what size SD cards do you tend to take on a trip and how many? Furthermore, is there any merit in buying the expensive (faster) ones for still UW photography?

A 32Gb card should store 1200 or so 25mb .raw images from my camera which is possibly a whole trip but I am reluctant to leave it all on one

I was thinking of taking one card per day and backing up to a portable HDD in the evening

(sorry if this specific topic has been covered before)

Mike S

Edited 5 hours ago5 hr by Mike Saunders
typo

II find its rare I need to shoot at such speed that I need a faster card, so for underwater use I think most recent cards should suffice.

I have 128gb cards and never come close to filling one on a dive, and that's shooting RAW on a Sony A1

Every night I download to a portable SSD and having sufficient memory on the cards gives me the option of leaving all images on the card whilst having the security of the files being on the SSD

A bit like Pooley, I shot RAW on a D500 with a 64GB card. I very rarely came close to filling the card on a 7-10 day trip.

Again, like Pooley, I would download the card periodically onto a backup system (the excellent ClouZen Tainer - now burnt out along with the D500 in a Maldives harbour)

2 hours ago, Mike Saunders said:

what size SD cards do you tend to take on a trip and how many? Furthermore, is there any merit in buying the expensive (faster) ones for still UW photography?

A 32Gb card should store 1200 or so 25mb .raw images from my camera which is possibly a whole trip but I am reluctant to leave it all on one

I was thinking of taking one card per day and backing up to a portable HDD in the evening

(sorry if this specific topic has been covered before)

Mike S

Decent quality cards are reasonably priced these days as long as you are not at top tier speed, though i notice they have gone up along with many computer items recently. The bonus for faster cards is they will download faster if you have the right card reader. I've been using 200GB/sec sandisk SD cards and have 2 128GB cards and back up to a laptop daily. I could write to both cards in camera but generally don't bother and just keep some backup copies.

You only need the really fast cards for high frame/sec shooting of full res images, even video is not that demanding in comparison, not likely to need it UW. My raw files are about 17MB (20MP m43 camera) and I can fit over 4000 images on one card.