Vacation Picture Tips
How To Stop Your Holiday Photos From Becoming a Nightmare
Digital camera essentials to help leave your photography worries behind while on vacation and concentrate on family photos or beach pictures
A vacation is for relaxing and getting away from the troubles of everyday life, and a bit of preparation helps to minimize digital camera problems and help you capture a host of pleasant memories. Pack only essential photographic items and use a compact camera bag to minimize the hassle of carting your gear around, while still having it all available.
One of the enduring tips for travelers is not to buy a new digital camera for a vacation trip without allowing enough time to become fully familiar with the new digital camera.
Customs
If your vacation is to another country, check with your countries customs authorities before leaving home for the procedure on bringing your own gear back into the country without having to pay duty.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection office have a Certificate of Registration (CBP Form 4457) so that you can register your valuable cameras and lenses before you leave. This proves you took them out of the country and no duty is payable when bringing them home.
Batteries
Digital cameras are totally dependent on their batteries, unlike older film cameras where the most of the operations were mechanical. Then the in-built light meter was the only electronic item, now when the battery goes flat, the digital camera stops.
Take a spare battery on your vacation trip. Everything is new and worth a picture, so you end up using your camera more than normal, without time to recharge the battery as you move about.
For international travelers recharging on the road can present challenges. Some regions use different mains voltages, perhaps 240 volts instead of 110 volts. Even if your battery charger has the right voltage for the region, another surprise could be that the mains plug is different. This is another detail, check here before you leave to make sure your charger operates on the local voltage and you have the right plug or adaptor for the local mains sockets.
Memory cards.
Buy more memory cards. On a long trip without the opportunity to download your digital photos to a computer, running out of room is real possibility, especially if there are many interesting sights on your travels. As well as extra cards, give some thought to the size of your digital photos. Saving pictures as jpeg instead of RAW will fit more photos onto a memory card and generally produces good results.
Mini tripod or support.
In the theme of traveling light and keeping mobile on your travels, the photographer’s favorite, the tripod has to stay home. This leaves the problem of how to capture those great displays of city lights or other low light scenic shots without camera shake ruining them. The answer could be a Gorillapod, one example of a compact lightweight camera support. The flexible legs have rubber sections so they grip on signposts, light poles, fences, or even golf clubs providing a solid support for most cameras.
In some large cities there are local laws banning the use of tripods, or restricting their use to special permit holders. As it is not a conventional tripod, the compact Gorillapod seems to be a neat way around these restrictions to get good camera support for photographing low light street-scapes.
