My iPad-isn't-quite-there comments (see story now on 2010 News Page) provoked a number of "so what do you use in the field?" questions.
We need to separate this between casual photography and serious photography. Casual photography means what the name implies: you're not trying to document anything specific, you have no substantive quantity to deal with, and we're not talking about a once-in-a-lifetime trip. My simple recommendation for casual photographers (and even many trips)? Just get more cards, a secure way to carry them, and don't worry about backing up. When you fill up a card:
- Remove it from the camera.
- If it's an SD card, flip the lock switch.
- Place the card face down in your card holder.
- Take a face-up card out of your card holder.
- Check to see what photos are on it (this is a sanity check just in case you goofed up one of the above steps).
- Erase the card and start taking pictures.
You don't need to (and shouldn't) make it any more complicated than that. If you do, you've gone beyond "casual photography" in my opinion. Don't worry about image review in the field; just make sure you have plenty of cards with you at all times. Cards are cheap these days. If you're a real skin flint, buy a bunch of previous generation cards (Extreme III instead of Extreme IV, for example) when they get discounted. Keep doing that at every generation.
Serious photographers and once-in-a-lifetime trips require more thought and gear. Most professionals I know who travel use a two-backup rule, meaning that they want at least two copies of every image tucked away safely, and usually separated from one another (one in luggage, one in backpack). For me on most trips, that means bringing my lightest computer and an extra drive. A product like Photo Mechanic or Lightroom allows me to ingest images from a card and simultaneously save them to both the computer's drive and an extra external drive. The full ritual:
- Remove card from the camera.
- Place card face down in card holder.
- Take a face-up card out of the card holder.
- Check photos on face-up card.
- Erase card in camera and start taking pictures.
Later, when I'm in my room/tent/vehicle/yurt I:
- Remove a face-down card from the holder and put it in card reader.
- Use the ingest of Photo Mechanic or Lightroom to rename, input batch metadata, and put copies both on my laptop's drive and external drive.
- Remove card from reader and put it face up in the card holder.
- Use PM's or LR's browsing feature on images on the laptop version of the files only and:
- Delete the no-keepers
- Rate the keepers
- Fill in specific metadata that applies to a single image
- Review my ratings and refine them
Technically, I do a lot more than that. My system of putting things in the card holder is more refined. I can tell the difference between cards that have been downloaded versus ones I haven't used yet, and I don't use the former until I've run out of the latter, effectively creating another backup unless I'm really chewing through cards (rare).
If I don't bring a laptop (perhaps because I'm climbing or well away from civilization), I sometimes bring a device like the Epson P6000 with me to do backups on. In that case, I don't do any image review until I get home.
So, given the above, how does an iPad fit in?
- It doesn't have enough capacity to sub for an Epson P6000 or similar photo backup drive. You're best off just buying extra cards if all you need is 64GB of backup.
- It can't do the rename, rating, or metadata of the laptop solution.
Which means that all you can do is review them and possibly delete the ones you don't want. But I should point out that even this right now is a bit problematic: the iPad does three things with images brought over from a camera: (a) it uses only the embedded JPEG for NEFs; (b) it strips much of the EXIF data from view (it doesn't actually remove it); and (c) it resizes the images from most recent cameras because it only supports 3mp sizes max. Thus, those people thinking that they can import from the camera and then email the image will find that their 12mp images become 3mp ones. Curiously, if you later hook the iPad up to a computer running Lightroom, you'll be importing the original file (NEF, EXIF intact, original size).
As I noted in the previous article: the iPad is not quite ready for serious photographers.