shooting digital on vacation: accus, flashcards and where to save the files? Here is what I found out on my 3 weeks trip through Scotland .

Great digital world: Instant replay, all important information will be recorded and stored together with the picture automatically and you can shoot thousands of images and it will cost you nothing ( well, after investing a small fortune in a digital camera, flash cards and an image tank ). I took my first digital images back in 1999, right after christmas with my first digital camera the Nikon Coolpix 950. In January 2002 I switched to digital after bying a used Nikon D1 on my birthday. Big investments have to be placed carefully to avoid discussions with your better half.

My vacation in Scotland this summer was the first time I completly rely on digital cameras.

Before leaving home there was a lot of stress because the Nixvue Vista ( image tank ) was not available in time. With great help from Jobo ( Germany ) and Slach ( Austria ) a 10GB Mindstore arrived just in time. They said that if I care about the Mindstor and return it in good shape I can have a Nixvue Vista instead after my vacation. But I think I will keep the Mindstor.

Well I now use a 160GB device which is almost half the size, half the weight and which costed half the price.

The Good:

There are some major advantages if you shoot digital:

1. instant review: You will never come home again with images that are either unsharp, wrong exposed or whatever. Sure if you work with care you can avoid unsharp or under/overexposed pictures in first place BUT what is about unsharpness caused by motion blurr from your subjects ( some birds can be really quick ) or the use of a ND-grade filter. This filters are not easy to use but with a digital camera you can check the effect right after you took the picture.

Or what about that wonderful portrait of the fisherman where his eyes are closed ( this happend to me and it is bad to find out weeks later at home - another slide for the wastebasket ).

Instant review is one of the best things in digital photography - no doubt.

2. all data is recording together with the image: This is great. The so cold EXIF-data records not just date and time but also a lot of technical infos like focus length, exposure data and compensation. Times are gone where you struggle to remember even the year the image was recorded. All images are avaible in a chronological order because of the filenumber. Even sloppy guys achieve a level of order that enables them to find a certain image within a day.

Using Lightroom it even gets better. By using the shooting time the program is able to automatically sort images of various cameras chronologically. Last vacation in Ireland in July 2007. I used a Canon 5D and a Panasonic FX100. My wife used a Canon Ixus 700IS. I stored all images in seperate folders but with one root folder. When I go into the root folder all images are shown in a chronological order. Very nice.

3. cost: Digital can save you a lot of money! Well depending on your shooting style and usage of your images. If you are a photographer that goes on summer vacation with the christmas film still in his camera forget about digital. It will never makes sense in a commercial point of view. If you are wealthy - don´t care! If you came back with thousands of slides from a weeksends vacation you have to go digital unless you are Bill Gates. With professional slide film one single image costs about 0.30 EURO ( framing included ) a digital image costs zero! And you will save a fortune in storing too. To store slides you need a lot of space. Tenthousand slides occupy a big cabinet whereas thousands of files can be easily stored on you PC´s harddrive. Hundreds can be saved on CD-ROMs. A CD-R is a 0.5 EURO device. You will end with about 0,001 EURO ( or Dollars ) storing costs/image. Slides growing old - files don´t.

OK. CD-ROMs are nice for 2MegaPixel JPEGs. For a 12MP RAW File it´s better to forget using CD-R or DVD-Rs. They are both way too small. It´s best to use external harddrives. 500GB HDD are very cheap at the moment and you can store some images on it.

4. contrast: digital cameras handle constrast better than slides. They can record more detail in dark and bright areas whereas slides already burned out or getting black.

And shooting RAW you can manipulate the image regarding contrast and shadow and highlight detail.

5. no more scanning: the scanning of slides is the most painfull and time consuming task I can think of. There are only two ways to avoid it: First: Let others scan and burn on CD your images and you end up with additional costs of 0.5 EUROs/image! Second: to shoot digital.

6. built in 1.5TC: Current D-SLRs come together with a built in 1.5 teleconverter which won´t cost you a aperture and will improve image quality instead of decreasing it like "normal" TCs. This is great as it turns a 80-400VR into a 120-600VR.

7. ISO - settings or whitebalance settings can be changed for every single picture.

The Bad:

1. The built in 1.5TC: It´s great with long lenses but it turns a superwidleanglezoom like the 20-35 in a 30-52 which is XXXX ( I think there is no word for it ). Maybe there will be some full frame CCDs in the future but the main problem here is the higher cost because of the Die size.

Well sometimes the future is just a heartbeat away. I got my Canon 5D this summer and it was already rather cheap because it´s 2 years old and will be replaced soon. The 5D is full frame camera and it was the first affordable full frame camera back in 2005! It´s price was 3.500.-EUROs in 2005 but it´s close to 2.000.-EUROs today. That´s cheap but a APS-C sencor camera can be had for less than 500.- EUROs today including a lens!

2. Power consumption: With my F100 to pack a second set of high level batteries and a 60 rolls is covered. With my D1 I can take approx. 500 images with fully loaded battery. After that you need to charge it ( 90min ). So a second ( very expensive ) battery is needed for backup. With the IxusV2 I can take approx.. 200 images before battery is empty. Because of the poor battery status managment of the Ixus you will take not more than 2 images after the low battery status appeared for the first time. So a second battery is needed. Because we went for camping I needed a way to reload the batteries away from 120/220V. Nikon and Canon offer 12V chargers that can be used with the cigarettelighter socket in your car. BUT they will charge you a lot of money and your image tank battery is still not covered. I decided to buy a smart device that converts the 12V of my car to 220V for my battery chargers. Such a converter will cost about 50.-EUROS compared to 290.-EUROS for the Nikon charger alone. My car is smart enough to remind me that there is a loading going on in the boot by displaying a message on the dash.

The good thing. That had changed! My D2H took over 1.500 shots with one battery. The Canon 5D though with 2 batteries in the vertical grip goes even further. So on vacation it´s no longer a permanent "where can a load my batteries?" I have 2 batteries for the 5D in the grip and no spare battery for the small Panasonic and the Fuji F31FD and it is not an issue at all. The Panasonic took almost 500 shots per charge and that´s enough for a small camera. The Fuji even a little more.

3. Storage of pictures: While the worries about X-rays at the airport are gone you are in trouble if you are travelling without a laptop. A laptop is a bulky thing that may be stolen before you return from your trip. And last but not least I don´t want to bother with Windows in my sparetime. No problem without a solution: Buy an image tank ( in fact a notebook harddrive with a cardreader slot in a more or less attractive and robust housing ) and everthing is fine. I bought the Mindstor as mentioned above and I´m happy with it so I will not change to the Vista. I like that there is Firewire onboard for faster download and the verify right after you download a card on the Mindstor. This parts are very expensive and so I took all the money I have saved on slide films and framing for this vacation and put it in the Mindstor. BUT this is a onetime investment. Next trip the Mindstor is payed and I will save real money.

OK. It was a one time investment but it didn´t last very long. I used it for the Scotland 2002 and the Ireland 2004 trip and the Santorini vacation in 2003. But that was that! In 2005 I borrowed a 60GB Image tank from a friend and for the Ireland trip in 2007 I used my new 160GB image tank. Problem is: 10GB was plenty back in 2002. It was enough for 10.000 D1-JPEGs. Now I use 4GB CF-cards that hold about 300 RAW files from my 5D. So the 10GB device is not enough any longer. Fortunately the image tanks have become very cheap these days. I mean those without a color screen to watch the images. These are still very expensive and I think that a small laptop might be the better option but the small, simple image tanks can not be beaten.

The Ugly:

if you are taking pictures with a fast digital SLR like a D1 there is only one big problem left:

DUST

Yes I underestimated the problem. I even wrote ( at dpreviev.com ) that the problem does not exist as long as you don´t change lenses during a sandstorm - well I got wise. The problem does exist. Dust will find it´s way in your D1 and some dust is in your camera already. This dust sooner or later will find it´s way on the CCD - vola! Now you can find tiny little dark spots in every single picture you take. I discovered the dust problem in the first week of my 3 week vacation in Scotland. But this doesn´t help because there was nothing I could do during the trip. There is no such thing like a Nikon service point in the highlands. I don´t own the AC-adapter so I can´t even try to clean the sensor. But to be honest: I don´t like the idea to clean a $$$$-device by myself.

Depending on the subject and the lens/aperture - combination the spots are invisible or very prominent in your image. They really pop out in a clear sky especially with a stopped down wide angle lens attached. They are nearly invisible on dark parts of a picture or if you use a telelens wide open.

Could there be a solution of this problem. I´m no camera designer but what if the CCD sits in an airthight housing behind a diaphanous mirror ( like in the old Canon RS design ). The loss of light trough such a mirror could not be a problem because modern D-SLRs provide high ISO-settings ( 400ASA, 800ASA ) with high quality. There would be another two advantages if there is no moving mirror: 1. high speed like 20 frames per second and 2. no noise.

I hope that Nikon or Canon already work on such a camera. This would be the perfect solution and it wouldn´t cost more than a camera with a moving mirror.

OK. Once again. The problem is solved as almost all new cameras have a kind of dust removal system. My 5D has not such a system but the dust problem is less pronounced. It ´s not as good as with my Nikon D200 where it was almost non-existant but it´s good enough to cause not too much worry. The next camera will surely have this anti dust feature and so that´s solved as well.

Conclusion:

With all this bad and ugly you might think it is not a good idea to change to digital. Let me say just this:

I would never change back to film even if someone would buy me my films and scan all my slides.

Digital is the clear winner for me. The chance to see the image right after I took it. The contrast, ISO and WB-advantage. After I changed to NEF I can add an unbelievable tolerance regarding underexposure. Now I can even restore 1 stop underexposed images!

I won´t go back!

After I looked through all the troubles of the early years I asked my myself if it was a wise decision to be one of the early birds regarding digital photography. It seems that in 2007 almost all the Bads and Uglies are gone and only the Good remain. Is it that good? No it´s better. Computers became faster, storage cheaper and most important software becomes better and better. Lightroom takes the pain out of RAW shooting and image filing. I think it is save to say that Lightroom ( or Aperture ) is one of the greatest image programs ever made. I rate it higher than Photoshop because it gives me all I ever need to work on and file my images.

But even back in 2002 digital photography was a great experience. I remember that I have gone through 3 batteries to shoot about 200 images with my D1 on a cold winter day. Amazing!

I never changed back to film and I never looked back and I never will.

PS.: I would love to use a Contax G2 for street photography. It can be bought very cheap these days. But there is a reason for it.