Thanks for your comment and query.

Yes, for us photography and holidays go hand-in-hand with the former usually dictating the location of the latter!

Wherever we travel I tend to take most of my photographic equipment – 2nr Digital SLR’s, 3 lenses covering 12mm to 200mm, a 1.4 teleconverter and a sturdy tripod. In addition to this kit and to partly answer your query I also take a laptop. It’s a lot of gear to carry and it forms 99% of our carry on luggage but so far the results have made the effort worthwhile.

Our pattern on holiday is to take shots during the day (obviously), download to the laptop each night and burn onto CD as well. There are several advantages here. My images are safe in two places, my memory cards are empty for the next days shooting and I can review images on the laptop to make sure I’ve got the shots I want (if I haven’t, I go back the next day). I know memory is cheap and one option is to carry lots of “big” cards but I’d be nervous that I might lose them or they don’t contain the shots I want.

I always shoot in RAW and the D300 also allows me to take a JPeg at the same time (for reviewing).

When I get home I transfer all of the images (RAW + JPegs) from the laptop to the PC. I review and select my keepers. For the keepers I process the RAW images to my taste. I dump the unwanted RAW’s but keep all the JPegs. What I end up with is a full set of JPegs, a set of keepers in RAW and a set of processed RAW’s saved as JPegs. I can always go back to my keeper RAW’s and re-process if my skills improve).

Finally, for security at home, I have two external hard drives in addition to the internal one on the PC so I have my work saved in 3 places. Hey, memory is cheap!!

Phew, I hope this answers your query