SAY CHEESE - advice on photography and videography while on the road
Digital Photo Storage
The extensive use of digital cameras means that traveling without knowing how your photos turned out is a relic of the past. Uploading photos to a blog is a great way to decorate blog entries (That is if the internet connection obliges).
Backing Up Photos
Talk to travelers and many will reveal horror stories of photos lost from journeys – everything from stolen cameras, destroyed laptops and water damage from an unexpected rainstorm. The fear of losing that once in a lifetime shot of you at the pyramids, or at the Taj Mahal leads many travelers to back up their photos.
Many photo shops in places like India and Indonesia will take your memory cards and for as little as $2 make a CD copy of your photos. The careful make two copies and send one home, but some countries like Vietnam or the Maldives make sending CD’s anywhere outside of the country a bureaucratic nightmare.
Uploading Photos
A long trip is going to fill up the memory cards fast. At some point you will have to download the photos and then upload them for viewing.
A recent trip to Borobudur proved this point: the internet café was full of travelers who for hours sat there patiently uploading their pictures to their Flickr.com page, Facebook profile and personal blogs –all in the name of social networking. It takes a lot of patience to do it, and best done daily to avoid a backlog; again, choosing your accommodation wisely can help speed up this process or make it a less painful procedure that trooping down to the often crowded internet cafes, sitting under fluorescent lights.
Flickr.com: mass uploading tool now makes this site easier to use, plus it is a fantastic community to share photos with other travelers, with many groups focusing on obscure topics like cabin crew shots and sunsets, to name a few
Photobucket.com: you can upload photos and create slideshows on this site
Facebook.com: another place where you can connect with travelers you have met on the road; albums can be created on your home page
Personal Experience
After losing every last photo from my trip to India, I now always back up my photos twice on hard drive (my MacBook Pro and again on a 250 G external hard drive). I also upload photos on sites like Flickr.com. If I cant connect to the internet to upload them all, I will upload only the ones I cant live without; if the internet is impossible, like in Africa, I make CD copies to carry with me until I can send them home. (crossing my fingers nothing happens to them)
I do travel with three memory cards of 2 G each, so I can save the best photos on each card, along with the back up steps outlined above.
Uploading Video
Shooting video on the road can convey far more than a paragraph or photo in a blog, capturing everything but the smells of a place…..and with video uploading services opening left and right, more and more travelers are using ‘vlogging’ as a way to pass on their point of view from the countries they visited.
Free, and growing by the thousands of videos per hour, Youtube.com is the best there is for uploading videos, where you can set up your own channel and include a link from your email, blog or website to announce new additions to your library. It is also a great place to connect with travelers, and a key point of contact aside from your blog, Flickr.com and Facebook page.
Personal Experience
Patience is of the utmost importance for video, because it can take a very long time to upload. I have used a Sony Cybershot for 2 years now and cannot complain about the quality of the video shot from a camera that fits in my pocket. While it won’t win any travel show awards, I was able to capture roosters crowing in the Manila airport on a recent visit, and a cart full of fried tarantulas on a visit to Cambodia.
To get around the slow internet connectivity experienced in some countries, I download the video onto my MacBook Pro laptop first, back it up on a 250 Gig external drive, then delete it from my camera’s memory card to free up space.
Personally I recommend staying in a Wi Fi equipped hotel if you are determined to shoot video on your trip. After downloading the videos to my laptop and external, I upload the videos overnight to Youtube, leaving my laptop on to handle the job.
If my hotel does not have Wi Fi, I might try an internet station, but spending hours in a cramped cubicle is not my thing, so I will then wait till I get to a country where the internet speed is better to upload the videos to Youtube.
You can view my 'TheLoweRoad' videos here: www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=theloweroad
