Digital cameras are a joy, and make no mistake about it. Sure, there are some who will continue to use film (slides or negatives) because they want classical photo prints or because they deal with editors or image buyers who want film. For the rest, though, migration to digital is getting easier to justify every year. But that’s not to say that digital doesn’t have its challenges, and one of the most significant ones is the simple question of how to store the images.
An earnest photo-nut shooting on a photogenic trip will burn about 30 rolls a week, say 1,100 images. Thirty rolls of film takes up some significant luggage space, to be sure, but everyone knows how to store and handle film. You shoot till the roll rewinds, load a new one, stick the used roll somewhere safe, and send the whole mess off to be processed at the end. With digital, particularly high-resolution professional digital, it’s not that simple.
Most consumer digital cameras shoot in compressed JPEG mode, and the images are somewhere between 250k bytes and perhaps 1.4M bytes even in high-resolution mode. A 1 GB microdrive will hold as many as a thousand or more images, and two such drives would carry enough pictures for our hypothetical week’s shoot. But a pro digital camera shoots from 40 to 100 pictures on a microdrive; my Fuji S2 holds 80. To get 1,100 pictures, I’d need to shoot up 14 microdrives, which at about $250 a pop would cost more than the camera. If you want to have high quality digital output, you need to shoot in high-resolution RAW mode, and you can’t buy and carry enough microdrives for an entire trip. Obviously, if you want to take a lot of digital pictures you’ll need to do something to empty the microdrives for reuse.
One option that seems attractive is to dump the drives to a laptop computer. Obviously a desktop isn’t going to do much good in the field! All the high-end digital cameras provide a computer link via USB or Firewire, and most microdrive vendors will supply a simple adapter that lets a microdrive slip into a PCMCIA slot. There are also Firewire card readers that can be used with desktops or laptops.
The plus to using a laptop to hold the shots is that many people have them already, so there’s no incremental cost, but the truth is that laptops aren’t much of a solution for a photographer who shoots wildlife, scenery, or outdoor activities, for a number of important reasons.
First, most obviously, they’re a pain to carry. Not only are even the lightest laptops pretty heavy, but they’re somewhat awkward to pack for field use, and even more awkward to get ready for a microdrive transfer. Imagine yourself out on the Katmai coast of Alaska, watching behemoth brown bears fifty yards away. You shoot your microdrive full, and yell “Hold everything!” while you unlimber your laptop, turn it on, boot up Windows (no fast way to do that, for sure), insert the microdrive in the adapter and into the slot, and then wait the 20 minutes it will take to dump. ‘Nuff said?
The second problem is that most portable laptops won’t hold all that much data. How many gigs of disk capacity do you have left on your personal laptop? It’s easy to fill one up with a couple of days’ shooting. Sure, the newer ones will come with 40 or even 60 GB drives, but most people don’t have ones that new, and many also have a bunch of stuff loaded already.
The second option is to buy a portable hard drive. These are little gadgets that vary in size from something about as big as a good-sized glasses case to something nearly paperback sized, and which contain the same kind of hard drive used in laptop computers. You stick your microdrive in a slot, turn the gadget on, and dump the microdrive into the gadget’s storage. Since these devices cost between about $300 and $700, they’re a lot cheaper than a high-end large-capacity laptop.
Having shot 63 rolls of film on an Alaska trip, I was totally uninterested in buying enough microdrives to hold a complete trip, so I decided to try the portable hard drive approach. I looked at products from about six companies before settling on Leading Aspect’s Super DigiBin. A neat-looking silvery gadget with an LCD display, the SDB is available in a variety of sizes including (at the moment) a maximum-capacity unit at 60 GB. I got the largest one available at the time I bought—a 40 GB unit.
Why did I get the SDB instead of one of the others? The reason is simple. It can transfer a complete 1 GB microdrive in about 5 minutes, and it has an available high-capacity external 4000 maH battery pack that will power it for at least a dozen such transfers before recharging. That’s a thousand images. Now the SDB doesn’t have an LCD preview of images like some others do, but you can get that from the camera in the first place, and the images are too darn small to be useful in the second place. It doesn’t have fast Firewire transfer to the PC like some other models either, but the USB transfer is as fast as putting the microdrive into the PCMCIA slot of a laptop, and in any case you don’t need speed when unloading your portable hard drive to your PC, but in loading the microdrives onto the portable drive.
To use the SDB in the field, you’ll need to establish a procedure. First, obviously, you want to charge the unit and the battery pack up on the night before your first shoot. Don’t expect the charge to last forever, so wait till the last minute. While the SDB is still plugged into the charger, delete any files still on the device to maximize your space. When everything is clean, plug the battery pack into the SDB immediately and leave it attached whether the device is on or off, until you’re going to plug the chargers in again. Now you’re ready for the shoot.
On the morning of your shoot, store the SDB with power pack still connected, in a nice roomy place in your photo bag, where nothing is going to bang on the on/off button. These gadgets are easy to turn on by accident, and you can drain your battery without knowing it. Leave the SDB in the bag unless you’re going to leave the bag somewhere you can’t get to it, or unless it’s going to be really cold. In the latter case, get a fanny pack or a big pocket and keep the SDB near (but not on) your skin to keep it warm. Again, be sure nothing is going to keep turning the SDB on by hitting the button!
Most digital users will check their cameras regularly to see how many shots remain on their microdrive. When you’re getting low (say, around 15 shots remaining), think about dumping the drive during any handy break in the action. To do that, turn off the camera, make sure the SDB is also off, and remove the drive from the camera and insert it in the SDB slot. Put another microdrive in the camera (and be sure it’s empty) so you’re ready for surprise action, then turn on the SDB. The default action with a microdrive in the slot is to dump drive-to-disk, so just pushing OK will cause the SDB to begin downloading off the microdrive. In five minutes, you’re done. Turn the SDB off, remove the drive, and you’re ready to use it again. My recommendation is that you try to avoid subjecting the SDB and microdrive to shaking or bumping during the transfer. I generally did it in a vehicle, holding the unit in my palm so the bumping of the vehicle didn’t jar the drive. When you are done with the transfer, turn the unit off and then remove the microdrive. Don’t let the unit sit with the CF card or microdrive inserted until it powers down automatically, because this may lock the device up!
A couple more points:
· Don’t erase or format microdrives except in your camera unless there’s no other option. Some cameras seem finicky about using microdrives set up on other devices. That means that when you “empty” a microdrive it will still have the images on it. When you insert a drive in the camera, you’ll have to remember to erase the old images.
· If you have to swap microdrives when you can’t empty the old one, turn it upside down in the carrying case it comes in so you’ll know it’s not available for use. Otherwise you’ll end up losing a bunch of shots.
· When you empty the SDB to your laptop, disconnect the external powerpack, plug the SDB into its AC charger, and do the transfer on AC power. You’ll drain a battery pack really fast if you power the SDB with it during transfers.
· There is no risk of data loss on the SDB if the battery goes flat when there are images stored on it, unless it goes flat while you’re adding images to it! Don’t let the battery indicator get lower than half-way on starting a new download of a microdrive.
· Don’t try to use the SDB, or any other portable hard drive, without that external battery pack, except in emergencies. None of these devices will give you more than three or four downloads of a 1 GB microdrive without that external power option. Mess up and you lose images.
· Don’t try to get by with a single microdrive, even if you have a portable hard drive. A minimum of two are required, and I have three. I’ve never been in a situation where I filled three drives without being able to empty.
· If you have a problem with the unit, it will probably manifest itself as the device refusing to turn off, or to turn on, even when you know the battery is charged. If this happens, there’s a little pinhole reset button on the lower right rear of the unit. Press that and it restarts the firmware. I’ve done this a couple of times and you don’t lose data stored on the device.
To get around the problem with the on/off switch, I recently got a small plastic sewing box (about 8x5x1.5 inches) and glued some foam padding into it to create a cradle for the SDB. I’ve not tried this in the field yet, but in home tests it appears that the box will safely store the unit and eliminate the “bump-the-switch” problem. It may also help insulate against sudden shocks to the device from dropping or bumping. Leading Aspect, by the way, has apparently committed to fixing the button problem in the new model, which will also provide USB 2 support for faster dumps from the SDB to the computer.
I’ve used the SDB in the field and I love it, and trust it enough that I no longer take a laptop and transfer images after a day’s shooting. I’m going to buy a second unit so I have enough storage for a long photo trip, and also in the unlikely event I need a backup. I’m sure that there are other devices out there that work well, but I have no special relationship with Leading Aspect, got no discounts on their gear, and I’d never consider buying anyone else’s unit. The SDB is good gear.
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Tom’s photo-tips are Copyright © CIMI Corporation, and adapted from his posting on his website at http://www.cimicorp.com/DI/DINav.html. Used by permission.
