Unprepared

One thing I forgot to do before taking off was to install photo software on my netbook. There's two apps I usually use. Breeze System Downloader Pro copies photos off of my camera's CF card, and gives you a bunch of options on how to organize the photos as they're downloaded. I organize mine by date. It makes my life easy, since it doesn't copy photos that have already been copied before. All I have to do is plug in my CF card, and photos are automatically copied over and organized quickly.

I'm still using C1 RAW to convert RAW images to JPGs that I can upload to flickr. RAW files are much preferred, since they contain a lot more colour information than JPGs. That is, you can fix the white balance, or find detail information in areas that appear to be all white or all back. C1 is far from being the top app out their for this purpose. I'm using both apps because they were more or less the best of their breed a few years ago, and they're purchased and legit.

Unfortunately, after the first two days in Cuzco, I realized that I was filling up my CF card. Although I had a few more cards, I suspected they proably wouldn't last too long. Luckily I had a trial version of Adobe Lightroom installed. Lightroom's probably the best of the breed right now, but I'm still not certain I'm ready to drop $200 to replace C1 which is sufficient on the most part.

That's the long way of saying that Lightroom was useful on the first day of the trip, I got a few photos up on flickr, but trial period expired within a couple of days. I managed to extend it a few days by never shutting down and only using hibernate. Unfortunately, Win7 crashed once when I unplugged my memory card reader. I can try shooting in RAW+JPG, but I won't have a chance to put up any MP pics before I get back.