Digital Photo Tips
Never Run Out of Digital Film
A half-gig memory card that costs you $90-$150 bucks will only hold about 65 full resolution RAW files if you’re using a DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) camera. So you’d need about three of these a day for a typical pro shoot. Double that number if it’s a shoot involving a lot of action: fashion, sports, journalism, or entertainment. If you were to be gone for a week, you’d need about 40 of them. That’s $4,000 worth of memory cards!
Of course, you’ve probably already figured out that you can get away with a day’s worth if you take a laptop and card reader along with you…provided you have 20 GB or so of free hard drive space on the laptop. The obvious solution, if you know about it, is a portable pocket drive. A pocket drive is a hard drive that will fit in your pocket. The kind you want is also one that doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall (except for re-charging, of course). But here’s the trouble with that idea: Most of those I’ve tested don’t work very well and cost $400 to $600 dollars.
The reason for both those problems is that they try to be all things to all people: Photo storage, MP3 player, editing dock…blah, blah. That sounds like a good idea, at first. The problem lies in the fact that it creates too many opportunities for breakdown and keeps the cost sky high. What are you going to do when you spent all that money on a device made by a small company that can’t give you support when you’re 6,000 miles (or even 300) from home?
Then a friend gave me a tip that nearly sent me to heaven. He found the I/O Magic Digital Photo Library. It is a 20 GB pocket drive that doesn’t do one stupid thing except that thing that you may depend on for a living: store your photos while you’re away from your computer. It lists for about $200, but I’ve found them on the Net for under $140!
The Digital Photo Library is so easy to use that you’d have to be on heavy drugs in order to screw up: All you do is push the Power button to turn it on, stick your memory card into one of its six card-reading slots (that’s right, it can read just about any type of memory card) and then push the Copy button. Lights will blink until all the pictures have been copied to the drive and then the drive will power itself off. That means I can carry it in my camera bag while it’s downloading. Meanwhile, I’ve put another card in my camera and can just truck along my merry way, shooting all the time. So even though it may take 15 or 20 minutes to download all the RAW files from a 512MB card, as long as I have two of them, I can shoot uninterrupted for at least a whole day (and probably several more).
When I get back to my car or hotel, I plug my laptop in and then plug in the Digital Photo Library with a USB cable. At that point, the laptop is powering the pocket drive, so you’re not using up battery while you’re transferring files to the laptop.
Of course, it’s still not a perfect world. It would be nice to have a higher-capacity drive for longer trips, shoots that are more intense than usual, or for those who use rapid sequence or video shooting a lot. That’s really not much of a problem. You can buy two or three of these guys for what one 40GB drive made by most anyone else would charge you. You also get the bonus of having a backup drive (especially valuable if you’re going to shoot in the rainforest or at Burning Man during a white-out.
Oh. One last hint: Make sure your laptop has a CD writer or (better) DVD writer. That way, if you run out of space on the laptop, you can offload files to CDs.
Want proof that the I/O Magic Digital Photo Library is a good idea? Sony just introduced 20 and 40 MB versions that operate the same way. Of course, they cost more and they’re a bit focused on the memory stick card. On the plus side, they do read other formats, look very slick in their silver-colored cases, and are made by a company that we’re sure will still be here when and if the drive breaks down (no hard drive ever lasts forever).