Backup Plan

Today is Day 1 without my DSLR camera. I miss it (see yesterday's post for details). However, the situation has really forced me to give some thought into my backup and recovery options. Prior to the debacle, I owned:

1 DSLR

Two batteries

Two memory cards

A series of lenses

Logically, I'm not going to replicate my lens environment. If something happens with one of my lenses, so be it. The fact that I owned two memory cards and two batteries was good. If one fails, the other is there.

But what about the camera? I've read that many professionals carry two or three camera bodies with them. That seemed excessive to me, as an amateur. Now, thought, it doesn't sound like a bad idea. If I were to purchase a camera body, though, it would need to be nicer than the one I own. However, I'm not about to go out and spend $1,000+ on a camera body right now. It takes me longer than two days to buy a piece of fruit, much less such a big-ticket item.

So, what to do? Well, first, I purchased two USB card readers. One is for my new point-and-shoot (more on that later), and the other for my DSLR. The latter is a universal one. This way, I would be covered on the road.

Back to the camera: I can't go six weeks without a camera. This is just not possible in my world. My Nokia phone's camera is nice and all, but it won't cut it. So, I headed to Penn Camera, and looked at some point-and-shoots. My criteria was as follows:

1) Good optical zoom - for my building shots, etc.

2) Good ISO options - for shooting in low light

3) High resolution - to do some serious cropping, since I was bound to have issues with exposures. Since I won't be shooting in RAW, I don't have the benefit of fine-tuning my shadows and highlights.

So, what did I get? I'll share that tomorrow. :) I need to test the camera first. And upload my pictures from Philly. They're still loading into Aperture.

In the meantime, for those of you who went to Penn, see if you can guess where this is:



Till tomorrow!