Liveaboard photography - sd cards & storage solution?

[JDelage]

All,

I'm planning a trip in 2 weeks. It's on the Red Sea Aggressor, and we'll be diving ~5 times/ day. I'm taking my Sony RX100ii with me, with housing & strobes.

What solution do people use to store photos while on the boat? I'm pretty much decided not to take a laptop at this point, for weight / space reasons. Right now I'm considering buying a Kingston MobileLite, which is a device that would allow me to copy the content of my SD cards into a large capacity USB drive. Another option would be to just buy a number of SD cards and only do the triage when I'm back.

What are people doing to deal with this? One issue I'm struggling with is that it's the first time I'll be doing UW photo, and I have no idea what to expect in terms of storage needs...

Thanks,

JD

 

[JahJahwarrior]

What I did was calculate how many shots I could take a day on my strobes at full power, given the battery pack size and the time to recharge. You can use that and the photo size to calculate daily SD card usage.

Then, wait for a sale on Amazon and stock up with SD cards of that size based on how many days your trip is, plus a few extra--you make good friends with the people who didn't bring enough!

 

[flareside]

Will the boat not have a computer to do transfers and daily reviews with?

 

[Shasta_man]

I buy and bring memory cards. They are the best combo of easy to carry, no dependencies, and low expense. Get mid sized cards. You don't want just a few monster cards because of the risk of losing multiple dive photos if the camera floods, but not too small so you have to change every single dive. I figure on at least a couple hundred pics per dive. Night dives will likely be less as there is less to shoot.

HOWEVER, I strongly caution against not bringing a device to review your photos daily. You'll like get back to a whole bunch of images you could've improved if you knew what you were doing wrong. Things like shooting up not down and WB and exposure issues. You don't need a device to edit them but you do need to look at them. Only an experienced shooter can go shooting images underwater and come back with mostly good stuff. Further, I strongly suggest reviewing your images at least nightly to adjust your technique and use of the strobes.

One other important point: remember to enjoy the dives with your eyes and not spend the whole time looking through a little hole. You'll see some very cool stuff and you can't capture everything. Another tip is to watch where your strobes are going when you are shooting. It's easy to kill some coral while shooting something else. And the goal is to show some cool stuff you get to see including environment, not a long list of portraits of every critter in the ocean.

Enjoy your trip.

 

[KeithG]

I use a laptop. I used to use just the camera, then just an iPad. If you are worried about weight, leave some clothes at home.

The daily review is very useful to critique your technique.

 

[JDelage]

With the MobileLite, I could review the pics on the iPad, saw the raw pics, and delete the jpg (and all the bad pics). That would allow me to learn day-to-day.

 

[Larry C]

I-Pad is the bare minimum. Faults that you can't see on a small screen (like backscatter and blown highlights) show up like a sore thumb on a full size computer screen. I used to leave the laptop home, now I carry a laptop backpack that will hold half my camera gear. The other half is in my carry-on with my socks and underwear. I discovered when I got home from Fiji, a 30 plus hour flight and two days in transit each way, that the scratch on my dome made most of my wide angle shots almost impossible to fix. I probably would have found a remedy had I know how bad they were.

 

[seansrs36]

All,

I'm planning a trip in 2 weeks. It's on the Red Sea Aggressor, and we'll be diving ~5 times/ day. I'm taking my Sony RX100ii with me, with housing & strobes.

What solution do people use to store photos while on the boat? I'm pretty much decided not to take a laptop at this point, for weight / space reasons. Right now I'm considering buying a Kingston MobileLite, which is a device that would allow me to copy the content of my SD cards into a large capacity USB drive. Another option would be to just buy a number of SD cards and only do the triage when I'm back.

What are people doing to deal with this? One issue I'm struggling with is that it's the first time I'll be doing UW photo, and I have no idea what to expect in terms of storage needs...

Thanks,

JD

You know how many cards you will have to take? I always bring my laptop. I also back up to an external hard drive. Everyone I know who does underwater photography always brings their laptop.

 

[Interceptor121]

I have tried iPad (had to abandon when I moved to movies) nothing and laptop. The best is laptop as exactly as Larry says am iPad is only good to delete your blurred and really bad shots but is not good enough to make you learn from your shots as you can't really play too much with the files. Using a laptop you import and do a first cut on a daily basis and have a much better idea of what to improve the next day. The iPad is excellent for land photography but at that point is just to many devices to handle

 

[James R]

I take 8 SD cards, 32gb each, and a 15" macbook pro currently. Also a 1.5TB external drive goes as well. I use a different set of SD cards when one set is full (D7000 currently, one SD card is recording a backup to the first). At the end of the day I run a copy of the SD card to the external drive and laptop (yes both). I may pick up a smaller laptop (macbook air) before my next trip.


Usually a liveaboard will have a camera room, so all camera stuff stays in there during the trip.