The problem with heavy lenses is that they really fill up your hand-luggage when travelling overseas, but are a must for photographing birds. Because of this, I hardly ever travel with a computer because I don’t like taking more than one carry-on bag, and it would push my backpack over the weight limit. Going away for a month, however, when you’ll be taking a lot of photos, makes it a bit of a strain to have nothing to edit them with, or even preview them other than the LCD screen on the back of the camera.

An iPad has somewhat revolutionised the way I travel. As a big reader, I was often hard-pressed on holiday to get my literary fix due to the bulkiness of books and my lack of space for them in luggage. This time round, I had the Kindle App loaded up with an array of things to read, and though I tried valiantly, I didn’t make it through everything! I also had audiobooks to listen to, because I can’t read in a moving car. A big part of my travels is also writing, I have kept journals of every trip I’ve been on. Being able to edit my writing made me write a lot more than I used to on paper!

To solve my conundrum of itching to process photos, I used a mini-usb to iPad adaptor to download photos on to my iPad. The App I use most often for photo-editing on my phone is Snapseed, and it was the only one I had on my iPad, not having anticipated downloading photographs.

I had a lot of fun using Snapseed to do some basic editing. It is extremely user-friendly to use and takes full advantage of the touch and gesture capabilities of the medium. I much prefer using it on the iPad now because of the bigger screen! My only issues with it are the heavy-handedness of the adjustments, and the limited ability to do selective adjusting. The selective adjust tool only has Brightness, Contrast and Saturation options, and I think it would benefit from an expansion to Colour Temperature and perhaps Sharpen/Blur.

It was a good way of showing family what I was doing, and give them an idea of why I carry heavy camera equipment around! It was also nice for Dad and I to share what we’d seen – some things similar, some things different – and make each other jealous with shots that we’d wanted to capture that the other had. While they’re by no means finished images, they’re great for experimenting roughly with what you want to do with them, and showing other people. Here’s a few pictures from the trip that I played with while we were away.

Watermarks were added later in Photoshop.