All of these were taken in 2008 and prior. Just thought I’d dust off the ol’ panos.
USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii:
USS Utah, Ford Island, Hawaii:
From the USS Arizona Memorial:
Port of Cascais, Portugal:
Amber Fort, Jaipur, India:
The urban sprawl of Los Angeles, CA:
The Danube River, Budapest, Hungary:
I’m testing out Microsoft’s Seadragon technology to better display the big panoramic photos I take while on trips. In this case, they range from 87 to 325 megapixels.
A farm along the slopes of Irazu Volcano.
And the Irazu Volcano itself…
Orosi Valley:
Gosh!
Two days in Costa Rica, 500+ photos. One of those days was me white water rafting, and no such luck with photos on that. I’m not taking my beloved SLR on a trip like that and have no water-proof camera, so essentially one day of photos. Out of the 500 photos, I took about 400 of them as pieces of panoramic photos. Now comes the fun part: assembling them.
Here’s what I’m up to:
1) Stitch together the photos automagically using Autopano Giga. Take the Canon .cr2 files and make one huge TIFF file.
2) Import photo into Lightroom, export photo as DNG.
3) Geotag the photos using GeoSetter, then reimport them into Lightroom.
4) Perform post-processing on the photos in Lightroom – color correction, cropping, etc.
5) Export a mega-hugeass JPG (>100 MB), then upload it to Fotki.
6) Upload them to Gigapan for a better viewing experience.
I would have done it over the weekend but instead, Justified and Damages got the best of me…
“Where are your photos?”
I hate hearing this within 48 hours of getting back home. Ok guys, when I get back from a trip, it takes a while to go through the photos I’ve taken and put them online.
I’m not a snapshot person. Through trial and error and years of traveling, I’ve finally got a system down pat for how to handle my vacation photos. Let me walk you through what I do with this trip:
1) I took 1500 photos in 5+ days, all in Canon RAW format. With 21 megapixel photos, you’re looking at some serious size (50gb or so.) Half of the photos I took will be deleted, either because they suck, or are just photos of labels of things that I took. Here’s a handy hint: When in a museum or somewhere in public, take a photo of the awesome statue or painting, then take a photo of the label so you won’t forget.
2) Geotagging. Yes, I’m a nerd who geotags their photos with a GPS. So not only do you have the photos, but most of them have location information within the files, so you can go back to that original spot and take that exact same photo. Syncing that data is easy, and also helps me figure out what exactly that photo I took is.
3) Labeling. This is where the suck comes in handy. I’m starting to become a keywording whore in Adobe Lightroom, and tagging photos with the (for example) museum that a painting is in, along with the name of the painting and the artist.
4) Panoramas. I like taking panoramic photos. It’s one of the lame things I do on a trip, and stitching panoramas takes time. Seriously – snap 20 photos at 21 megapixels and it’ll bring a high powered desktop to its knees. Then I’ve got to crop them, assign geotagging info and eventually, export them to JPG. If they’re over 200 megapixels, then I’ll make a Zoomify’d version of the photo.
5) Editing. I admittedly don’t do much other than color/exposure corrections with the photos, but even then, that takes time. And if there are ones that I’m truly proud of, I’ll spend more time prettying it up.
6) Uploading. 50gb of RAW files might lead to 15-20gb of JPG files. That takes time to upload not only to Fotki, but to Facebook as well.
So, it takes a while to do. And for the first 72 hours from returning home from a trip, I have work stuff to attend to, jetlag to overcome and quality time to spend wearing cotton clothes and sleeping on my own bed. The real world gets in the way of things, and I’ve actually, you know, work to pay bills and stuff.
I made a 1042 megapixel image out of the photos I took of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Only took about 45 hours to render on a Quad Core desktop with Autopano.
When my friends travel, I’m like the bad mother going “do you have enough camera memory?” I’ll get a response of “I’m going to be gone for 2 weeks and have a 2gb card – I should be ok.”
Oops.
I shoot anywhere from 200-300 photos a day when I’m on a trip. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s not. So if I want to travel light(er) and leave the laptop at home and just bring memory cards, I calculate estimated number of GB per trip and plan accordingly.
Here’s a handy chart from Compusa that I stole shamelessly (sorry):
On a 2GB card, you should be able to get X amount of JPGs:
2 Megapixel: 2245
3 Megapixel: 2000
4 Megapixel: 999
5 Megapixel: 800
6 Megapixel: 735
7 Megapixel: 657
8 Megapixel: 582
10 Megapixel: 444
12 Megapixel: 339
If you’re snap-happy like me and have a brand new 12 Megapixel camera (you ARE setting these to take in the highest quality possible, right? RIGHT??), then we might run into some issues. Fortunately for you, memory cards are cheaper than when you bought the camera (it happens – I have a friend who still cries over the fact that he spent $80 for a 1GB card years ago…), so you’re better off going crazy when you see a sale online.
This leads me to my first photography tip: Lots of smaller cards (say, 4 – 2gb cards) are better than bigger cards (1 – 8gb card). There’s always a possibility that the card can fail or “shit happens.” In that case, you’re only going to be – at worst case – losing a small majority of your photos.
For me, I carry 7 memory cards in my Pixel Pocket Rocket (which is dorky, but I love it) and on my Trans-Siberian trip, I had card “issues” a few times (I didn’t lose any pictures, but it certainly doesn’t lower your anxiety level.) So I pulled the card, replaced it with one I didn’t shoot on in previous days, then went on my merry way. Label the cards with numbers or letters, and shoot in order. If you’re going to carry around more than a few cards, you might want to figure out the best way to wrangle them, whether it’s the Pocket Rocket, or something else.
Whenever I throw down the 200-300 shots a day figure, people seem to find that I’m over-doing it. Well, that may be true. Some days it’s more, some less. My second photography tip is to ALWAYS take photos of labels and signs. I learned this from my good ol’ days at the Field Museum, where as a docent, I had magical powers and by virtue of reading the information label on the display, I seemed super brilliant. You’ll forget what you took a picture of, and be reduced to going “durrr, I don’t know” when people ask what it is. You can always delete them later when you go through your photos after you’ve labeled them (more on that later.)
My third tip is carry a PDF of the camera manual with you if you’re bringing a laptop/smartphone along. Same goes for the external flash and whatever photography gadgets too. You should also have a PDF of your passport and travel visas too somewhere just in case – but there are times you just need to refer to the manual…
I get a lot of questions about cameras for travel because apparently I claim I know something about photography (which I may or may not do – whatever.) And while I’ve been laid up, I’ve been geeking out on travel photography things and I’ve immediately found what’s wrong: They’re all wrong.
It’s not that they’re not useful, but there’s nothing that really breaks it down simplistically. Every discussion that asks about what camera should I get or how much memory should I bring/buy turns into completely lofty discussions. Most people want to just press a button and take photos. Some people want to take artistic photos, and some people want to make works of art. It’s personal preference, and it’s your trip. I just want to be able to help you out and take the best photos possible with what you have.
“But Nick, I’m looking for THE PERFECT camera for traveling,” you’ve asked. Well, it’s simple: spend what you can afford. The problem with asking photographers is that they’ll say, well, you might need A and B and C sometimes, and if you listen to them, you’ll be carrying around a lot of stuff. Stuff is heavy, and given the choice between dragging a tripod/camera bag + other crap around and traveling light, then people will travel light.
I’ll tell you what I think I know about photography, and what’s helped me on the evolution of growing as a travel photography hobbiest (I can’t call myself a photographer, because that would imply that I’m making money off of this, when it’s a drain on the wallet – but OH SO FUN.) So over the next several blog posts, I’ll write about things I’ve learned and wish I would have known before I started traveling that are photography related.
If you wanted to get started reading, pick up Scott Kelby’s The Digital Photography Book boxed set. It’s $30 well spent. I’m going to start with “the best cameras (I think)” broken down by dollar amount and my Rule of $125 and all sorts of useful things.