As I write this, I am repacking in order to fly back home tomorrow after a break of 4 days in Port Douglas. Naturally, as you do, I carried an assortment of cameras with me ranging from a Panasonic GS-400 3 chip camcorder to a Panasonic L10 LUMIX DSLR with a 14-50mm lens on it. For the camcorder, a goodly supply of miniDV tapes was packed, and a 512MB SD card to take stills, and for the LUMIX a 1GB SD card was purchased. Also in the arsenal was a small pocket sized Casio EXILIM with its own memory of 512MB and a backup card of 256MB.

Now many would think this assortment of ordnance would be heaps? I certainly did. But oddly, not so.

Quite simply, in this particular case, circumstances dictated that many, many shots were taken (if you have ever seen the Barron Falls in full flight and / or ridden in the Sky Train you’ll understand why!) This quickly filled up the 1GB card in the LUMIX as I was (as always) shooting in RAW mode. 70 shots and boom, full. The backup 512MB card was quickly taken from the GS-400 and acted as an emergency card for around another 35 shots.

Yes I know that you can delete redundant shots to free up space; the problem here is a lack of time, and secondly, to really see if a shot is not worth keeping, you need to use the LCD and not the viewfinder. In bright sunlight of course, this is usually not an option.

The same problem had occurred the previous day while wandering through the Daintree rainforest taking macro shots of plants and insects and panoramic shots of the forest from the aerial canopy walk through as well as bird shots. By the way, if you thought you knew what sweat was, try that for exercise for a couple of hours.

Simply, these days of 7 megapixel and above in cameras, especially using RAW format, 1GB cards are not enough. 4GB cards are here and 16GB cards are pending, but until then, I would heartily endorse carrying a few extra cards when on holiday, and religiously dumping them off to a laptop each night (I stick ‘em on a 16GB Transcend thumb drive via the SD card in my ASUS EeePC). Even then, I’d probably still carry a spare.

But another thing; if you are a small business owner in a tourist zone, do yourself a big favour and carry a stock of SD cards (and a smaller one of xD and CF cards). You’ll make a mint! The Sky Train shops did carry cards, but to my knowledge only at the Kuranda end which is pretty pointless for those going “up”, but no other location we went to in the 5 days – even the Sheraton Mirage shop – did that we saw. And I was keeping my eyes open, and the Cairns region is pretty switched on usually for these sorts of opportunities.

Final note: High Kudos to Panasonic for the simple but elegant solution of having the same battery in the LUMIX DSLR and the GS-400 camcorder, thus allowing interchanging when one went flat and also meaning only one charger needed to be carried. I wish other companies had the same forsight.