a practical storage medium. After 8 months of digital shooting we already have around 70 CDR's!

Anyway, back to the photography, the rain is stopping and that looks like a hint of sun on the hills - perhaps today won't be a complete washout! If you thought that choosing where to travel with your new digital camera was the end of all your decisions, then think again, because like everything digital there is always a whole new set of problems to stumble over

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