When I'm on a shoot that involves an overnight stay, I take my iPad and load the images on to it. Otherwise I just dump 'em on the Mac after the shoot when I get home.
I use two 8GB Compact Flash cards.

Mark

Just as a side note, on more than one occasion I've found a micro to full SD card adaptor to be useful between devices. I've also got a thumbnail USB micro SD card reader, both are dirt cheap and very handy.

micro to full SD adaptor. Are you shooting with a phone?

No no, I just meant it's been useful in general, but I do know a few people who've done that, or realised they could use their phone's card to carry on shooting with their camera.

Ah, that makes a bit more sense.

I’m here all week.


Spare cards. In a film pot (yes, really - organised people will have two - one for empty cards, one for full ones, properly labelled). This should certainly be the case when I’m out with my video camera.

I’ve never filled my 8GB cards up on my DSLR or compact cameras, not believing in the machine-gun approach to taking photos (exception - I was at a race track a couple of weeks ago - I machine gunned that or I’d have missed some good shots).

Ok guys, total consensus. Thanks.

Have another mate who's going to the Maldvies on a surf trip in September and is worried his GoPro will eat through cards before he gets home. I was wondering if there's another solution to that beyond "buy more cards". But it seems there isn't. Thanks.



But presumably none of these people have ever built their own PCs? The last machine I built lasted 7 years and is still going strong with a few tweaks. It's quiet, quick, and cute to look at (well it was cooler in 2005!)

Your friend could take a laptop to store or burn the files to DVD, or use a local internet cafe to do the same. No issue really.

If he wants to do a bit of diving I know a couple of hot Japanese chicks working in the Maldives at the moment.

He'll be on the waves every single day. He's a machine. They live to surf, but contrary to popular British belief the conditions down here are mostly shash, so they only actually get 2-3 weeks of decent surfing a year when they go away. With that in mind, he never does anything other than surf. Each to their own. Otherwise, I'd pass that along!!

He doesn't have a laptop currently, and I've just helped him spend £1k on a desktop/monitor/sound system/Eyefinity setup. So I think cards is gonna be the way forward.

You don't have to be machine gunning to fill them, you just need to be taking photos.
When I shoot burlesque, that's 8-10 acts, plus crowd shots, plus some product shots (cup cakes) plus some back stage stuff if I'm lucky. It's a four hour gig, and I don't put the camera down all evening.
The wedding I was assisting on last weekend - filled 12GB of space over the day, and that wasn't even trying terribly hard, slowing down and picking shots because I was the backup shooter.

You wanna assistant?

But that is a cheap screen.

The Apple screens aren't bad, but they still don't compare to professional quality screens, like Eizo's pro range. It all depends on what you need.

A cheap screen will be fine for quick checking, an Apple screen is ok for mid-range work, but you'll still need a pro screen if you really want the best colour accuracy.

As to Mac or Windows, for photo editing, the Windows versions of Lightroom and Photoshop overtook the Mac versions around 2009, using video cards to accelerate effects. Now they are equaling back out and the OS X versions are able to use hardware acceleration as well - but you are limited to the low / mid-range cards that Apple provide, high end consumer and professional cards, which offer even more power aren't generally available for the Mac Pro and updating the iMac or MacBook lines is not possible.

On the other hand, the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro is supposed to be really excellent and, once Adobe update Photoshop for OS X to take advantage of it, it should provide some real benefits for photo editing on the move - that said, I'd probably still prefer to have dual 27" 2560 displays.

At the end of the day, the software she will use will probably be identical on both platforms - for photo editing, you are pretty much going to be using Photoshop, with either Lightroom or Apeture for cataloging. The latter is Mac only, the former is cross platform.

One thing to look at is the new Adobe Creative Cloud licensing. This has a monthly fee attached to it, but she can use their software on any platform (one machine at a time) and if she decides to switch platforms later, she just needs to download the latest version and install it. She also gets the benefits of "free" updates to the latest versions of the suite every time.

If she needs one of the Creative Suites, as opposed to just Photoshop on its own, she would have to use CS6 without upgrading it for about 4 - 5 years before it would be cheaper than the Cloud solution.

In conclusion, I would say, if she is already a Windows user, she should probably stick to Windows. I've worked in advertising agencies which use purely Windows and I've worked in agencies that use OS X, the end results and the amount of time involved remain about the same. On the other hand, we have a marketing person who learnt CS5 at university on Windows and she spent half of the first two months swearing at her 27" iMac, because it didn't "work properly".

She likes the display, but she would still rather nuke OS X and put Windows on it...

Why? She was brought up on Windows, learnt CS5/6 on Windows, now her boss is forcing her to use a new OS she doesn't know, without any training and expects her to be productive. She spends more time fighting OS X, to get it to do the things she wants it to do than she would under Windows.

It doesn't help that OS X Mail and Microsoft Office 2011 don't support Exchange Server 2003, so she has to read her e-mails on a separate Windows Terminal.

Bootcamp?