Lorne Resnick - Travel Photographer of the Year

- thoughts on the importance of the right digital storage-

Article by Lorne Resnick on digital storage solutions:

Q.  What is the only thing more important that taking a great photo??

A. Not loosing it.

The Dream.

It starts off the same way every time. I’m on location (being a travel photographer this makes some sense) and I see some incredible sight. Sometimes, I’m on top of MT. Kilimanjaro watching the sunrise or on the plains of the Serengeti shooting elephants in the golden African light. Sometimes I’m floating down the Mekong Delta in a scissor boat or shooting old cars in Cuba…and the feeling is always incredible. The sun is on my face, I’m realizing my artistic vision and getting some great shots. I’m excited, engaged and having fun. Life is good. Then it happens. I open up the camera back an realize there is no film in the camera (in the old film days) or I realize there is no card in the camera and all the images I shot were for naught. There are variations on this theme. Sometimes I see a great once in a lifetime image and have run out of film or don’t have flash cards. Or I got the shot and my backup storage device blows up or less dramatically just does not function.

Then I wake up in a cold sweat. Ask anybody who has a passion for capturing images and they have had a variation on this dream at one time or another.

So, it is bad missing out on taking a possible great image – but I think it’s far worse to have taken what you know to be a great image and then loose it to an equipment malfunction.

There is actually a studied category of dreams called “Mechanical Things Don’t Work”. Carl Jung felt that dreams were offering us an alternative path to our willful daytime attitudes. In this sense, dreams where technology fails us offers us an alternative view to our usual control and manipulation of the environment we must practice so diligently in waking life. Instead of pushing and willing things around with our apparatuses and machines, we are forced in mechanically challenged dreams to relate in other ways.

So, maybe I should be calling it a nightmare instead of a dream. And the question becomes how do you avoid having the nightmare become a reality? For me the best way to avoid it coming true, is to search out the best possible piece of equipment for the job and use that.

I was very specific in terms of the criteria I needed to look for when doing my search. My top 3 must have things were:

1. Reliability. Without a reliable system it’s pointless to even get started.

2. Speed. Do I want to be capturing great images or spending my time downloading.

3. Possibility of large drive sizes. I want to take advantage of one of the great things about digital – no real cost per image shot.

Other features were not as vital to me as the above three.

I did search far and wide looking at every possible option including but not limited to Archos, Epson, Wolverine, Jobo, Canon, Nixvue, Flashtrax, etc.

In the end, after lots of testing, I came up with the HyperDrive Space.

I’m not a lab reviewer at a photography magazine, so what follows is more my impressions and real world experiences from an actual working photographer, than actual timed benchmark tests versus other units.

You can find all the tech specs on HyperDrives web site here.

The Job:

I was commissioned to shoot a private resort 7 minutes by boat off the coast of Antigua called Jumby Bay. It was the perfect opportunity to use my two new HyperDrive Space 160’s.

I shoot with a Canon EOS 1Ds MK II and the RAW file size (16.7 Mega Pixels - 8-9MB each) add up very quickly. So because of this I wanted a device with a very large capacity. The HyperDrive space is the biggest one I could find on the market at 160Gb (they do make smaller ones).

You can find the exact drives I used here:

The reason I wanted big drives is to extend my shooting capacity and not worry about running out of space in any way. For this shooting trip I was using two of the 160GB HyperDrives. I would always recommend buying two identical units (please see “Mechanical Things Don’t Work” above.)

My workflow using the devices was pretty simple:

My Canon camera accepts one compact flash card and one SD card at the same time. It writes the identical files to the CF card and SD at the same time as a backup. All my cards are 4GB in size. Once I return from a day shooting (usually 12 hours, sunrise to sunset), I would stack up all my memory cards next to the HyperDrives and begin to insert one CF card into hyperdrive one and the SD card into HyperDrives two. Then I simply hit the copy buttons and a few minutes later have two copies of each image shot on separate units.

Should your camera not accept two different cards like the Canon you should still have two backup devices. Simply copy the same card into two different devices to have two copies of each precious image.

Having talked above about criteria #3 (possibility of large drive size) I will now go onto one and two. Reliability is naturally vital. I found the HyperDrives in use to be flawless. I shot more than 5,000 images and downloaded all of them without a hitch. The reason I always suggest buying two identical backups units is not necessarily because I think one will fail. I believe the HyperDrives are great quality and I won’t have an issue with them – but things do happened. Especially when you travel. There is a long list of Murphy’s Law events that make the cost of a second identical drive seem insignificant.

Which leaves point #2, which I consider to be the most overlooked feature of storage devices and the once sorely lacking in most – speed. When I’m out shooting for 12 hours the last thing I want to do is come back and spend 4 hours sitting in a dark hotel room downloading flash cards. I’d much rather be sipping on a rum punch by the beach. This also ties into my comment about buying two drives. If you don’t want to do it for the additional security of having two copies of each images, then buy two drives to double you backup speed and download different cards into each unit at the same time.

The actual speed of the drives was by far the most impressive and unexpected feature of the units. The drive would download an entire 4GB CF card in about 4 minutes. The last unit I had (from a company that will remain nameless) downloaded a 2GB card in 23 minutes. The time difference is staggering. And the difference it makes in the quality of your travel cannot be discounted.

As I mentioned you can find all the actual technical specs on the HyperDrive web site, but some of the additional features on the drive which I found invaluable were the ability to take any kind of memory card you could throw at it, the VERY small size of the unit itself, the great ease of use (I didn’t even have to read the instructions) and the fact that they look kinda sharp didn’t hurt either.

Lorne Resnick