An updated treatise on my travel camera gear.

When I wrote the last blog post about flying with cameras gear, I had only considered the airport and airplane overhead space only.

Well, here I am again in a different scenario and this time the kit looks very different. The overarching theme here is apparently that you should tailor the kit to suit the trip. Lol. I have done just that.

For this trip we are being tourists more or less, so the camera kit will reflect that. I am taking the Leica CL and just two prime lenses. The 17mm and the 35mm lenses are perfect for tourist type photography and there is two more reasons for taking two primes over a single zoom… read on to learn why.

When choosing kit for trips now, I start with the premise of the trip. For a long time, I would have these illusions of grandeur and would take all this gear for events that never happened. You see, I dont plan the trips, the wife does so she plans on things the I don’t consider. She will arrange tours and such and I am just too busy with other things to pay much attention. Well, I finally learned and now I dont bring hardly any of that stuff and this makes travel SO much easier. Some types I have encountered are tourist, wildlife, street, and such as that. Once this is nailed down then I choose a camera that best fits that type of trip. Usually between crop sensor and full frame first as this gets me the right camera. For wildlife I prefer my crop sensor Z50 but for architectural purposes I prefer a full frame sensor. Things like street photography can be shot with either but on long days, the little crop sensor Leica CL is a much better choice over the much heavier Leica SL2.

Now that I have a camera picked out, I will decide what is the most likely scenario I will be shooting in and choose a lens for that. Next I will look at what else there is and choose a lens that will work for this as well as loosely backup for the main lens.

Using this process, I chose the 35mm f0.95 TTArtisan lens as my main lens and the TTArtisan 17mm f1.4 lens as the backup. These are designed for the Leica CL which is a crop sensor camera so the equivalent field of view for these lenses is 50mm and 28mm respectively. These are two VERY useable focal lengths for a travel kit. These will also both work just fine if one or the other gets damaged at some point. I might have to adjust my shooting style a little but the trip is not a loss…

I want to take a moment here to mention TTArtisan and how they are making some amazing lenses for crazy low prices. The quality of all three of the lenses I currently have that they made are just stellar. I have one they gave me as a review sample but I bought the other two on my own. They are great little manual lenses.

Another reason I like using prime lenses for trips is the maximum aperture is much larger than on general purpose zoom lenses. General purpose lenses work great in broad daylight but the lack of large apertures make them less than desirable for me in the evening and early morning.

What this means is I will end up with a really compact kit with this camera and two lenses. These being native L mount lenses also means they are smaller than adapted lenses as well. (This is something that I do regularly and dont sweat it and that is how I know.) Native mounted glass means they are more compact though and that is what I wanted.

Since we are hiking this trip, I wanted to make sure that rain didn’t ruin my camera gear. This is why I put all my camera gear into a dry bag and then put that inside my backpack.

Once inside the dry bag, they are divided into three different lens “dump” bags I used for this trip to organize this gear loadout. These are made by Thinktank Photo and are great for street photography photo walks as you can stick batteries and a spare lens, business cards and lens wipes and such in them and they are still small and lightweight.

I realize now that I desperately need to clean my lens! Will do that asap!!!

Armed with this kit I am ready to take on just about any tourist, street, or even landscape type photo with hood confidence that I will come away with something reasonable. The next blog post in regards to this kit will be a photo spread describing what I found to photograph.

Until next time, get your camera out!!!

My loadout for flying with camera gear.

Traveling over the years to locations that require flying commercial has taught me a few things about what to take.

I once carried almost everything I owned when I traveled so I was sure to have whatever I needed for a certain photographic event. Well, with time comes wisdom… I have been adjusting the loadout and searching for the best solution as far as bags go and have finally found the perfect setup…FOR ME. You see, different people have different needs and your loadout will vary depending on your personal needs and wants.

When I traveled early on, I carried a large shoulder bag, very large mind you and a ton of kit in it. I had to fill it up you know! Lol.

Well after a couple of trips like that, I learned that I needed a different bag. So the giant Vanguard bag was retired and replaced with a Thinktank Airport International v2. This was a nice upgrade and allowed me to travel with more confidence in knowing my gear was protected better and it was also a roller bag! No more lugging that massive shoulder bag all over creation!!!

Well, I still use this bag from time to time, but only for roadtrips in my truck. The irony of this statement is not lost on me. I bought a literal aircraft carry own style, camera bag and now I dont even take it when I fly at all.

Thinktank Photo Airport International 2.0

So I learned the hard way something about marketing with this bag. Thinktank Photo will tell you, probably with an asterisk, that this bag will fit in standard overhead spaces. This isn’t so and I learned this the hard way on a trip coming home from Hawaii one year. On the last leg of our long journey, we boarded a small commuter jet and the overhead storage bins were just too small. This is when I got a VERY sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. You see, this meant I had to valet check this bag at this point. If you have never watched baggage handlers loading luggage then you dont know the horror movie I was imagining my expense and fragile camera gear was about to experience. They can be quite rough with check bags, we have had them arrive at baggage claim with wheels missing and such. So I tell the flight attendant my plight and she saves the day by stowing my roller bag of camera gear in what amounts to her broom closet. I almost cried in appreciation. That was the straw the broke the cameras back of roller bags for me.

Pictured here are the Peak Design Everyday Messenger bag and the Thinktank photo street walker backpack.

After the Airport International “incident”, I decided I needed to downsize my kit for multiple reasons. The main one being that I didn’t want to have to valet check my bag because it wouldn’t fit in the overhead bin.

The next reason is the most important though. I was tired of carrying gear I didn’t use or even need.

Taken with the Nikon Z50 handheld and using the kit lens.

So I decided to get something new and smaller. I chose something that had been on the market for just a short time at this point. I chose a Peak Design Everyday Messenger Bag. It is a wonderful way to carry camera gear for the most part with one exception. I cant really carry my big telephoto lens I use for wildlife. I tried it for a couple of years and at the time, I was using a large system consisting of a Nikon D810 with battery grip and the 200-500mm super zoom lens. This combination is very large and would leave me with room for just a couple of smaller lenses. It also came with another problem…pain. Single strap bags are great as long as they are not heavy, which is exactly what mine was at this point in time. So the search continues and I found another Thinktank Photo bag.

The next bag I chose was the Streetwalker v2. This is a smaller bag that is backpack style and is really comfortable. The single shoulder strap on the messenger bag would make my shoulder incredibly sore after just a couple of hours of carry. I tried this for a couple of years and paid the price. The streetwalker solved that problem in short order. It was at this point in my photography journey that I was finding smaller cameras like the Fuji XT3. I took this camera to Israel for a ten day trip and it was on this trip that my eyes were opened to carrying excessive equipment is wasteful. I took three lenses with me and only used one of them. Yes, I used the KIT LENS for the whole trip and it worked gloriously!!! All the while I was carrying around all this other crap and just getting back to the kibbutz tired every day.

Current travel load out, Z50, 500mm PF, 16-50mm Z Kit, and 10-20mm F mount Nikkor/FTZ adapter.

Well, I finally figured out that the smaller pack was the way to go, but it really didn’t have room for the big wildlife rig I liked to use… It also had one other critical shortcoming that I noticed from regular use. The pack opened to the top when unzipped. What this means is you take off the pack and lay the side that normally sits against your back, on the ground facing down to access the gear area. At this point, I was doing a great deal of photowalks and hikes to waterfalls and such and this caused lots of dirt on the back of my shirt… To say this was frustrating is an understatement but I carried on till…

Enter the Thinktank Photo Retrospective 15L. For my needs, this is as close to perfect for a camera bag as I have ever found. It opens from the back, the side against my body which means you lay to outside one the ground, keeping all the leaves, twigs and dirt off of my shirt. It is slightly larger (15 liters in size) so there is room for my wildlife kit. It is REALLY comfortable and it is made of stone washed canvas. So it has a nice look (it doesn’t look like a nylon camera bag) and has a great feel. This is a hallmark of Thinktank Photo from what I have seen. Their backpacks are very comfortable. So now that I have landed on the perfect camera bag after almost a decade of searching, I can now shift focus to the gear I put in it.

Taken with the Nikon Z50 with the FTZ Adapter and the 500mm PF Amount lens.

The gear loadout for my photography usually involves at least two bodies, three general purpose lenses and then my special purpose lenses and all the support gear too. Like a whole cleaning kit complete with blower bulb, dry wipes, wet wipes and solution and sensor swabs… way too many batteries, like I must have thought I was going to take 10,000 photos per day or something. I never needed most of this crap either. I mean almost none of it. What I had was a case of “fill’er up” syndrome. If there was bag space I felt compelled to put something in that space for some reason. This is a terrible way to operate if I must say. You end up tired, sore and resentful of the hobby as you brought all this kit for nothing.

The Nikon Z50 with kit lens makes for a powerful little general photography kit.

So this trip, the bag is scaled WAY back. I mean, there is room in the bag for stuff and nothing is in those pockets. This is a milestone for me, as I am a prepper at heart and want to cover every conceivable contingency under my normal mindset. To be honest, I probably brought at least one lens more than I will need and could have lightened the load some more there, but we will see. So my takeaway from all this is, your hobby is a journey and you will have to figure out your kit for that hobby as you go. For me, it is still an ongoing journey to be honest. Hopefully I can stop spending tons of money on it and just enjoy it. Let’s be realistic though, probably not…Lol.