LEAVE THE LAPTOP AT HOME!

Simple Strategies for Power, Storage, and Backing Up on Long, Remote Photo Trips


So you’re planning that long and far away photo trip of a lifetime. Maybe it’s a two week rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. Maybe you’re trekking in the Himalayas, or perhaps you’re following in Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe’s footsteps and planning a ten day horse packing trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Time’s have changed from when all you needed to do was load your view camera and film sheets onto a pack animal and go.
You’re probably sporting one of the later generation DSLRs, which sounds just great until you start thinking about how to recharge batteries, where to store your images, and how to get juice to your laptop. What to do? How do you sort through the options of solar rechargers, extra laptop batteries, hard drives, backup hard drives, generators?……..the list goes on. My mantra for any long and/or remote outdoor or travel trip is this: Take everything that you truly need, but keep the kit as light and as simple as possible. If I don’t really need it, it stays at home.
Powering my camera: If outlet power is unavailable, I keep it simple by avoiding rechargers, solar or otherwise. I just take extra camera batteries. Today’s SLRs are energy misers. Camera batteries last longer and take more pictures than ever before. On my very longest trips, like a 5 week wilderness expedition on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic where there were no outlets, I took 4 additional batteries for my camera, in addition to the one it came with. Each extra battery costs $40 and weighs 2.6 oz. That’s a $160 investment in power that weighs 10.4 oz. In 5 weeks, I made about 3,000 captures. I tried to not use too much juice looking at the camera monitor and when the trip was over, I had gone through 4 batteries and still had one remaining. $160 and 10.4 oz is much cheaper, much lighter, and far less likely to be problematic than any solar roll or generator that I know of.
That’s all well and good you may be thinking, but extra camera batteries won’t power a laptop. Well, you got me there; however, I’m here to tell you that if you are going on a long, remote photo trip, you should seriously consider keeping it simple and just leaving that laptop at home! What is the most important use of the laptop to the digital photographer?......for editing our images of course. Sure it can store images, but lots of devices can. My feeling is that I can edit at home on my big beautiful flat screen while sitting in my super comfy office chair. When I’ve invested weeks of my life and thousands of dollars to get to a remote place, the last thing I want to do is edit images. I’d rather spend my time going out and creating more images! Leaving the laptop at home on a long, remote trip makes for one less device to charge, one less thing to get stolen, one less thing to carry.
Here are my strategies for storage and backup. If I’m off on a shorter remote trip, say up 10 days and if I want to keep things as light as possible, I will bring extra batteries for my camera and all the compact flash cards that I need for the trip. I will keep the images on the cards and not store them or back them up until the trip is over. If I start running out of card room, my extra battery or two will give me the juice to edit images while looking at them on my camera monitor and I will create more storage space that way.
On a longer trip where I’m shooting so much that I am forced to download cards or if weight is not an issue, I will take along portable storage devices. My favorite product to date is the Sanho Hyperdrive SPACE Portable Storage Device and Memory Card Reader. I own two and they are available with capacities ranging from 40GB to 500GB. My preference is for a device that does not give an image preview. My philosophy is that if I need to see something larger than the 3 in. wide image on my camera monitor, I can wait until I’m at home. A portable storage device without a monitor is smaller, lighter, and cheaper. One Hyperdrive weighs a tad over half a pound and is about half the size of my SB-800 Speedlight flash unit. Put a memory card into a Hyperdrive, turn it on, and then watch as your card is quickly downloaded and data is verified from card to device. I like to have two Hyperdrives on a longer remote trip. I download each card to both of my Hyperdrives and then I carry one of them and I give the other one to one of my traveling companions and make sure they keep it in a safe place. If I’m concerned about moisture or shock, I’ll put each Hyperdrive in it’s own tiny Pelican box. The Hyperdrives always stay on our person or nearby. They never go into checked luggage that could be lost. This storage and backup system is redundant and fairly fool proof. It helps me sleep at night.
So the next time you leave for a long, remote photo trip, remember: Keep it simple! Consider leaving the laptop behind, carry plenty of freshly charged extra batteries, and carry a portage storage device or better yet two.