Dave and Jen For Oxfam

Digital cameras and holidays. There is a valid train of thought about people going on holidays with their little digital cameras and spending more time taking photos then soaking in the experience. There is plenty i agree with in that regards, and one only needs to sit in any crumbling temple watching people get frustrated with each other as they jostle to take, largely, terrible photos of wonderful things, before bustling back on to a tour bus. The logic of this argument gets stronger when you consider the photo their tiny point and shoot camera attempted to take of a distant temple, at sunset, with their tiny flash on is all but throw-away. So why did we take 3 cameras with us? 

Some of the adventures Jen and i go on are nice and pure and rough. Climbing mountains at 3am to see the sunrise, getting lost hiking around waterfalls or just driving… somewhere… distant. Those are great trips. This trip however presented us with the challenge of fulfilling certain obligations with sponsors, articles commissioned and the like, along with another layer to the need for certain imagery. We had our own needs, giving the mix of holiday, adventure, charity and education within the experience. This factor of ingredients made the experience more a project than a holiday. Which is why we departed with three digital camerasand a digital video camera stowed safely in our Crumpler bags. The cameras consisted of:

• Canon Ixus 55 
• Canon Powershot A700
• Panasonic DMC-FZ5 Lumix
• Sony DCR HC32E

These are relatively older bits of gear from our collection, and all relatively cheap. The Ixus is a very small camera for quick snaps and video whilst riding, and inconspicous when amongst crowds. The A700 is a worthy general travel camera and offers enough manual control for good pics, and escapes the marketing insanity of artificially high megapixels. The Lumix is basically a step under a DSLR with 35mm equivalent lens, good rapid fire mode, manual controls and is capable of good seperation and sweet bokeh. The video camera is a vertern of my band and alas still uses DV tapes. All light, easily stowed and kept safe, as i said above. But not safe enough. With Jen’s riding accident we have basically written off the Ixus and the video camera. Thankfully no data was lost and this re-enforces the importance of travel insurance.

Since getting back to the studio in Brisbane, i have been eagerly dreading the task of sorting through all the images. Whilst travelling, i made good use of Adobe Lightroom on the Acer Aspire One to attend to some of this on the road. The plan was to import all the daily photos into Lightroom, quickly tag them for the day and region, and utilise its backup function onto the tiny Lacie drive. This worked well for a few days but we soon fell in to the far easier habit of nightly dumps of files into daily folders for each camera. Its important to keep the different camera’s files apart, and a lot of other small issues i could relate and bore with at great length. The truth is the system as above works exceedingly well, but the trip quite quickly become bigger than the technology. There was just so much to see, experience and do, and appending files for the sake of saving time back at home? A quick decision to make. 

So now however i have the task of getting all these files imported into Lightoom, renamed and sorted. After that comes tagging them (where taken, what of, etc) and then rating. After that we’ll export a heap up to Flickr and post the gallery here. Only after that will we consider the exhibition content. If anyone is interested in the workflow of this let me know, as its rather interesting how best to accomodate three cameras, five SD cards, twenty-three days of travel and a very dusty and unreliable environment. For now though, there is work to do.