What Goes Into My Backpack?

Rule: The lens I leave at home will be the lens I need
Rule: I bring too many lenses


Cheetah with Cubs, South Africa

As I begin going through the ritual of getting my gear ready for a photo trip, in this case Northern California/Western Oregon, I do the usual research about the shooting locales to best anticipate which gear I should bring. Since I will taking long hikes with my gear in a backpack, I have to be selective. (It would be nice to travel like Chase Jarvis, but I don't have the entourage just yet- seriously, click on the link- he actually brings a "scouting lens," which is a lens that he uses to determine which lens to use! No joke.)

My extra batteries get a quick charge, I make sure all my memory cards are working and formatted, and double check my portable hard drives workability. This is almost as important as the gear itself. My backup device of choice is the Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA. It uses a 500GB drive, fits in my pocket, and uses very little battery juice compared with its competitors, the EPSON and Wolverine. As pro bodies have incorporated larger sensors, megapixel counts have gone up, and file sizes for RAW files are 20-30MB a piece. For a week of dedicated shooting I may come home with well over 100GB of photos, and having a place to copy these photos from my memory cards while in the field is essential. I opt for smaller cards (most are 4GB), that way if a card corrupts I don't lose a whole day's worth of shots.

The technical aspects of the shoot always seem straightforward until I actually see the elements first hand. As an example, for my most recent big trip to Thailand, I brought a bag full of landscape lenses and ended up using the 70-200mm 80% of the time. This trip, it seems, will be exclusively landscape, though how the landscapes are framed depends entirely on the weather and available light. For example, brilliant skies and excellent golden-hour light usually lend well to wide angle shots to capture the entire essense of the landscape; cloudy, overcast skies sometimes are best left out and I'll use a more telephoto range.

Sunflower Macro

My checklist:

Required for every trip:

• Equipment insurance up to date
• Lots of extra memory cards
• Backup batteries charged
• External drive x3 (I'm distrustful of electronics and don't feel safe until the photos are home and backed up with my usual redundancy and off site scheme)

What's going in my backpack this trip:

• Bodies: Canon 5DII as a primary, Rebel T1i as a backup
• Lenses: 70-200mm II IS, 1.4x teleconverter, 16-35mm II, 14mm f/2.8 II, 24-70mm, 17mm f/4 TS II, 24mm TS
• Filters: Polarizer, UV, 3 stop reverse ND grad, 3 stop soft ND grad, VAR-ND (All Singh-Ray), step down ring
• Batteries, Memory Cards, GPS
• Remote triggers
• Tripod: Gitzo GT3541XLS and Arca Swiss Z1 Ballhead.
• Flashlight (for lightpainting at night)

You'll see there is an obvious redundancy in my lens choice as I have the 17-24mm range covered several times over. The 17mm and 24mm Tilt-Shift lenses are my favorite, super sharp lenses, but have the downside of being very heavy and manual focus only. Therefore if I'm in the circumstance to frame and focus my shot at leisure, these are my lenses of choice. The 16-35mm and 24-70mm zooms give me a little more versatility.

In the end, I will probably not need everything I bring, and wish I had the things I didn't. I'll be back with some photos to post in early May.

Birmingham Botanical Gardens