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Garry Black Photography |
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TECHNICAL
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Storage
of Digital Files in the Field You
probably already have a method of storing your digital images while you’re
out on the road shooting, but in case you don’t here are some ideas. Now
before I begin I have to tell you about a horror story of my own that I
experienced on my last trip to My method of storing images while on the road has been to download them to a laptop computer and also backing up a 2nd copy on a portable digital photo storage device. However when we’re on a trip where we fly to our destination I leave my laptop at home. In an effort to cut down on the weight and the number of things that I have to carry and only use the portable digital photo storage device. This unit doesn’t have an LCD display that shows the images, only a LED display that shows the progress of the images being copied onto its hard drive. I always pay close attention to ensure that all of the images are copied before shutting the unit off. As far as I knew everything copied onto the unit’s hard drive. When I got back home and plugged it into my computer to download the images I was shocked to find that the images from the 1st download were repeated again and again throughout all of the folders. In other words I had the same 80 images in all of the folders and none of the subsequent pictures that I had downloaded. There should have been another 700 different images, but they just seemed to have vanished. It would be like putting 19 rolls of film in your camera bag and then opening it up only to find 2 rolls left. I spent days downloading and testing Photo Rescue and Recovery programs, but most only worked with compact flash cards and not a hard drive. I did find one that worked but it was going to take 13 years to save the files. Needless to say I didn’t use that program, but I did find another one mmCard Recovery that worked perfectly. It found all of the missing pictures and saved them to my computer in less than an hour. The pictures had been there all of the time but the portable digital photo storage device hadn’t given them a file name, so it was like if they had been deleted. When a file gets deleted on your hard drive it really doesn’t get deleted only its’ file name does. This program goes through and finds these files and assigns a name to them so that they can be saved. So if you ever have a similar problem now you know how to solve it. One of the great things about shooting digitally is the fact that you can shoot more, at no extra cost. There’s no film or processing costs so this makes digital far more attractive and you’ll probably find that you're shooting more images, and trying new shots. Exploring and shooting as many different variations of a scene that you can possibly think of, because it is costing you nothing to try. It’s a great way to enhance the learning process and obtaining great images. But another result of shooting more is that you’ll need a lot of digital storage. You should have enough compact flash cards with you so that you can shoot all day long and then download your images when we return to the hotel at night. How much is enough? That depends on your file sizes, the capacity of your cards and what type of shooter you are. You will shoot more images digitally than you do with film, so keep this in mind when trying to determine your needs. On
our recent workshop trip to As
always contact me for any specific recommendations. |
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