As usual, hit me up if you find any problems! Flickr seems a bit boring now….

The photos below are a few of my favourites. Please click them to enlarge.

If you’re looking for advice on a trip there yourself, I’ll quote my reply to a thread on naturescapes.net:
I took: D300s, D300, ~70gb of CF storage, 400 2.8 AFI, 70-300 4.5-5.6 (old non-vr version, borrowed), 50 1.4, 10-20, 18-135 as backup – all in a Tamron 8x backpack, carried everything fine, with a Gitzo monopod for support.
Looking back at it, that was just about the ideal setup. Laptops are unnecessary unless you have very little card space (<40gb)/shoot a lot (I shot 800 pics in an hour gorilla tracking, you may be able to rack up something like that per day of “normal” shooting”/have some extra space in your bag (unlikely).
Taking two bodies is highly recommended – it is super-useful for gorillas as you only have an hour with them, and both you and they move around a lot so changing lenses and missing great moments hurts. It’s also a bonus to have the peace of mind of redundancy when you’ve spent so much time/money on this trip.
For gorillas, speed of lenses is vital – I missed a trick not borrowing/renting a faster 70-xxx….even at ISO3200 on the D300s, I was getting 1/30th at 200mm, which is difficult to brace at…monopods and tripods are allowed close to the gorillas if you tell the rangers that they are essential camera support, contrary to what I thought before I went out there. Weight wise, there are porters available for £10/day, which about 60% of our party went for, (I was the only photographer carrying much kit), even the people with 10litre backpacks. It helps the community, etc. etc., and they are lovely and very strong, even with the 2.5hrs of torrential rain we had to trek through on the way back! Oh yes, make sure you have waterproof covers for cameras/bags…..
I didn’t take a macro lens, and didn’t really miss it at all. For gorillas/chimps the slow af would have been a real pain – the 70-300 and 50 1.4 combo on each body worked very well, and I switched up to the 50 a lot for that bit of extra speed.
For shooting in QENP and similiar safari areas, I used the 400 exclusively. It’s just about right for focal length on DX (maybe slightly too tight for full body large mammal shots but great for head/head+shoulder shots). Support came from a sturdy gitzo monopod that I use a lot – once the engine is turned off in the bus and the roof is popped open, monopod are great for easy to move around quickly, stable support that doesn’t take up too much space. I rested it on a chair which worked good. A beanbag would have been helpful, but our bus had weird bars for luggage that would have meant I’d have needed a massive one to support the hulking 400. The 200-500 will be very good for safari-style shooting – the extra 100mm at the end will help a lot for far away leopard and lions in trees. If you get lucky you’ll see lions close in trees, and you’ll be able to fill the frame very well.
As mentioned previously, the Kazinga channel boat trip is mindblowing – animals and birds everywhere and great options for photos. The crew are very knowledgeable and have great eyesight – definitely not one to miss. When we went there was also a banded mongoose family (~30 individuals) up at the top, near the booking office and hotel. They made some great photos in the 2 minutes we had there……
In terms of storage, I got through about 30-35gb in the 10 days I was there. However that was only about 5 days “hard shooting”, with lots and lots of transport in the days inbetween where I would take a couple of photos out the windows to remind myself how bumpy the suspension was, and then put the kit away. Even if you do see something, at 50kmh the bus is well past it and the bird has flow before you can get the big glass out. Take a laptop if you have some spare space, but don’t struggle to fit it in – electricity is a rare thing out there (along with cold or hot water etc..). The only plug I did find electrocuted me, so be careful!

2 Mini drives stacked

Basics

The G-Drive Mini hard drives (to give them their full name) are small 2.5″, bus-powered (they run directly off your laptop or desktop, no bulky power supply needed), that have Firewire 800 and USB interfaces. They come in a range of sizes, from 250gb to 500gb, spin speeds of 5400 or 7200rpm, and work daisychained (more about this later) off firewire. They are made out of aluminium which is tough and has lots of perforations to aid cooling. They come with smart cases and a whole load of cables too. You can see more specs here.

Backup Strategy

The most simple way of storing pictures, and the one I employed until a few months ago, was to store the pictures, along with everything else, on my laptop’s internal drive (the stock 160gb 5400rpm drive that comes with white MacBooks). This had two noticeable disadvantages – the space available for photos was around 100gb, not enough for more than a couple of year’s shooting, and storing everything on the same drive meant that my system was running slowly. Not to mention that sharing files between computers became very hard.

From there it became obvious that the photos would have to be stored on a separate hard disk. This would allow me to share them between computers, and have a variety of options for sizes and speeds. I discounted using SSD’s (solid state drives) early on, due to their high cost/space factor. In the future SSD’s could possibly make very viable storage methods due to their immense speed and durability, but now they are not quite feasible for storing lots of photos.

I then realised I needed bus-power disks as my primary storage. This was because access to electricity can never be guaranteed, and I wanted the freedom to be mobile with my laptop and to take my pictures anywhere. The problem with using bus-powered storage is that the total amount of storage is not as large as AC-powered disks (about 1/4 of the potential maximum), and the photos and videos would stack up – just shooting timelapses it is easy to fill cards quickly.

The solution in this case was to use bus powered drives to edit the most recent (<1 year old) photos and some videos off, and then have archive drives that run off mains power to put older photo projects, as well as the majority of video projects on. Once I had decided this was the way to go, I started looking at backup. Of course, you always need two copies at least of any file, and this means you need two hard drives containing the same files. So I got two hard drives for each use – 2 active (or Field as I like to call them) drives and 2 archive drives.RAID is a method employed by some photographers, but RAID is not a true backup. If the RAID controller fails, then you lose all the data on all the disks….In my setup, the drives are separate, so one failing will not affect the other in any way. This takes a bit longer to copy files to, and can be more complicated, but gives me a lot more peace of mind about my data storage.

I also plan to use a 1tb disk that I have around as offsite storage. It only runs over USB, so backup will be slow, but incrementally managed so I won’t have to copy over hundreds of gigabytes every time – this is the same for all my drives. Incremental backup works really well, and I use Carbon Copy Cloner to run scheduled backups every day of everything. It is free, efficient, and doesn’t hog CPU resources when running in the background, like some other applications.

At this point, I think a diagram is due to make everything a bit clearer:

My 2010 Workflow

Drive Choice

For the bus-powered drives, I knew I had to use the Firewire Protocol to transfer files. Whilst USB 2 is just about fast enough for photos, it will struggle with HD video, dropping frames and being very stuttery. USB3 isn’t supported in enough computers yet to be useful, but will be very interesting in the future.

The two good Firewire drives I found were the LaCie rugged models and the G-Tech Mini drives. There was very little to choose between them – in the end I went for the G-Techs as they had a few nice touches, such as On-Off switches, nice cases to store everything in and bundled Firewire 800->400 cables (important for my laptop which lacks a Fw800 port). The archive drives I got were LaCie D2 Quadra disks – I’ll talk about these some other time.

First impressions were excellent. The G-Tech boxing and presentation is wonderful, and the drives look very smart and extremely well built. They are very small (about the size of my hand) and pretty light – carrying two at once did not seem to be at all problematic. First usage was easy – these drives come formatted for Macs, so I plugged them in and went. If you are using a PC it is a simple sequence to format the drives in the necessary filesystem for Windows to use.

Lots of Ports

The connectivity shown above is great – two Firewire 800 ports and a USB port. Both can run bus-powered, and if your computer’s USB ports are quite low voltage then you can get a DC adapter to supply the necessary power to run them. I don’t have this problem. The Firewire ports enable you to daisychain the drives – this is connecting them to each other via a very quick FW800 connection. I have the drives setup this way, and archiving my work between the two of them is very quick. More details in the benchmarks section. The On-Off switch is a nice touch – if you try to turn the drive off early before it has spun down it will beep to let you know you might damage it – a very nice safety feature built in.

Underside

In usage the drives run quietly but quite hot- they are warm to the touch after about an hour of usage, and hot after two hours. The heatsink on the bottom and the holes in the side help release warm air, but the drives still get warm. This is partly due to their high spin speeds of 7200rpm, which makes them a lot faster to copy to and slightly more power-hungry. I experienced only very slight decrease in battery life when running both drives of my firewire port. The drives have nice rubber feet on the bottom, which stops anything scratching. The feet also make them stack nicely, as seen below. In design they are reminiscent of Apple products – very smart with lots of smooth metal surfaces, and holes in the side like a Mac Pro.

Stacked

Benchmarks

I first benchmarked the drives using Xbench‘s disk test facility. However, this isn’t so good as a disk testing application, so for these tests I ran AJA system tester. To be honest, I know little of what the results mean, but it might be useful for comparison. Also featured are my laptop’s upgraded internal disk (500gb Seagate Momentus XT) which is a lot faster in use than the figures suggest, and my Seagate Expansion 1tb USB drive. I highly recommend not buying cheap drives like that – I only got it because the price was too good to refuse…The failure rate is phenomenal on them, and mine now only runs properly when I hold it vertically……..

Another thing worth mentioning about the tests is that the data rate via Firewire is almost constant, as opposed to USB where it fluctuates wildly (ie the G-Techs wrote solidly at around 32mbs whilst the USB drive alternated between 10 mbs and 40mbs). This is why USB will “drop frames” with video, and why Firewire is so much better suited to those kind of applications.

Conclusion

These drives are as close to faultless as I could think of. Yes, they are expensive, but the quality of build, speed, reliability (from many user accounts I’ve read), and  design are top-notch. Easily recommended.

Making Snowmen...

Smaller Snowmen...

Panorama of the frozen pond....

A bit of wildlife.

As for the wildlife side, today was limited due to my lens choice and time restrictions – not to mention that I didn’t fancy slipping and dropping the 400!

Filmed in a studio and in locations near us, the video tells a story of former lovers meeting. All shot on DSLR’s, cut and edited on Final Cut. Audio synced up manually, which took a while! If you like it see the other videos on the channel, and learn a bit more about the people behind it here.

For more, be sure to check out his blog, with loads of detail on production, locations, and more.

Be sure to check out his post over at Mark J. Rebilas Blog.