Traveling Light! May 2, 2012
Earlier this year we took five weeks to explore four different countries we had never been to (Fiji, New Zealand, Thailand & Vietnam), on a side of the world we had never wandered through. It was a wonderful, productive and challenging experience to squeeze so many locations into such a relatively short amount of time.
We had always wanted to go to these countries and take in as much as possible. Our plan was to expand our photography portfolio and be always ready to shoot video as well and time lapsing, well, whenever time allowed. 🙂
Carmita spent endless hours researching and prepping for this journey on TripAdvisor. The infinite amount of reviews provided us with the most up to date, honest and realistic opinions on hotels, tours, adventures and some secret locations we wouldn’t have found out about otherwise. We had a rough idea in our minds of things we wanted to see in each country, but it was comforting to have a better idea of how to accomplish it all. Through all her reading, Carmita was able to build an itinerary with all the things we couldn’t miss, all the “Plan B’s” for when needed and at the same time leaving space for just open exploration whenever possible.
Taking all the gear we wanted to play with while still remaining mobile was probably the biggest challenge of all. We weren’t going to have any camera assistants or any PA’s; it was going to be only the two of us for the whole trip, so fitting both clothing for all the different kinds of weather and all the camera gear into somewhat-compact luggage was definitely a priority. Ideally one main big bag and one light ‘day bag’ for each of us would perfect.
The gear we were planning on taking was: A Canon 5Dm2 & 60D bodies, 50mm f1.4, 16-35mm f2.8, 24-105mm f4, 70-200mm f2.8 lenses and the 2.0x Extender. Two GoPros with a bunch of mounts, a small manfrotto tripod, the big GorillaPod, the Edelkrone Pocket Rig, a filter set, intervalometers for each cam, the Rode Video MicPro, Fat Gecko’s dual suction mount, a Nexto DI drive, a hard drive, a waterproof Lumix point-n-shoot cam and of course batts & chargers. Whew.
I didn’t want to take a laptop because I didn’t want to lug it around all over the place when I knew I’d only use it for downloading cards. That’s where the NEXTO drive came in.
The rugged NVS1501 model takes both CF and SD cards and downloads directly to it without the need for a computer. You can even preview your files on its screen to make sure all your stuff is there! I’ll write a more formal review later but for now I can say this sweet device worked like a charm. I carried with me a small CF/SD card reader in case of emergency so if I needed to I could backup at an internet cafe, but I never had to!
During the 5 weeks we knew we were gonna be jumping back and forth between basically every mean of transportation possible. Planes, taxis, train, bus, ‘tuc-tucs’, boats and even canoes; so you can imagine our necessity for remaining as light as possible with as few pieces of luggage as possible.
Our biggest concern was making sure we were able to take all the gear with us as carry-on through all our flights. I believe the amount of plane rides was around ten. The thought of checking all that gear in and just trusting that it’ll make it through unscathed (or at all!) throughout all those flight connections seemed WAY too daunting. We simply could not afford to have any baggage misplaced, not so much for the gear, as it is all insured, but more because we probably wouldn’t get the chance to be in these beautiful locations again for who knows how long and we didn’t want to miss capturing anything! The good ol’ point-n-shoot wouldn’t have cut it this time around.
After about two months of researching, we found some great solutions for our baggage concerns.
One of the first things I bought for the trip was the SCOTTEVEST ESSENTIAL JACKET.
With removable sleeves and a total of 19 pockets, most of them hidden and discreet, this jacket was the perfect fit for being on the go while being able to carry a lot of my daily essentials. Dedicated pockets for cel phone, travel documents, eyewear, mp3 player, keys, camera and even a pocket big enough for an iPad gave me enough options to always be ready for whatever situation I would face. The iPad pocket is the biggest one of all, yet it is inside the jacket so no one sees what you are carrying; at times I even put my 70-200mm lens in there and no one could tell the difference! Scottevest have a great line of products and I can’t recommend them enough for people who travel with a lot of gadgets.
For our main luggage, we found that the company CLIK ELITE makes performance packs for adventure photography. They all look sleek, tough and don’t scream out to the world that they are full of expensive camera gear. Excellent! I decided on their CONTREJOUR 35 backpack, even though it says it was meant for back-country ski photographers, I found the design perfect for our needs. Half of it is set up for gear and the other half for personal items like clothing etc. Plenty of compartments, hidden pouches, organizational pockets etc. The camera bay is even accessible through either the back or side panel. All good stuff.
Quickly I started seeing the gear portion fill up though as the bag is rated for 1 pro DSLR body with lenses, yet I had TWO bodies, 5 lenses and quite the list of accessories. A bit of rearranging of the velcro dividers and slowly all my main items started fitting into place. I had to put the GoPros and its accessories on their own pouch, which together with my 1 day bag all had to go inside the clothing compartment. For the daybag we opted for 2 LowePro Passport Sling Bags which not only have enough space for 1 DSLR body, a couple of lenses and some accessories (perfect for splitting the gear between the 2 of us), but they are collapsible as well!
Take off the dividers and the whole thing flattens down! Perfect for storing in the bigger backpack for the long flights.
So now that the gear had a nice and happy home we still needed a solution for our clothing.
Enter SEA TO SUMMIT COMPRESSION BAGS!
Carmita found out about these handy little bags that can compress any articles of clothing you put in them into what seemed like half the space of what would be originally needed! We had already bought about a week’s worth of light dry-wick clothing anyway so as to be able to hand-wash our items and have them dry overnight, and their light material made it even easier to fit inside the compressor bags! We each only took the pair of shoes we’d be wearing and 1 pair of sandals, so Carmita was able to fit both our compressed clothing bags, her flattened day bag and our combined toiletries into one standard backpack and voilá! I only had my CLIK backpack full of gear, and Carmita had her standard backpack with our clothing. Ready for travel!…Well, almost. The one thing that did not fit into either one of our bags was my Manfrotto 390 tripod. It’s one of their smallest tripods but I knew even if I was able to fit it in there, it wouldn’t be allowed as a carry-on since it could be considered a weapon on aircrafts. So I padded the inside of a small rectangular cardboard box, put the tripod in there and surrendered to checking in at least that one item at every airport. I guess one item out of so many ain’t too bad!
Even though the full CLIK bag was looking quite bigger than before, we went ahead with the plan and it turned out it was gracefully accepted as carry-on on every single one of our flights! I was not even charged for overweight once!
All in all, we were very happy with our choices. Of course it would have been nice to have some extra hands for help throughout the trip, but we proved to ourselves that we could pull off being as compact & mobile as possible without sacrificing on efficiency for what we wanted to accomplish. Things went smoother than we could have ever hoped for, no gear was lost, stolen, broken or confiscated so that’s a victory in my eyes!!
We will be sharing more specific stories and pictures about each country in upcoming blogs and we are excited to recall all the details of these fantastic places so please come back and join us!
