Recently I’ve been thinking about what to pack for an upcoming holiday, in particular what camera gear I’ll take with me and how I’ll use it. I love both traveling and photography and the two things together are a truly great combination.
I’ve been so busy with work (amongst other things) I’ve been really struggling to find the time to dedicate to my photography so I’m really looking forward to this trip as it’ll allow me some serious shooting time everyday.
Camera Gear to Pack
For most of my traveling time I like to have all of my cameras/lenses in a proper purpose made camera bag. My bag of choice at the moment is the Lowepro Slingshot 300 that we reviewed some time ago. The compact size of this bag means it doesn’t attract undue attention from airport staff eager to charge for overweight hand baggage (which it invariably is with all of the lenses mentioned below!).
Here’s a list of the main camera gear I generally pack for a trip away:
- Main Camera Body
- Canon 50mm f1.4
- Canon 70-200 f2.8 L IS
- Tokina 11-16mm
- Canon 24-70mm f2.8 L
- 2 x batteries + charger
- Multiple memory cards
Day Photography Bag
Once we’ve reached our destination I sometimes like to travel a bit lighter and depending on what we are doing each day be a bit more discrete with my gear. For day tips or evenings out I’ll quite often not take the full bag of lenses and will instead use my converted Timbuk2 courier bag to just carry the camera with the 50mm attached as well as a couple of other lenses, a guide book, some snacks etc.
Timbuktu Messenger Bag with Domke Inserts
For me the Timbuk2 is also perfect if I’m going somewhere a little off the beaten track where I don’t really want people to know I’m carrying a few thousand dollars worth of camera equipment. It looks discrete from the outside and when combined with some camera bag inserts provides great protection for your gear.
Holiday Photography Work flow
After reading Thomas Hawks excellent post where he describes his digital work flow I got thinking a bit more about my approaching trip and how I store, process and back my photography files up when I’m traveling. While i won’t be shooting in a professional manner during the trip I still worry about things like security, backups and work flow while I’m away.
1. Multiple Memory Cards
Memory is cheap these days that most people (myself included) have large amounts of storage, be they SD or CF cards. Depending on where I am going i generally have enough cards to shoot for a 2 or 3 days before having to free up some more space.
2. MacBook Processing
Every night I’ll copy my days shooting to my macbookpro and add it to a Lightroom Catalog that I will have created for the trip. Once imported I’ll proceed with my usual work flow of deleting poor shots, moving to a logical folder structure, key wording images, rating what i consider my best shots, batch editing and finally editing single shots.
3. The Back up
Once i’m done i’ll plug in a Iomega 500gb USB hard disk that I use to run Time Machine on for my MacBookPro. This means i’ll have the whole Lightroom Catalog (not to mention the rest of the files on my macbook) backed up in case of hard disk failure or theft.
4. Security
Obviously there’s no point in backing up your images if you keep your backup in the same place as your master copy of the files. The first thing I do when I head down for breakfast in the hotel each morning is leave the macbook in the hotel room and take the hard drive with me, everywhere I go. I keep the two separate at all costs. If we’re traveling then the macbook goes in my wife’s bag, the hard drive in mine.
When you’re staying in far flung places it can be a challenge and a worry leaving expensive items such as macbooks or lenses in a hotel room. Here’s how I try to reduce the risk of things going missing while I’m out:
- Samsonite Suitcase: Put simply they’re the lightest, toughest and most secure
- Kryptonite Kryptoflex Looped Cables: These great security cables come in a variety of sizes. and are great for locking a suitcase up to something immovable almost anywhere.
- Master lock padlocks: These are tough little padlocks and some are approved by airport security for locking cases.
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