John Robb

Going on a long holiday can bring a lot of photographic opportunities. The thing is that if you also take one of the new breed of 20+ megapixel cameras like the Canon 5D mk2 then you have to think of a way to managing all that data you’ll generate. Thus I have packed some travel companions as shown below.

HP 2140 netbook

This is the business level of HP netbook offerings. The regular consumer level HP netbook has a plastic case and fairly small 60GB HDD. This 2140 version is a little more expensive but comes with a more robust, and sexy, aluminium case and a 160 GB HDD.
So far it has been very useful and more than capable of handling the several GB data generated each day. Unfortunately the slightly low 10 inch screen resolution although all right for web surfing can stymie the use of software like Photoshop or Canon DPP – they both need 1024×768 where the screen is 1024×576. Otherwise the LED backlit screen has reasonable colour fidelity.
For connectivity HP has two USB ports, an express card slot, a network port, wireless LAN and an SD card reader amongst other things. Ideally an additional USB port would be useful.
To do basic image stuff I’ve loaded Irfanview which handles basic image manipulation and opens RAW files and allows me to post some reasonable looking stuff here on the Bubble. Alas all the HDR and careful manipulation has to wait until a rendezvous with a bigger and better screen on a regular PC.
Other software includes WiFi detecting software, MS office, VLC media player and Skype (which can use the built in web cam)

Sandisk Extreme Card reader

When Dealing with large cards you need a good high speed reader so you don’‘t spend your time in a hotel room watching a progress bar. I use this Sandisk USB2 based one. File transfer is pretty quick and helps to doesn’t tie up much time.
Interesting note not all Sandisk readers are as good as this one. You do pay for what you get – this isn’t the cheapest version around. It reads both CF and SD card formats.

Seagate Freeagent Go 320GB

This is a little (using a 2.5 inch notebook hard disk) external drive does a great job of keeping a copy of the images safe in case bad things happen while on the road. The drive doesn’t need additional power which is very useful.
The other advantage is that the drive comes with easy to use backup and sync software. Options include the ability to encrypt the data on the drive.
For the fashion conscious the drive comes in a number of colours. For the geek conscious you can get capacities up to 500GB.