Captain Bodgit: Posting Photos from the Field

Saturday, 8 March 2025

Posting Photos from the Field

If you just take photos on a mobile phone ...no problem!

But what if you have a proper camera?

Here are a few tech notes from our 2nd holiday to Costa Rica

For Costa Rica 2025 we planned to take photos, ...lots & lots of them.

White-necked Jacobin Hummingbird (male)

I bought a second-hand Olympus 75-300mm lens from London Camera Exchange in Chichester to marry up with my Olympus OM-D E-M10 mkIII.

My wife already has the same model lens with a OM-D E-M5 mkIII, so now these two cameras are very suitable for [amateur] bird & general wildlife photography.

Olympus E10 & E5

We wanted to create a kind of photo-diary as the holiday progressed, and settled on the idea of using a simple private Telegram Group, inviting friends & relatives to become members. I'm not sure every member was expecting 425 posts in just over 2 weeks, but for us it remains a great reference, which we can refer to while planning Costa Rica 2026.

Since our cameras save photos to SD cards, we purchased an SD card reader with a USB C connector, suitable for our OnePlus phones.

This reader (from Amazon) reads SD & uSD cards

We set our Olympus cameras to save both RAW & 3200 x 2400 jpeg formats; the RAW files would allow maximum flexibility in future edits, while the jpeg files were typically around 2MB and therefore easy to edit & post via our phones.

It was also necessary to do some 'house keeping' on the SD cards. With more & more photos added each day to the cameras working folder, things quickly became tricky. So we soon got into the habit of creating new folders for the older photos (e.g. all photos taken on 5th Feb were moved to a new folder: "5-Feb"). This simple step saved time when selecting, sorting, editing & posting pictures.

The next problem was battery power. To be sure we could keep our cameras ready for use in remote areas, we took a 5V powered camera battery charger and our two PowerBanks.

Camera battery charger & 2 PowerBanks

With all devices, chargers, rechargeable torches, & PowerBanks compatible with USB C, this simplified our cable requirements, although we needed several to ensure we could charge everything via 110V mains each evening.

We also took 3 US to UK mains adaptors; one 2pin and two 3pin.

The 2pin will fit 2 and 3 pin US sockets, and is therefore a useful backup if only a 2 pin socket is available (i.e. you can't push a 3pin plug into a 2pin socket!).