The last of our gear for the trip which had been ordered online arrived today – ironically, it was also the first stuff that got ordered.

This time it was an 8GB memory card for the DSLR – I can now take 515 photos before having to download … although I will also take the 4GB card as a backup, which gives me a total of 772 photos before I run out of space. It is a pity that the A650 uses a different memory format – otherwise I could share the cards between the two cameras. As it is though, I had a couple of 2GB SD cards already which give the A650 a capacity of about 568 photos on each card (this is at the 8mp setting rather than the default 12mp setting!).

I also got a USB data/charging for my Nokia mobile phone. The idea is to be able to charge my phone from my laptop rather than needing to take an extra power adaptor – saving space and weight. That was the theory at least … now that I have the cable, it is longer (and hence heavier and bulkier) than I expected. 58g versus 72g for the normal charger … and not terribly much more compact either. Almost not worth the effort. The only real benefit is that I don’t have to find another power socket – I already have the laptop, the AA battery charger, the Canon battery charger, and Leanne’s phone charger (unfortunately Leanne’s phone is not compatible with this charger). I’d have to spend half the night swapping chargers over if I had yet another device that needed to be plugged in.

[EDIT: I tried the cable in Leanne’s phone when she got home (there is an adaptor at the end for different plug sizes) and it worked! This is better than I expected – not only do we not need to take my phone charger, we no longer need to take Leanne’s either. Turns out this was a very good buy after all!]

The third item is the one I’m the most excited about – although it’s more of a toy than something useful. I bought a GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Lite GPS logging unit. This simple little unit has a GPS receiver built in and simply records a log of GPS coordinates each interval period that you specify (eg every 5 seconds). It runs on a single AA battery and has a mini-USB port on the bottom to connect to your computer.

The idea is that you synchronise the time on your camera to the GPS time of the data logger, then you simply turn it on, attach it to you somehow (your pack, camera strap, even just shove it in your pocket). It connects to the GPS satellites, and logs your position continuously until your turn it off. Later, you connect it to your computer, download the log files, and use the supplied software to “geo-tag” your photos. This simply matches the GPS coordinates from the data log at the time the photo was taken and writes that information to the EXIF data in the photo – which can then be read by photo management software or photo sharing sites. You then have an accurate record of where each photo was taken, plus a complete history of where you went during your trip.

I haven’t had much of a chance to use it yet … I wandered out to the letterbox and back, and it wasn’t that accurate when I used the supplied software to look at my track on Google Maps … but then I jumped in the car and drove around a bit, and it managed to track fairly accurately where I had been and show it on the map.

Pity it didn’t come last week – would have been good to use it at the zoo on Tuesday. I might have to go for a walk down to Tunks Park later – with the camera – and try the photo geo-tagging features.

We’ve just spent the evening doing a check through all our gear and identifying anything missing – fortunately only minor items now … we have pretty much everything we need.

I’ve been able to rationalise a few things, which has been useful – save a bit of space and weight.

We finished up doing a test pack to see how we were going for space. It’s a tight fit, but Leanne got all her gear in her 60L pack – except for her fleece, which I think we can squeeze in with a bit of rearranging. Her pack ended up at 13.6kg.

My 80L pack is quite full – I’ve a little bit of space available if I squash things down a bit, and I’m at 14.6kg – I’m surprised at how little difference there is in weight between the two packs – especially given mine is 33% larger than Leanne’s (although I’m still to determine whether the 80L includes or excludes the gusset … it may well be that I’m only working with the equivalent of a 70L pack at the moment!)

Unfortunately my day-pack is approaching 10kg with the laptop, camera and lenses, plus all the other bits and pieces. I think I’ll be able to rationalise it a little bit, but most changes won’t make all that much difference to the overall weight. I might have to get a bit creative with how I distribute the weight – I’ll be studying the rules about carry-on luggage to see whether I can get away with two bags.

I’m not currently planning on using the day-pack that came with my travel-pack … I have another larger (and more comfortable and secure!) day pack for the laptop and camera gear. I might be able to use the spare day-pack to carry some of the smaller items like my jumper, water, books and other things to use on board – this will help distribute the weight a bit better, but at the cost of needing to carry two day packs. We’ll see.

One thing I will say now is that packing cubes are a wonderful invention – we have four sets of Sea To Summit mesh packing cubes (each set contains a small, medium and large cube) … two sets each – for all our clothing. Makes organising and finding things far easier than just shoving it all in the bag. They are very light and don’t add any bulk or weight to the bags at all.

I thought I’d go back and post some of the better photos I’ve taken since getting the Canon EOD 40D DSLR back in early December.

Canon digital cameras have automatic file numbering starting at 0001 and wrapping when they get to 9999. Our first digital camera – a Canon S50, got up to 0293 … the second time around!. That means we took 10,292 photos with that camera in the 1585 days since August 2nd, 2003 when we bought it in Hong Kong (the last photo I’ve taken with the S50 was on December 3rd, 2007. That’s an average of nearly 6.5 photos per day every day for over 4 years!

Since I got the 40D on December 5th, the file counter is up to 798 photos already! I must admit though, many of those photos were experiments, especially when trying out the burst-mode continuous shooting (6.5 photos per second!)

I’m starting to get quite good at deleting photos too – something I’ve always struggled with. I’m now taking a lot more photos than I ever have before – so I am becoming much more fussy about the quality. I’ll tend to take 2 or 3 or even more photos of something, with slightly different settings or framing, and then only keep the best one or two. As such, I actually only have 596 photos in my collection since I got the camera – I’ve deleted nearly 200 of the photos I’ve taken!

Still, that means between the 5th of December and the 26th December (22 days), we’ve taken an average of over 27 photos per day. Actually – if you consider that there were only 10 days that we took photos, that’s actually an average of nearly 60 photos per day.

I’m shooting in RAW+JPEG mode, which saves a raw CR2 file plus a smaller JPG file for every photo taken. This takes a lot more space, but gives me a lot more flexibility with processing. I have an older 4GB Compact Flash card currently in the 40D, while I’m waiting for my 8GB card to arrive later this week. I can store around 250 photos on the 4GB card, which means over 500 photos on the 8GB card. The most I’ve ever taken in one day was just under 300 photos (filling up both of the 384MB and the 32MB cards I carried with the S50). It will be interesting to see how I go on this trip – I’m a little worried that 500 photos will not be enough on some of the days where we’ll be seeing a lot of diverse wild life and scenery. I will take the 4GB card with as backup – that gives 750 photos maximum capacity for a single day’s shooting, and I’ll have about 60GB of disk space on my laptop with another 80GB drive as backup (I’ll keep two copies of all my photos). I also have the 60GB iPod with about 30GB of free space if I get desperate for more storage capacity, and I’m sure I can find a 2.5″ notebook hard drive somewhere (or another high capacity Compact Flash card ?) if I run out of all other options.

Anyway, I’ll start posting a few of my better photos. Here’s the second photo I took back on the 5th … depth of field is something I’ve had to learn about with this camera and lens – it has a very sharp photos, but tends to use a very narrow depth of field if you let it make all the decisions itself.

Hopefully we made our last trip in to town today – we’re almost ready for our trip!

We got in after lunch and headed straight to Paddy Pallin so that Leanne could look at lightweight waterproof jackets and Polartec fleeces. We had previously seen some in Mountain Design that were good – but Leanne didn’t really like the colour of the fleece, and the jacket was just too expensive compared to what we’d seen elsewhere.

Fortunately we found some Berghaus fleeces that Leanne liked and were on special, and they had the women’s equivalent of the Mountain Hard Wear jacket I bought the other day in a green colour that Leanne quite liked – also on special. We bought some more tops and some socks and sock liners and had actually checked off everything on our to-buy list more quickly than we had expected.

Since we still had time, we decided to look at sandals – something we had been thinking about for a while. We wanted something that could be worn comfortably around town for warmer weather when we didn’t want to wear our boots – yet providing more protection and comfort than a simple pair or slip-on shoes or thongs. After trying a few pairs of shoes, we both bought a pair of Teva sandals that were on special – far easier than choosing our boots was!

We also found some small screw-top bottles that are the perfect size for carrying shampoo and conditioner. We didn’t want to be taking our usual small bottles given that if the bag gets squashed – the pop-top lids can come open and you end up with a mess everywhere (this happened on our last trip to Adelaide – in our hard-sided Samsonite bags!). Leanne also found a small first aid kit that had most of the stuff she would like to carry, yet was compact enough to not take up too much extra room in our packs (we could even take it on day hikes if necessary).

There’s just a few bits and pieces we need to get – mostly toiletries – trying to work out the best compromise between space/weight and function. Things like finding a good stick/roll-on deodorant to use instead of my normal spray can and such.

We’re having to be pretty tough on choosing what to take for the sake of fitting everything in the pack. It’s not as if we will be in areas where we can’t get anything at all – so better to take as little as possible and plan to buy whatever else we need while away. Most of our travel in the past has been via expensive hotels and limited to plane/taxi trips – we tend to take a lot of gear with us, so it’s an interesting challenge to work with a limited amount of space and weight.

When I think we’re going overboard (either in trying to go too light, or even trying to take too much!), I have to remind myself that we did a 5 week trip to the US a couple of years back and we took both Samsonite bags, plus my little Samsonite roll-on, plus two day-packs (I had my laptop bag, and Leanne carried the camera bag plus a small sling-bag). We took well over 25kg each (just in our check-in luggage!) for our five week trip – while this time we are attempting to carry less than 15kg each for a 6 week trip. Given that I’m also taking a large DSLR with three lenses, a 14″ laptop, a compact digital camera and spare batteries and chargers for everything … weight really is at a premium – so I don’t think we’re really going overboard when trying to minimise our pack weight (although none of that electrical gear will be in our travel packs – day pack only).

We’ll have to see whether I regret taking the extra lenses and the laptop. I could have bought a nice little 12″ X61 ThinkPad – they were on special … but I decided we were spending enough money as it was and I didn’t really need the additional laptop. If I didn’t already have the T41, I probably would have bought the X61 – far better than lugging a 15″ T60 around!

Another walk to Chatswood for some more gear shopping. This time some tops for Leanne. We’re still looking for a waterproof jacket and a fleece for her, plus some t-shirts and shirts. We found shirts and t-shirts in Paddy Pallin which suited her, but she wasn’t convinced about any of the waterproof jackets or the fleeces. We looked in Kathmandu, Columbia and Mountain Design with no luck either (although she did get some more thermals in Kathmandu). There is the female version of the Polartec fleece I bought in Mountain Design which is on special at the moment – but she really doesn’t like the colour (Cherry). There was also a good lightweight waterproof jacket in MD, but it was a lot more expensive than other similar jackets we’ve seen – we’ll keep looking. So, looks like we’re heading in to town once more tomorrow for our regular Sunday shopping trip.