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I know I should have posted this before my trip but I simply did not have time. The truth is I was too busy trying to find a way to pack my photo bag and deciding what to take. My starting point was simple, one bag for all the camera gear, that I could carry as cabin luggage on the flight back. I had to have a laptop with me and I had to have 2 copies of all my raw files I downloaded to it. I didn’t care too much about having a backup of my Lightroom library since I wasn’t planning to do editing on the road. I had to be able to charge everything from a wall socket as well as a 12V cigarette lighter socket in a car since most of the trip was to be spent driving and I had to be able to use AA batteries in at least one of my camera bodies.

Simple huh? Well, no. Packing a photo bag is actually hard work, you have to know where every little thing is and have it easily accessible. If you’re driving your bag is gonna spend most of its time in the back seat of a car while you’re in the front so it needs to be packed so that you can one-handedly pick things out of it.

The general idea when you pack photo gear is to take as much as you can with you. Have two sets of bags, one to get the gear to wherever you are (say your hotel room) and the other to lug just the gear you need for a particular shoot. I couldn’t afford this luxury since the one bag I had, had to fit into the overhead compartment of the plane I was flying back on.

If you watch the video you’ll see that I stress the point of having as many lens cloths as you could possibly carry. This is good practice in any case but is especially important when shooting close to salty water or in areas where the prevailing winds blow in from the sea. Salt water tends to leave a sticky oily film on lenses which is really hard to get rid off. I tend to carry sensor cleaning equipment with me. It’s useful in case a major dust spot arises, but I don’t rely on it to thoroughly clean my sensor when away from home unless i’m certain that I have a nice dust-free environment I can work with.

Another point is to have a way to keep track of memory cards which have been filled up. I tend to put them back into the card compartments in my bag facing label down if the card  is full. Taking backups is a must here…i’ve never had a CF card die on me but i’m convinced it’ll happen one day. Even if I didn’t fill up my memory cards one particular day I tried to dump them onto my laptop once a day, since there I was creating two copies of everything  on separate hard-drives. This meant that I grabbed every possible chance I could to charge  whatever gadgets I had with me.

So that’s been my gear strategy, feel free to share yours…

Here’s the video:

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