So you’ve just booked that once in a lifetime trip on an African Safari, or some other excursion to the continent and now you are wondering what camera, lens, tripod, filters, bags, etc. you should pack to photograph the great moments you know that you will be experiencing during your journey.

You know that if you back too much equipment you’ll be sick of lugging around extra lenses, cameras, or tripods that you never use by the second day. On the other hand you know that if you pack on the bare minimum you are sure to be faced with that incredible contest winning shot of a lion licking his chops at dusk that required the speed of your 200m f2.8 that you left at home. Unless you have budget for assistants (or friends) who are willing to carry along your extra gear you will find that travel photography, especially to a place like Africa is always an exercise in trade-offs.

The top trade-offs that you’ll encounter are:
1. Should I pack every lens and camera I own, or pack light?
2. Should I buy extra memory cards/batteries or buy them on my trip if I need them?
3. Should I bring a laptop or other device to backup my memory cards?

My rule for photography trips to 3rd world countries, and in particular the African countries, is to follow the boy scout advice and always be prepared.

1. Be prepared for spotty, incompatible, or non-existant power sources by buying several extra batteries and fully charging them just before you arrive. Then, charge them every opportunity you get after you arrive in your destination. You never know which charge may be your last. I’ve stayed at lodges on the edge of beautiful reserves in Kenya that relied on generators which were run only intermittantly to power outlets which were neither typical Kenyan/British outlets or American outlets, but in fact were French-style outlets for which I had no adapter!

2. Be prepared for dusty, dry, dirty conditions which will gum up your sensor, your lenses, and everything else in your camera bag.  At the same time be prepared for sudden downpours of the heaviest torrential rains you have ever seen.  To counter the dust you could bring sensor cleaner fluid and tools, but I don’t recommend it – it takes up precious space, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a dust-free area to open up your camera.  Instead, use good technique changing lenses.  Minimize the time when the lens is off the camera, keep the camera pointed toward your chest with your back to the wind and you shouldn’t get too much dust on your sensor.  To counter the rain I recommend either a waterproof camera cover or if you are going cheap then a shower cap works well.  Always bring it along even if the weather looks great, you just never know.

3. Be prepared to take more pictures in the week or two you are traveling than you have ever taken in your life, and bring enough memory cards to capture all of those great shots.  There is nothing more frustrating than madly deleting pictures trying to free up enough space to capture the once in a lifetime pose of the lion over its kill, or the monkey swinging through the trees and missing the very shot that you traveled 8000 miles to take.  It is next to impossible to find memory cards or batteries in most locales in even the most developed countries like Kenya.  My rule of thumb is to take at least 2x the number of memory cards I think I will need.

In addition, after having seen too many vacations ruined from corrupted, lost, stolen, or insufficient number of memory cards I take the following precautions.

1. Rather than one large 8 GB SDHC SD card card I take 2-4 smaller 2 GB SD cards.  This means I have to switch cards more often, but it also means that if one of my cards gets corrupted during shooting, or before I have a chance to back it up I only lose 2 GB of shooting, a day at most, rather than three or four days of shooting.

2. I back up my pictures whenever possible to a laptop or a dedicated photo storage device.  I like photo storage devices better than laptops for backups since laptops usually don’t last more than 4 hours without a charge (remember it is difficult to find places to charge in Africa) and are much heavier to carry around.  They also make a much more enticing target for theft.  Now, if you are bringing a laptop for some other reason, then by all means use it to back up your cards.  Now, in addition to backing up my SD cards I also keep the SD cards in a location away from my photo storage device so that if the photo storage device is stolen, lost, dropped in to a pot hole filled with water I don’t lose my images.  That’s right – I don’t reuse my SD cards after backing them up, I bring them back to the U.S. and wait until I’ve retrieved all of my photos and verified that they are not corrupt before I reformat the card.

You can certainly call me paranoid, but I’d rather take the extra precautions then lose once in a lifetime shots because I decided to save $10 and reformat my 2 GB SD card rather than just buying another.  Trust me, I’ve seen it all, and nothing is sadder than the wail of the forelorn photographer as they discover that the great shots they took on the best day of the safari are gone forever because their memory card was corrupted/stolen/lost/dunked in water/you name it.