photoshadow by taliesin / www.morguefile.com
You enjoy taking pictures with your digital camera or DSLR while you are visiting stunning places on your trip? This post might help you answer the question what camera equipment is necessary having with you while travelling or backpacking.
Camera equipment is expensive and often very sensible with weather conditions like extremely cold or hot weather, sand on the beach or dust. Therefore you should consider very carefully what you want to carry. Decide which pieces of your camera equipment are important for you to take with you by considering the upsides and downsides of each piece of your stuff.
Storage
Depending on your travel time and your personal needs you ought to have enough storage capacity with you. There are different possibilities to store your photos: photobanks, memory cards, DVDs or the internet. Which of these possibilities fits best to your needs depends how much storage (in GB) you will need.
- Photobanks offer much more storage (e.g. 500 GB) than memory cards. They are simliar size to external 2,5″ HDDs where you put your memory card in the slot and transfer your data to the photobank. The downsides of photobanks are that they need to be handled with care. If the photobank breaks down or gets stolen you will loose all your pictures which might be a nightmare for all photographers.
- Memory cards like sd cards are easy to handle. They offer less capacity than photobanks but need less space. The best advantage of the use of memory cards instead of a photobank is that you separate your photos to different memory cards. If one card breaks down or gets stolen you will still have your other memory cards with other photos. Of course, this will also be a photographer nightmare but a smaller one than loosing all your pictures on a photobank.
- DVDs might also be a possibility to store your travel pictures. They are quite small and very cheap and easy to handle while travelling. The only negative aspect is that you need a PC to burn your photos on the DVD.
- The internet is possibly another way of saving photos while travelling. You can upload pictures to services like flickr, picasa or to your e-mail account (Gmail offers a lot of online storage capacity for your mails) or own webspace. These ways to store your photos require internet access and a lot of time if the bandwith isn’t high enough for a fast connection.
Of course, you can combine these ways to save your photos to reduce the risk of data loss. Consider how much storage you will probably need on your trip and choose the alternative that suits best to your needs.
Tripod
A tripod is very helpful at shooting night pictures, panorama photos or macro photos. Unfortunately, tripods are often quite heavy (5 to 6 pounds) and need a lot of space. Passionate night photographers will probably accept these cons as they will often need their tripod while travelling. If you need your tripod only occasionally and don’t want to buy an expensive light tripod made from carbon there is a good alternative for travellers: a GorillaPod. The GorillaPod is a very flexible tripod which is sold in different sizes to suit compact cameras and DSLR cameras or video cameras. Wind it on handrails, place it on the ground or put it wherever you like to – the GorillaPod is a really helpful accessoire for your camera equipment while you are travelling.
Battery
Taking a lot of pictures needs a lot of power from the battery especially if you do longexposure photos at night. Cold temperatures also reduce battery. Having only one camera battery might not be sufficient if you cannot recharge it as often as you need to. So bring along extra batteries and do not risk losing a good opportunity for a photo.
Lenses
Zoom, macro, wide angle – DSLR photographers need different lenses for different kinds of photos. Changing lenses is always a though thing especially when its dusty or sandy. Consider a lens that will cover the focal lengths that you use most.
Camera insurance
It might be a good idea to have an insurance for your camera if your equipment is quite expensive. We would reccommend to record all your equipment details like serial numbers or make model and preserve the receipts of your camera gear. If you need to claim insurance this could be very helpful and could speed up the acquisition of an insurance policy.
What about you? Leave a comment and tell us what experiences you made. We’d love to hear your story.
