We took all our photos with our Nikon D50 equipped with the Nikon 18-200mm zoom. We had along a pocket Canon A670 for backup but we never used it.
Oh thou good & faithful servant...
This Nikon is a horse. We've been hauling it around with us since 2006. It should fly free, it's been on so many planes. It's gone thousand of miles riding on the floor between the seats in our RV; it has crossed Russia on the TSE. Its battery is good for three days of shooting. It comes on instantly and focuses even faster. If you see a picture you can pick it up, slide the power switch to "on", aim, and shoot all in one continuous motion, grab-swing-click. Try that with your average pocket camera. By the time it has finished booting up and stretching out its lens, your picture is long-gone. We've been using the Nikon so long, the rubber strip on the zoom ring has stretched out of shape and wants to slip off.
The Macbook Pro 13-inch, on the other hand, was bought new just before this trip. Unlike David's prior Macbook, the screen of the Pro has good enough color it can be used for accurate photo editing. Its sale-clinching feature was that it has a slot in the side for an SD card. No need to carry an external USB reader to input the camera chips.
"Mr. Fusion" reading pics from an SD card.
Every night we uploaded the day's pictures from the camera card into the Macbook, where Adobe Bridge stored them in a new folder named for the day, e.g. 20091031. A typical day produced 100 or so pictures, with a low of 20 and a high of 250.
We would sit together over the Macbook and cull the pictures, choosing on average one in five to keep permanently. The selected ones got moved into a separate folder for the week and David would go through them and add keywords for cataloging.
Then David would select from the day's "keepers" the ones to show in the blog. These he would work over lightly in Photoshop, typically spending no more than two minutes on a picture. Mods were kept to a minimum. Almost every blog picture needed to be straightened and most were cropped a bit. The Photoshop "Shadow/Highlight" tool was sometimes applied to bring out shadow details in a dark scene. And pictures taken on gloomy days got their contrast and brightness boosted a bit.
The "road pictures" that Marian took through the van windshield had to be color-corrected. Here is part of an uncorrected road picture.
The windshield makes things too green and gray.
Fortunately, New Zealand lines every road with white plastic markers that have little reflective stripes in them. Those stripes are perfect gray-scale references! All we had to do was get a Curves adjustment, and click the mid-gray eyedropper on one of those reflector stripes, to get an instant correction of the color.
Windshield color corrected - whites are now white and grays, gray.
The windshield also drained contrast and life from the scene so a little Photoshop Brightness-Contrast adjustment was in order to make a road picture look like what we saw.
Photoshop chases the clouds away.
But again, that was for pictures shot through the windshield. Pictures taken in the open, under full sun, never needed anything done to them. The amazing greens and brilliant flowers, foliage, and ocean waves came out of the Nikon, bless its pixels, looking just like how we saw them.
After being buffed-up in photoshop, David scaled each blog picture down to either 1024 pixels (most) or 1280 pixels (the super-good ones) and uploaded the scaled version to our Smugmug album. Once there, links to each pic could be put in the blog text.
When David finished drafting the blog entry he turned it over to Marian for proofreading and rewriting. Then it got posted and we could go to bed!
Batteries and Charging
We had two laptops, the Nikon's battery charger, and a charger for the cell-phone. Fortunately all of them were perfectly happy to take 220-volt 50hz power. We had two adapters to connect US-type plugs to NZ's sockets. The van offered two outlet sockets that of course were only live when the van was plugged in at a powered campground. Both outlets would be occupied all evening charging laptops, camera, or phone.
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