I am just finishing up a month of travel with the M9 and a Samsung Galaxy tablet. Now, this is really the first time I have traveled with digital but am planning a 3-5 month trip RTW with my daughter starting in August.
I am pretty much new to digital and have been using the tablet for email, skype and surfing the web. However, I have been disappointed in its photo limitations so let me ask a couple questions.
1. Is there any tablet which let's one upload photos directly? Unless I am totally messed up, using my M9 requires me to upload first to a PC then transfer to the tablet.
2. I really don't want to wait until the end of my RTW trip to see my photos so what is the best laptop to take for travel? Something that would let me run lightroom or something similiar.
3. Is there an alternative to carrying a laptop, say using an internet cafe? I really am an analogue dinosaur when it comes to this stuff so any hints or techniques you use for traveling with a digital camera would be greatly appreciated.
I've been traveling with digital camera and iPad (and iPad mini) for several years. On the desktop, my primary image processing app is Lightroom, but it's not available on the iPad (although I've heard rumors).
- The camera connection kit allow you to read the M9 storage card and imports both JPEG and raw files.* They flow into the Photos app "imported files" area, other apps which have access to the Photo Library on the iPad can read and write to them.
- Far as I'm concerned, if I am going to take a laptop, the only one worth considering is a MacBook Air 13". I'd outfit one with the fastest processor and the largest internal drive, and carry a portable hard drive for extended storage capabilities. That's actually the same computer I do most of my work on every day and runs everything, and it's very slim and light-weight, but it will need a bag almost double the size to carry compared to an iPad (and more than that for an iPad mini).
- No. Not that I've found. Internet cafe type places are disappearing since tablets and small, high powered, laptops started being relatively approachable in price. And they were always crap for image processing anyway.
* The iPad is not an ideal environment for raw processing, but works fine for editing JPEGs. There is, however, an excellent raw processor that handles M9 raw files, PhotoRAW.
When I'm traveling, I set the M9 to produce JPEG + raw files. MOST of what I process on the road I process from the JPEGs, but this gives me the option to go to the raw file for tricky subject matter. More on this later.
Working with an iPad takes a different mindset from working with an OS X or Windows system. You have a fixed and non-expandable amount of data storage, which any camera like the M9 can easily fill to capacity in a short time if you shoot a lot. For this reason you have to think about what you want to do and prepare for it.
When I am preparing to go on a trip, I plan what I'm going to carry on the iPad: I like to have a couple of movies and books available for my own entertainment in transit times, and I usually want to have at least a few albums of my work. I buy an iPad with the max storage capacity (64G on the older models, now 128G). Usually, what I want to carry along from the start fits nicely in less than 30G (that's the OS, all my apps, and the aforementioned entertainment and other data files).
The working methodology is
- shoot JPEG+raw in the camera
- download to the iPad a selection of the exposures
- make my picks and edits
- save the finished work to NEW files
- then delete the imports
I don't consider the iPad to be a backup storage receptacle ... for the camera, I carry enough camera storage cards that I just keep shooting with a card until it is full and then move to the next one. NO deletions. That way all my photos are there when I get home with more sophisticated tools for editing, grading, sorting etc.
There are TONS of image editing apps for the iPad. I use two as the basis of my travel use, and have a half a dozen others that I use occasionally. The two are Snapseed and Photogene. I tend to do most of the editing in Snapseed, save the finished image, then open it with Photogene to annotate with IPTC metadata and size for upload to the web (if I'm going to do that). Other apps offer different processing options as well, finding which apps do the job for you is something you have to put the time into.
Another way of working is to use PhotoSmith. This is a tool designed to work with your photos and with Lightroom on your OS X/Windows system. You can sort, grade, do IPTC annotation, etc, on photo files you import to the iPad or even leave on your camera card. When you get home, you can import those photos and all the annotation directly into Lightroom. I've only used it a little, it's pretty slick.
I also use Apple's Keynote and Pages apps to assemble photos into finished presentations on the iPad. There are other similar editing tools that work nicely if you want to blog with your photos, etc. I use DropBox and iCloud services to both store my work when desired and to share files over to the OS X/Windows systems.
It all works very nicely. An iPad mini, charger, and Camera Connection Kit takes up FAR less space and weight than any laptop, and has proven to be extremely useful on the road. I stuff a Bluetooth wireless keyboard in my bag for when I will need to do more extensive writing, and I create other graphics with Paper by 53 that I incorporate into the presentations with the photos. When I get home, all my work transfers into my regular OS X system for further development or archiving.
Hope that helps.
G
