Help..Trip to Japan with D70

[Norman]

I'm going to Japan for 2 weeks & need some advice on quality settings for taking pictures. I have a Nikon D70.

I have some aspirations to have some photo's published, should I be taking the photo's in the Nef+Jpeg setting, or Neff only or Highest quality Jpeg. I have limited memory cards & don't want to be left without memory half way through the trip.

My Father is making the trip with us, he was a POW & is going back to pay his last respects to his friends he left behind. I will be documenting the trip with my camera & want to take pictures for him, plus I will have time to shoot local scenes which I would like to send to magazines & photo competitions. So any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Norman

[mjm]

shoot the absolute highest quality you can. you will regret it later if you want to make larger prints when you get back... just pick up another memory card or 3 ;)

[awkwards]

I completely agree. Shoot with the best possible quality for this occasion.

Here's an idea: Maybe you can transfer your images from CF to CD-R while you're over there. Japan has always been way ahead of us North Americans when it comes to this kind of thing. I bet you can find a digital photo kiosk and get the attendant's attention. Wave your CF card in one hand and a CD-R in the other. Make lots gesticulations indicating your desire to get the pix off your CF and onto your CD. If they can do it in Costco, they can sure as heck do it in Tokyo (in fact there's even a Costco IN Tokyo!)!

Best wishes for a good trip and lots of good pictures.

James

[Peter_AUS]

An image tank wouldn't go astray either, you plug in the cf card and push a button it transfers the images to the image tank and you can then reuse the cf card again and again.

I have one with a 4G drive in it, had a drive lying around, when I can afford to get a 40 or 80G laptop drive I will then put that in and not be concerned about storage of images for a long time during shooting that way.

Getting them compied to CD-RW would be better as you might not fill it up from one compact flash card, that way it can be multi session and not waste unused space.

I'm sure that you shouldn't have too much trouble in Japan, there have been many tourists travelling there for many years now and quite a few speak English to a more than acceptable standard.

Have fun, enjoy it.

Check the Histogram of your images after taking a shot and have it in the middle and look for the indications of blown out highlights. I can do that on my Canon 10D, you should have the same with the Nikon D70 I would think.

[Norman]

Thank you all for your responses, I think I will take my photo's in Raw, the only thing I not familiar with, is it worth using the Raw+Jpeg setting, so I would get a small jpeg file along with the Raw (Nef), I'm not too sure why this option is useful.

Thanks again.

[SmartWombat]

I would get a small jpeg file along with the Raw (Nef), I'm not too sure why this option is useful.

Because you can store the raw NEF files away, like negatives, and quickly view the JPG files so see if you've got the shot.

I don't know if the D70 has the same restriction as my A1 & A2, check to see if you can enlarge a shot taken in raw only mode in the on-camera viewer. You might want to do that to check image details and it would be more than annoying to find you can't do that while you're away rather than in advance !

If you can't tale a laptop with you, or some other image storage box, I would suggest it's worth spending money on more/larger memory cards for this once-in-a-lifetime trip. It would be to me !!

I went out and spent £250 on a 1G memory card for my F1 photography, so I could shoot RAW at the track instead of JPG. Now they're down to £175 but it was still worth it to get those photos of practice in the rain.

[another view]

From what I've heard, the jpeg that is attached to the NEF is pretty small, so you probably wouldn't lose much space on the card. It may be handy to look thru the jpegs quickly, but I don't have a camera that does that so I can't really tell you.

From some of your previous posts, you seem to have a pretty good amount of experience. If you're used to shooting slides, then the highest quality/largest jpeg that the camera can shoot will give you a great large print. Advantages: Many, many more images on the same size card, less work to do later. Downside: If it's not right at time of capture, there's not a whole lot you can do to fix it (that's debatable, but can require a lot of expertise and time in Photoshop).

Say you're shooting inside a building with artificial lighting. The light source is constant (not like the sun going in and out of clouds) so a custom white balance, shoot jpeg (assuming no flash) and you're fine. Same deal for an overcast day. RAW (NEF) files will give you ability to adjust the white balance later (and exposure a little) but a properly exposed jpeg is a very high quality file.

Short answer: You may be best shooting both!