Even the most gadget-adverse bike tourist is likely to carry a digital camera these days. After all, when you finally round the last switchback to reach that glorious mountain peak, you’ll want a photo to remember the moment!

You can also create a small income stream by selling your travel photos online. This takes work but can be enjoyable if you like photography. See our photos on microstock websites Fotolia and Dreamstime.

Here are some points to consider when preparing to take a digital camera along on tour:

Smaller is usually better. We carry a Nikon D80 SLR because we’re serious about our photography but it’s heavy, prone to dust spots and very often a compact camera will do the job just as well. For a good example of what a small camera can do, check out the photos on the 14 Degrees site. He’s using a Canon Powershot G9. It’s just 320 grams, compared to our brick of a camera, which weighs 585 grams without the lens! In addition to being lighter and smaller, a compact camera is less intimidating when you want to take a picture of someone you’ve just met on the road. If you’re determined to go for an SLR, you probably have your reasons. We won’t argue. Just get a large handlebar bag.

Battery life is crucial. Go for the longest lasting battery you can find. You may not be able to recharge your camera each night and the last thing you want is a dead battery just as a magnificent view opens up in front of you. For reasons of battery life alone, avoid cameras that use an LCD screen as a viewfinder. Get one that allows you to turn the screen off and use an old-fashioned viewfinder instead.

Get a big memory card. Whatever comes with the camera won’t be big enough. Memory cards are cheap these days and the more room you have, the less you’ll have to worry about burning CDs on the road. It’s worth going with one of the better known brands like Sandisk for speed and reliability. A 2GB card would be a good starting point or 4GB if you plan to use the video function that comes with many cameras. A larger card will let you shoot bigger photos or in RAW format, useful if you plan to sell your photos or print poster-size pictures of you and your bike.

Back up your photos. How you do this will depend on the length of your trip and what else you’re carrying. Because our trip is long, we have a laptop for picture editing and storage. We also burn DVDs of our photos to send home and upload our pictures to our website (usually a quick process even for full-sized JPEGS but sometimes it has to be delayed because of poor internet connections). Once this is done, we delete them from our computer, leaving us with two backups. If you’re not carrying a laptop, many internet cafes or photography shops will burn a DVD for you. You can also upload photos to online storage sites like Flickr but compare storage limits and inactivity rules carefully. Check as well to see if they store a reduced or full sized version of your photos.

Get a mini-tripod. You’re unlikely to need a full-size tripod but there are a few intriguing miniature options, including the Gorilla Pod with legs that wrap around anything and the Ultra-Pod, which has velcro straps that can attach it to your bike’s handlebar. We use it for shooting videos on the move. These tripods weigh very little, can support an SLR and they’re great for self portraits or extra stability when you need to take a picture in low light.

Consider an external hard drive. If you’re carrying an ultraportable laptop like the Asus EEE, you may want an external hard drive. Get a reinforced one that can handle the bumps of the road. Some models have memory card slots to let you dump photos from the card directly to the drive, without using a computer. This sounds good but it doesn’t allow you to edit or sort your photos. It just puts the task off until you get home and doesn’t eliminate the need for a second backup in case the hard drive fails. If you have a laptop, any other gadget with large storage like an iPod can be used as an alternative to an external hard drive.

Organise. Organise. Organise. If you don’t sort your photos, it’s easy to end up with a digital version of the jumbled boxes full of paper pictures most of us have stuck in a drawer somewhere. We download our photos directly into folders based on each country we visit and sometimes further broken down by region or a specific event. We only caption our photos online but admittedly this isn’t the best use of internet time. This is easily done offline on a computer.

Other issues to consider include optical versus digital zoom, the quality of the camera lens and the size of pictures the camera takes. These are all expanded on in depth on photography sites so we won’t go into details here.