Travel workflow

[RPCrowe]

I usually travel with three batteries for each of my cameras (I mostly shoot with two cameras).

I will rotate the batteries and will always start the day with a fresh battery in each camera, a spare in my shooting vest and the third battery charging or charged and left in my motor home or hotel room (depending on how I am traveling).

I have numbered each set of batteries with the numerals 1 through 3. That way, I will have both of my cameras using batteries number 1, batteries number 2 as backups and batteries #3 charging and rotate these batteries through the days of my trip.

I could probably get along with just two batteries per camera but, three is an insurance policy. If a battery goes down, I will always have at least two batteries for each camera.

My workflow is that before I go to bed each evening, I charge the batteries which were used during the day's shooting.

Also as part of my workflow, I down load my images, batch title them and give them a cursory check to ensure that there are no glaring equipment problems. I copy the images to a pair of tiny but, large capacity external hard drives. I don't do any image editing on my trips. I would rather spend the time shooting.

I carry one of the mini hard drives in my camera backpack and my wife sends the other hard drive onboard with her checked-on luggage. That way I have back-ups in two different places. The mini hard drives are different brands - redundancy is safety.

The problem is that when I am traveling in my motor home, both hard drives are inthe same location. I am looking into some remote storage possibility to which I can send each the days imagery for storage. Anyone have any good ideas?

I will then format the cards for the next days shooting. I prefer to format each card in the camera with which I am going to shoot it. Probably, just formatting the card in my 40D would work O.K. for both the 40D and 30D but, I individually format just to be safe.

I learned a lesson with a corrupted compact flash card recently. I now have loaded an image recovery program on my travel notebook computer, just in case I have another corrupted disk. That way, I don't have to sweat through my entire trip hoping that I can recover the images when I arrive home.

I now will also not use cards larger than 4 GIG. That is also an insurance policy against loss of a great number of images due to a corrupted card. I recently had an 8 GIG card die but, luckily was able to recover the images.

I will shoot LOTS of images and I will carry extra CF Cards (they are cheap these days) just in case I cannot download my images one evening because of power failure or some other reason. I want to have enough memory for at least two days shooting and to retire any cards which are not working.

Anyone out there have any other workflow tips which make life easier or safer?