My Digital Accessories on the Road

I am often asked what digital gear I carry while away on a photo shoot, so I here is a quick list of the essential workflow tools that I take on the road with me.

Computer

I use a MacBook notebook computer (updated 04/2008: Macbook Air) for most of my computing needs, both at home and away. I use a dedicated desktop computer (currently a Dell PC, but will be moving to a Mac desktop when they are announced and shipping) for my critical color management applications, but all of my email, word processing, etc happens on my MacBook. I have the 2ghz MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and I have upgraded the internal hard drive to 120GB. Since my typical safari trip has me leading back-to-back safaris, I needed the ability to store between 40GB and 60GB of digital images from my current camera setup, which is sure to change in the future.

Storage

I use a Epson P-2000 storage device as my backup hard drive, as well as a method to offload my images in case my MacBook craters on me. I never know. It could happen at any moment.

I also have an external 100GB USB hard drive as my second backup device, and I keep this hard drive with me at all times when traveling overseas. I also carry my original MacBook's 80GB hard drive in a padded case, and this will allow me to have a bootable computer in the event of a hard drive failure. I create a fresh backup of my internal hard drive to this 80GB drive at least once every few weeks.

Compact Flash Cards

Ok. My name is Andy Biggs and I am addicted to compact flash cards. I have to admit that I have a boneyard of compact flash cards dating from 2002. Only 11 more steps to go towards my full recovery.

My 'collection' of cards that I actually use are the following: (1) 8GB Sandisk Extreme III, (2) 4GB Sandisk Etreme III, (1) Sandisk 2GB Extreme III, (2) Lexar 80x 2GB, various 1GB and 4GB Microdrives to be used as loaners.

I use Lexar USB CF readers, but I am evaluating other options to make sure that I am using the latest and fastest readers available on the market today.

Electrical Plugs

A few months back, while out on safari, Thomas Knoll (one of the original authors of Photoshop), introduced me to the Road Warrior universal electrical plug. I have seen devices like this in the past, but nothing so compact and, well, universal. What a wonderful product. It seems that I only see great innovations like this from the Japanese market, and I was glad to finally find a source for such a product here in the US. The Road Warrior allows me to carry a small and lightweight adapter that will work in any country around the world. Time to put away my multiple sets of plugs. I usually take 3 or 4 adapters on each trip, per country. Sometimes I might need 3 totally different sets of adapters for a single trip. Not any longer, since I found this product.

You can purchase the Road Warrior from Madsonline for US$28 each.

Software

I seem to test and use many different software applications on a daily basis, so this is just a quick list of applications that I am using at this very moment. This list will most certainly change as I get more acquainted to the Mac environment.

• Photo Mechanic - for downloading, renaming, viewing and culling of images.

• Adobe Camera Raw - for digital raw conversions

• Adobe Photoshop CS2 - for final image cleanup

• Adobe Lightroom - I am evaluating the application, and I suspect this will be my future all-in-one application for downloading, renaming, viewing, sorting, culling, rating, raw converting, and outputting of images.

Back from Alaska

Canon 1DMkII, 500mm f/4 L IS, ISO 400, 1/200sec @ f/5.0

Well, I am back from a 7 hour flight from Anchorage, Alaska. Red eye flights are always challenging when it comes to sleep. We had a wonderful time photographing coastal brown bears in Lake Clark National Park, where we saw around 25 to 40 bears every day. The weather was challenging for the first few days with overcast/rainy skies, and then cleared up wonderfully near the end of our stay.

I have nothing but wonderful things to report from Silver Salmon Creek Lodge, as they run a great operation out there. We were fed extremely well, too. I am trying to process some of my best images right now, but the long journey might have me working on the images later on this weekend.

I am headed for Alaska

I am off shooting grizzlies for the next 6 days, photographing grizzly bears in Lake Clark National Park, Alaska. The workshop will only consist of 6 people, and from all the news I am hearing from the area, the photographic opportunities should be stellar. The flight to Anchorage will be over 7 hours long, and my mp3 player recently cratered on me. Not good. But that gives me time to do some writing for a book I have been working on for over 2 years. Essentially a 'how-to' book on how to photograph with digital equipment out on safari.

When I return, I will be posting a few more 2007 safaris online, 1 of which will be an alumni safari in late September 2007 with 100% luxury camping in remote areas (with electricity, of course). We will also head down south to the Selous in southern Tanzania. I will have 2 other safaris that will be announced: 1 in June 2007 and 1 in early September 2007.

My Storage requirements

My library of digital images keeps growing every year at a faster rate from a space requirement standpoint, and this is mostly due to owning cameras that generate larger and larger files. So how do I store all of my data?

I have a 1 terabyte RAID5 TeraStation hard drive array, made by Buffalo Technology. It isn't a speed demon, but it gets the job done. My primary working drive is a 500GB 7200 rpm drive in my desktop workstation. All of my more recent raw images and layered .psd files are accessed on this drive. Every night these files are backed up to my RAID5 server through the use of Retrospect backup software.

Once a month I back up my RAID5 server to offline USB hard drives. These drives are in varying sizes from 160GB to 300GB in size. It takes me some manual moving around of files, because no single drive can hold enough folders that need to stay together as one cohesive group. In other words, one drive might have baby photos mixed up with African safari photos. Not optimal.

So I am revamping my entire backup strategy in the coming weeks. I plan on turning my Dell desktop workstation into a RAID server of some kind. I am also thinking of buying a 1.6TB ReadyNAS RAID5 server for an additional backup server, as my digital photo library grows by about 200GB per year (yes, you have that correct!). The ReadyNAS is apparently much faster in retrieving and saving files compared to my TeraStation solution. So my backup plan will work like this:

After a shoot, files will be transferred from my MacBook to my Dell desktop with two 500GB drives inside. On a nightly basis, these files will then be backed up to the ReadyNAS 1.6TB (1.2TB usable) server. Once a month I will backup the ReadyNAS data to the TeraStation 1TB server (750GB usable) and any additional external hard drive(s). I will then take these devices off site to a family member's house. Since my library is growing so quickly, I anticipate that the Buffalo server will only contain older shooting sessions from years past, and it is not likely that they will change at all. So my monthly off location backup will most likely only be a USB drive or two.

I am just thinking off of the top of my head, and these ideas might change while I am sketching everything out on my way to Alaska on Saturday. I will have over 7 hours to think about it!

September Safari openings available

I have had some late cancellations on my September 3-15 safari. We will be photographing at three exciting northern Tanzania game parks: Serengeti National Park, Ngorongoro Crater and Tarangire National park. These safaris will be unique in that we will be visiting Tarangire National Park during its peak. At its peak, Tarangire National Park has exceptional wildlife viewing (especially elephants) along the Tarangire River. This is a wonderful time to view elephants and other large mammals.

Here is a summary of the safaris :

13 Days out of your schedule from door to door.
Parks visited: Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti National Park
Limited to 12 people

For more detailed information on this safari, click on these links:

September 3-25, 2006:

http://www.andybiggs.com/2006_09.03_safari.html

I anticipate that these spots will be booked up rather quickly, like all of my other safaris. We will need to arrange for your airfare as soon as possible, so if you are interested you should contact me ASAP.

 
To book this wonderful photographic adventure, please email me back as soon as you determine that the trip has your name written all over it.

Safari Photos Posted

I finally got around to processing some of my images. I haven't had the time to do anything more than a simple raw conversion of my digital negatives. Out of 57GB of images, I am probably happy with about 4 or 5 photographs in total. For some reason I had a difficult time setting up photographs on these past two safaris, as opposed to previsualizing and setting up photographs that inspire me. I had a wonderful time, and probably saw more breathtaking wildlife behavior than I have ever seen, but there are very few images that conform to my normal look of my past photographs.

Here is a link to my May and June safari photographs:

May and June Safari Photographs (rough edits)

My Move to the Mac

I tested the Apple Macintosh waters early in 2005 with a Mac Mini. I maxed out the memory with 1GB of ram, and I learned all that I could learn about the Mac on the machine. I learned that the machine was not even close to enough horsepower for the things that I want to do, but from a usability of OSX standpoint I learned much. And then Apple made the Intel announcement. This froze me in my tracks, as I was on the heels of buying a dual G5 desktop.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago out on safari. My trust IBM Thinkpad X40 has been a wonderful machine, but the small 1.8" 60GB hard drive, slow processor and limited screen size weren't cutting it any more. Yes, I loved the very light 2.7 pounds of the X40, but my storage needs, processing power and overall usability needed to improve. Somebody had a new MacBook in black on my safari a few weeks ago, and I was intrigued. An intel dual core cpu, 2GB of ram, and the ability to run Windows XP via Boot Camp or Parallels. Pretty cool.

So I picked up a black MacBook with 2GB of ram 2 days ago. I am now processing my 4 hours of HD video from Tanzania, as well as processing and organizing my recent photographs from safar with Adobe Lightroom beta 3. I am hooked. My only disappointment so far is the amount of heat that the MacBook generates. I mean really hot.

Why did I buy the MacBook over the MacBook Pro? Mostly because of my needs, and not desires. I wanted the smallest machine I could get, and the MacBook Pro is a few inches larger. Also, I tend to buy a new laptop about every year or so, and buying a more expensive laptop that will get banged around doesn't make sense to me. I am tough on my equipment!!

Have any essential Mac programs that I should have? Drop me a line, as I would love to hear about them.

Digging through the archives...

Gosh, it is fun (or depressing) to look back at earlier photographs in the early(ier) days of digital photography. Here is a quick photograph from a quick stop in England back in 2002, as Leslie and I were headed back home from a 6-week mega safari in east Africa. We had climbed Kilimanjaro, went on a long safari in northern Tanzania, headed to Zanzibar for 5 days, and then went on a long safari in Kenya. When visiting London on the way back home, we decided to be tourons for the day and head over to Stonehenge. uh huh. Not what I expected. Since there were so many tourons there, I decided to scope out some street shooting kind of shots. I thought it was kind of funny to see 3 people on a bench, all listening to the audio tour of the famous landmark.

Taken with a Canon EOS D30, 16-35mm lens.