Photography and Long-term Travel

Branches, Capilano Suspension Bridge Park; Vancouver, Canada

The demands and challenges of photography on a long trip are fairly different from a vacation-length trip.  Primarily, the difference is in the volume of pictures, but there are other surprises too.  This is a collection of ideas, tips, and lessons learned while taking pictures for a year on the road.  Some of them may also be helpful for vacations, or even general use as well.

Colors

We had a suggestion to post a collection of vividly colored photographs.  Here are three collages, followed by a slideshow of all the individual images.

Hong Kong: Snapshots

Hong Kong was vibrant, culturally diverse, and very easy to get around on foot and by public transit.  It was a pleasant surprise, and a good change, after Singapore.  Some snapshots, and brief notes:

Bali: Snapshots

Hong Kong Subway

Typical subway scene in Hong Kong.  Clean car.  Map with illuminated indicator for current stop, next stop, and which side  the doors will open on. Quiet, polite passengers.  Tote bag with pandas that look like KISS band members.  Let’s zoom in on that, shall we?

Hong Kong is awesome.

Singapore Snapshots

Wedding Photos

It was wedding season in Vietnam when we arrived.  Traditionally that is during the dry season, when farming families had both the time for an extended party, and the money for it, from the last harvest.  I don’t think any of the couples we photographed were from farming families, as their photographers were all carting around roughly $8000 in camera gear, but likely the wedding season is now more of a cultural expectation than a practical decision.  We saw an even mix of brides in traditional garb and more westernized dresses.  Lana guessed that many of them would have a photo shoot in each style.

Postcard: Hong Kong

Dusk, Sheung Wan district, Hong Kong.  Taken on Wing Lok street.  Yes, that’s Lana on the right.

Bad Photo Friday

Bad banana? No monkey, it’s Bad Photo Friday! Sit back and enjoy, along with some stolen banana.

Postcard: Singapore

Lunar new year in Chinatown, Singapore.  Taken in the Anne Siang Hill area, from the pedestrian alley at the corner of McCallum and Amoy, facing down McCallum.

Bad Photo Friday

This week’s bad photo is brought to you by the “over it” smile.

Just. Take. The photo. Already.  Also making an appearance in this photo is the Look of Much Constipation Concentration. Also we are sweaty and gross after walking all the way across the Harbor Bridge. The look on Lana’s face may also be influenced by our decision to walk back rather than take a ferry across the water to Circular Quay. 

Lana’s not sure what influenced this one, except for maybe alcohol or a seizure.  You’ll notice, however, that David’s expression remains exactly the same.

Postcard: Bali

Remnants of an offering, Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, Ubud Bali.

Bad Photo Friday

No, not bad hair day. Bad photo day.

It’s never a good thing to let the photographer fall behind you.  Thanks David. Posterity thanks you very much.

Bad Photo Friday

We have enough bad photos to post one every day for, oh, forever. But we thought we'd share a real humdinger each week, as a counterpoint to the steady diet of gorgeous landscapes and attractive travelers posing with smiling faces. This is how you know we're not faking this trip like the moon landing. No one would ever fake these photos.

Holiday Card

Normally we send out a personalized photo card for Christmas with a letter telling everyone what we’ve been up to, the trips we’ve taken in the year, and any significant life events. This year, the blog has taken the place of our Christmas card.  But we did put together a slideshow of photos of us from our trip, which we thought would be a fun way to see how all that ice cream we’ve been eating has affected us, and exactly how many bad hair days we’ve had between the two of us. 

Happy Holidays! VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Seriously, though, Happy Holidays to all of you who are following along.  May your journeys in the coming year be filled with beautiful views and lots of ice cream—I know ours will.

Much Love,
Lana & David

Travel Photo Processing Workflow

The following post is rated PG for photography geeks, and may not be appropriate for all audiences.

I mentioned in a previous post that a fair chunk of the time I’ve spent at the computer on this trip has been for processing our pictures.  Why so much time, and why process at all?    It’s not actually that much time compared to what we spend seeing things in the areas we visit each day, but it is the majority of the time I spend on the computer.  There are a number of things I’m doing: importing, adding keywords, culling down to the pictures we want to post, making modifications to those images, and finally exporting them. 


Import and Keywords
The import is very simple, due to the automation of the software I use, Adobe’s Lightroom 4.  During the import, I will add keywords that apply to all of the images being imported.  Afterwards, I will add additional keywords to subsets, or individual photos; for example, I add the keyword “Lana” to all the pictures she appears in, or I add the keyword “Glacier National Park” to all of the pictures taken in the park, etc.  If I import pictures every night, it takes just a few minutes, and the keywording is easy, since the day is still fresh in our minds.  This might seem a bit detail oriented, but it’s a very small price to pay for having a useable picture library, rather than an enormous, unlabeled grab bag.  We will have more than 30,000 images by the time this trip is over.  A relatively simple task like choosing a picture of Lana and me for a Christmas letter would be tedious to impossible if we had to rifle through that entire collection without any way to search by name.  Instead, we’ll be able to filter the collection to display only images that contain both the keywords “Lana” and “David”, and instantly we can choose one we like from a (comparatively) small set of images.  Or, we can quickly find all of the pictures we’ve taken with our travelling gnome, Mr. Bee.

Culling
Once the pictures from all three cameras are in Lightroom’s library, we will review each picture briefly, and give anything with promise a 1-star rating, and mark any obvious rejects (blurry, etc.) for deletion.  This is also a fairly quick process.  Like keywording, it’s easier to do the same day the pictures were taken.  Sometimes we review them together, sometimes we each take our own pass.  Usually at this point, I will stop working on images from today, and either Lana will start lining up the next accommodation reservation, or I will start catching up on an earlier day’s pictures.  If that day has only 1-star images, I’ll filter the display to only show those, and go through the second pass of giving the best a 2-star rating.  Very roughly speaking, 1 picture in 20 makes it this far.  Here’s a 0-star self-portrait failure (the 2 second self-portrait timer was not long enough for me to get back to Lana) that didn’t make the cut, but is still amusing:

Processing
Only when we’ve culled the pictures down to the 2-stars will I invest time in making adjustments.  If it’s called for, I will crop or rotate.  The jpeg images from the small camera will generally be finished now,  though some will need some tweaks for severe highlight clipping, or to brighten shadows to reveal details or facial features.  The raw format images from the two larger cameras get a number of additional adjustments, but I generally spend less than a minute working on each one.  The picture above is unprocessed, and the picture below is the same image, after cropping, rotating, and 7 simple adjustments. 

Exporting
I have configured an export preset in Lightroom, which automates saving all of the finished, 2-star images to a folder, resizing each to make the longest edge 1000 pixels, for a more uniform appearance on the blog.  This takes essentially no time.  Now they’re ready for posting, once we write up a coherent description.

Why Raw?
Since it’s so much faster to process the jpeg images from the smallest camera, why don’t I do the same with the two larger cameras?  There is no shortage of really well written information on the advantages and shortcomings of raw format on the web, and this won’t be a detailed recap of that, but I will describe why I choose to dedicate time to hunching over a computer, post-processing while I’m travelling in exciting places.  For that to make sense, I need to briefly explain what the difference is between the two image formats.

Digital Capture
All digital cameras translate the light from an exposed sensor chip into raw sensor data—or a raw format image.  Most cameras use a tiny, specialized computer chip to immediately convert the raw data into a standard format known as jpeg, which can be displayed on pretty much any digital device, including your web browser.  Once that jpeg image is saved to the camera’s memory card, the original raw sensor data is permanently discarded.  Some cameras allow you to save the raw sensor data to the memory card instead.  This data is not an image, per se, and it cannot be displayed directly on a web page.  You need a specific computer program to interpret that data, and display the image that it represents, and eventually, to save it in a format (often jpeg) that can be displayed by other devices.  There is a lot more data in a raw ‘image’ than there is in a jpeg image; raw data records 4096 levels of brightness for each pixel (12-bit), where jpeg images can only record 256 levels of brightness (8-bit).  While that’s a big difference, it’s made even more severe by the linear nature of sensors, which means that half of those brightness levels are dedicated to the brightest 6th (or so) of the image.  So a jpeg can only represent the darker 5/6 of an image with 128 tonal variations, compared to 2048 in raw.  This isn’t to say you can’t take great pictures in jpeg, by an means—when I choose not to lug around a larger camera, the small camera (in gentle lighting conditions) can produce jpegs I’m quite happy with, like this bumble bee:

Creative vs. Technical
This is where I won’t discuss why that additional data allows you to create technically better images.  Others have beaten that horse much more thoroughly than I can.  What I wanted to explain was that a raw image has a lot of data available for you to do something with, and also that you have to do something with it in a specialized program before anyone else can see it.  For many people, this is enough of a drawback for them to skip shooting in raw.  To me, it’s actually the compelling reason to shoot in raw.  I get to the chance to be creative with that data, and choose exactly how my image will appear.  Raw format is often compared to film negatives, and I think the analogy is good in many ways.  For me, shooting in jpeg is the creative equivalent of sending my film in to a lab, and letting someone else make many of the important decisions about how the finished product will look.  The only difference is that with a digital camera, a tiny on-board chip is calling the shots instead of a lab technician.  Shooting in raw is like developing your own film—but without the expensive, noxious chemicals—you are in control of a wide range of adjustments that determine how you finished image will appear.

Coaxing what I saw out of a file is at least half of the creative fun and challenge as the composition and timing of the shot, along with controlling the comparatively simple aperture, shutter and ISO settings.   I’m thoroughly in the Ansel Adams (who spent hours in the darkroom) camp of “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

Which is a long way of saying that I’m hunched over a computer in exotic locations because I enjoy it, not because I have to.

Backing up your photos while traveling

Photo backup strategy, for the geeks (Updated, post-trip):

There are variations of the saying, "If a file doesn't exist in at least two places, it doesn't really exist," but the idea is common.  I'll be trying to make sure my pictures really exist, using an updated version of the backup strategy I have used on previous trips.

The three threats to my data that I need to protect against are: mistakes, hardware failure, and theft/loss.  The last two are really just a combination of care and luck.  Mistakes are the most likely, and the trickiest to protect against.
 

Delete this at night, on the computer

My first defense against mistakes is a simple practice: never, ever delete an image from the camera itself.  I will wait until it's backed up, and I can review it on a larger display to be really sure I don't want it.  It may not actually be out of focus like it appeared to be on the camera; it may be soft, but your only usable shot of the scene.  Or I may simply have meant to delete the picture of my shoes, and instead deleted the one of Jackie Onassis, Bigfoot and the Lochness monster posed together.  Deleting on the camera will go badly--it's just a question of when.  I make sure I have enough memory card space that I never need to, and then I'm also not wasting daylight hours looking at the back of my camera when other neat stuff is visible.

Shoot RAW

My second defense against mistakes is shooting in RAW (not the primary reason, but it's a great perk!).  There are no issues with preserving a pristine original, to avoid generation edit artifacts from re compressing in JPEG; and I don't end up cropping my original, and then having that crop propagated to all of my backups, and no original full-size image left.  Non-destructive editing in RAW eliminates a whole class of mistakes that are really easy to make.
After those two, I'm relying on redundancy--keep it in multiple locations, and don't propagate deletes with backups.

Since I'm shooting in RAW, cloud backup isn't feasible--I'll be producing too much data for the kind of bandwidth that will be available.  Based on the number of pictures I have taken on previous trips, I'm expecting to shoot roughly 750GB in the next year (update: we ended up with 528GB, in 34,000 pictures).  Assuming a generous 256Kbps upload, I'd need to be online 20 hours a day to back up that quantity.  Instead, I'll be using a series of 2.5"  drives, which are very light and portable, and in smaller capacities, reasonably cheap.

Drives X, W and S

To simplify the description, my destinations:
F1 - F4 are my four flash memory cards
C: is my internal drive, a 500GB drive, which is the largest 9mm 2.5" drive currently available (the Lenovo x220 is slim, and will not accept the more common 11mm drive).
S: is my primary storage, a 1TB USB 3.0 drive (silicon Power A80)
W: is my primary backup, a 1TB USB 2.0 drive (Western Digital Elements SE)
X: is one of several small capacity (cheap) secondary backup drives, which are just bare 2.5" SATA drives in (cheap) plastic shock/water resistant sleeves

Importing

The routine:
When possible, each night I will remove the F1 card from my camera, and insert the F2 card into the camera, and immediately* format F2.  I'll import F1 into Lightroom on the laptop, and the import process will copy the images to S: and also to a temporary backup location on C: at the same time.  Then I will place the F1 card back in the card wallet, still with all of the images on it.  At this point the images are in three locations, but two of them (C: and F1) are temporary.
Once the import is done, I will connect the W: drive, and run the robocopy script to backup S: to W:  It's important to note that the backup only copies new or changed content from S: to W:, it does not mirror deletions.  If I delete an image on S:, by mistake or not, that image will still exist on W: and X:.  This is an important safeguard against mistakes.  If I used the MIRROR option in robocopy (or similar parameter in any other command), I would be replicating my mistakes to my backups, in exchange for saving a tiny amount of space.  That is not a good trade.
At this point, the images exist in four locations, and it is now safe to format F1 in the normal rotation of the four flash cards, though this probably won't happen until four days from now.
Weekly, I will connect the current X: drive, and run a different, incremental script to backup S: to X:.  I will also clear out the temporary backup location on C:, since that will eventually run out of space otherwise, and the images are already in three permanent locations (S, W & X).
When the X: drive is nearly full, or when it's convenient, I will ship it home, so I will have a copy of most of our images even if we lose all our bags.  Before starting to use the next X: drive, I will use Lightroom to move all of the images from S:\Pictures\YYYY\ to S:\Archived\YYYY.  The full backup to W: copies from both of those folders (merging them to a single location on W:), but the incremental only copies from the S:\Pictures\ folder, so the next X: drive will not have any overlap with the previous one (conserving space on these small drives).  At the same time, in Lightroom, I will also permanently delete all images marked as rejects (waiting until now insures they are backed up on W and the prior X: drive, in case I later discover I rejected the wrong photo/s).

(*An updated note on formatting a rotation of cards: when you're shooting a lot (like 30K images), it's important to remember to format the card as soon as you rotate it into the camera.  If you just rolled over 9999 images on your F1 card, and your most recent shot is named IMG_0257, but you're inserting F2 which has a most recent shot of IMG_9412, your camera will try to be smart, and it will name your next shot IMG_9413.  If you don't care about such things, you probably stopped reading after the first paragraph; for the rest of you, fixing this is not how you want to spend an evening in some exotic location where you could be seeing/eating/experiencing something really neat.  Instead, make it a habit to insert a card, display the first image on the card, in-camera, double check that you do already have that image in Lightroom/whatever you import to, and then format that card, right then.  Pain averted.)

Do I fit in?

Speaking of bags, the C, S, W and X drives will each be kept in separate bags (we each have a backpack and a carry-on bag), so we won't lose pictures if we lose a bag.

The backup scripts I'm using are very simple.  The most complicated part is generating a date-time stamped log file for each backup, which is almost certainly overkill, but it's fun to keep my scripting skills in use, and it does provide a very detailed (but tiny, in terms of disk space) record of your backups, in case you need it in the future.








Full Backup batch file:
REM Modified log datestamp from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5329414/generating-managable-log-files-on-a-batch-file-job
REM Truncates localdatetime to 14 characters (year through seconds)
for /f "skip=1" %%d in ('wmic os get localdatetime') do if not defined MyDate set MyDate=%%d
set Filename=W:\Logs\BackupLog_%MyDate:~0,14%.txt
REM Copy, recursing folders, no retry, no wait, logging with datestamp
robocopy S:\Pictures W:\Pictures /S /R:0 /W:0 /LOG:%Filename%
REM Copy any archived pictures to single location on W:
robocopy S:\Archived W:\Pictures /S /R:0 /W:0 /LOG+:%Filename%

The incremental Backup script is identical, other than destination drive, and omitting the last two lines to copy S:\Archived\.