Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/10/20

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Subject: [Leica] Re: jim laurel's digital photo expedition to africa
From: Kyle Cassidy <KCassidy@asc.upenn.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:00:15 -0400

>I will be in the Far East for a month this November, 
>then in North Africa for a month in Dec/Jan.  I think 
>I'll invite B.D. along to guard the $10,000 worth of 
>digital accessories (laptops, hard drives, satphones, etc) 
>whenever I walk away from the car to shoot, and to haul 
>the two 30lb Pelican cases that contain it all in and 
>out of hotels and inns, onto buses, trains, etc. 

This is an odd argument from a lugger: "the camera equipment is too
valuable!" for the price of a nice leica lens, you can get more digital
equipment than you could carry. What I'd recommend doing is taking a Disk
Steno, which is a portable CD player/burner with a compact flash reader.
They're about $250. no laptop necessary, you plug your Compact Flash card
into it and burn the contents directly to CD. Since a CD holds about 600
megs, I'd recommend getting a pair of 512 meg cards, so you're not filling
more than 1cd's worth of card. They're about $123 each.

I took a setup like this to egypt in 2001, though I was burning 250 meg zip
disks, which was a bit more combersome. But still, the zip disk / cf flash
reader was still smaller than a brick of film.

Figure your total output from scratch:

Leica d100 $1500
Leica 17-35mm $350
Leica 28-80mm $350
Cd-burner: $250
1 gig of cf flash $300

About $2700

From the ground up. And no developing costs. And it'll all fit in an
ordinary domke bag.  Jim can now take the extra $7000 and extend his trip
down along the coast, or across to the east and send back another months'
worth of spectacular photos from the sinai, up through israel, and maybe
across to spain. And when he finds himself in a cybercafe in madrid, sipping
whatever they sip in café's there, he can upload a couple photos for us to
look at. We'll all check in.

Keep pressing that shutter button, it'll come unstuck.

Kc
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