WARNING: This is a post for total photo geeks. If this is not you, please skip... Ahh, now that the "normal" people have left the blog, let's get right down to it! This trip is an experiment in lightening up my camera setup. My setup has evolved over the years. This is for a typical "big trip." A big trip entails a few hot, tropical countries (e.g. Malaysia, Thailand), some SCUBA diving, and a couple cool places (e.g. Japan, China). The duration ranges from 4 to 9 weeks. I get a big trip about once every 3 years, and I try to fit in a half-dozen places if I can, so I don't want to miss out on a photo shoot opportunity. For a big trip, I need the following from my setup:
I know that sounds gross, but photos and people and food are why I travel. The photo gear helps get those food and people memories flooding back. Here's what that list looked like, then and now... Photo gear, circa 2006:This setup was heavy, bulky, but served me well. If I took a bad photo then it was not the gear! :) Lenses are generally Canon L series.
Gross, huh? After each trip, I account for how much use each lens got. Guess what? All of these got used and there were "Top 20" shots from each one. That's not to say that I didn't screw up the setup a bunch of times. Here are some examples... What didn't work? Sometimes I packed additional lenses which didn't get used enough. I used to lug the 85mm F 1.2 "Canonball" around. Those shots were stunningly gorgeous. Really, they were. But my back thanks me now for leaving it home. I'd pack a 10mm-22mm wide zoom for a friend, but they never used it. You only need one interior shoot. The big white telephoto lenses come with collar mounts for tripods. They aren't heavy, but you're generally better off hand-holding. If it's something far away in low light, it had better be very still. So then just use towels, rope, your pack, whatever you have laying around. In fact, this will probably be my last trip with a tripod. Mainly, I used the tripod for bracketed exposures, for HDR conversion later. I found that I never got around to the HDR part later. Instead, the middle exposure was usually "good enough". Several technical advances will obsolete my tripod. First, a 5D mk3 can shoot at much higher ISO's, and it can do HDR in the camera. Note this is at about 12 bits per channel instead of 8. I didn't believe it until I did an interior shoot for a friend, but you can handhold HDR interiors now. Also, Canon finally fixed their wretched 16mm-35mm F 2.8 lens with a mk2 version, and this works great. I experimented with another kind of underwater housing, essentially an industrial-strength ziplock bag. For this I needed a 20mm F 2.8 lens. It was heavy (the bag needs more weights). Worse, the buoyancy was unstable with depth. Fail. I bought generic batteries with almost 2x the capacity (mAh). I marked them with sharpies. That worked great. Inevitably, one out of five would be bad (I caught those before I left). However, after 2-3 years of abuse, another 1/3 were bad. I was too cheap and set in my ways. I should have just thrown all of them out after 3 years. :) I had a big bag of adapters and chargers and stuff. They worked. But now there are many alternatives for chargers. You can get chargers which are much lighter. You still need 2-3 chargers per battery type. They literally smoke and crackle if there is a big enough line fade. Think Vietnam. Third party chargers, good and light. Just don't pack only one. The plug-splitters and adapters I had were too heavy and made too big a nest of wires. Fail. The new system is simpler and more compact. Also there are indicator lights so I can see if it's OK. Win. The Canon G-series (G7, G8, G9 ...) are heavy bricks, with mediocre sensors and lenses. The reason I carried them is that they used Rebel-sized batteries. Newer G's use different batteries. All G's inherit Canon's dismal auto white balance. Finally, Olympus makes a camera that goes to F 1.8 (the XZ-1 which I use now) and Panasonic makes one that goes to F 1.4 (the Lumix LX7 which I got for my mom). These will make much better, and lighter, underwater cameras. The 3-digit locks are fine, but it's not very many combinations, only 1,000. Now I use TSA "4-letter word locks". These have 10,000 combos instead of 1,000, so that buys some time. It is easier for a friend to remember my 4-letter combo (which is strong, not a word), so again, more secure. Initially, my MEC backpack worked great. Then TSA dorks ruined air travel worldwide, as other airports adopted "security theater" to follow suit. Also, some newer airports have no luggage storage lockers, no carts, no shower/rest areas, and long, long walks. I'm looking at you Heathrow! This can be brutal with 50 lbs on my back and a 4 hour layover. Fail. Now I am experimenting with a small, wheeled Samsonite Cosmolite bag. This rocket-science rigid fabric bag is the future. It's gross to carry 3 heavy DSLR backs. That's a fail. My wife has a full frame Canon, a 6D, so we should be able to consolidate. Before, we had a mix of full-frame and APS-C, mainly to cover the focal range wide to long tele. Canon updated their extenders to mk3, and we tested them during a lens micro adjustment session before we left. A 2x extender is tolerable now, and better yet, we didn't need any adjustments (our deltas were zero or plus one, which is negligible). In theory, one of us can carry a telephoto and the other a normal/wide and we can swap. Bolting a 2x to the 100mm-400mm lens results in a 800mm F 11 instead of the 900mm F 8 which I enjoyed before. Canon is also making their APS-C backs heavier and heavier, and they are putting too many pixels on the sensor. It may be time to ditch Canon APS-C backs altogether, and I'm trying a Fuji XE-1 with an 18mm-55mm F 2.8-4.0 lens (27mm-83mm equivalent) instead. As a bonus, it's mirrorless, so the back is smaller and lighter, and the lenses are small and lighter too. So for example, for safari, I can carry the Fuji for normal shots, and the 100mm-400mm on the 5D for telephoto. On a related note, I used to miss some photos because I didn't want to lug my 5D + 24-105mm lens, which was my normal walking camera solution. Or I'd bring my G7 and it just couldn't take good photos in certain conditions. Fail and fail. Now with the Fuji XE-1, I can get most interesting shots with great quality and color. It is light enough that there is not excuse not to carry it along. Win! I used to pack a camera bag. I also used Calumet film bags (for medium and large format film) which are slightly padded, to transport my cameras in a knapsack. The latter is preferred, as it is lighter and more stealthy. However it looks ghetto when you go into a fine restaurant. I'll take that tradeoff. Unfortunately, newer 5D and 6D cameras are bigger and they don't fit well in the film bags. Now I am trying fuzzy-lined stuff sacks...so far, a win. The Epson photo bricks worked great, even viewing and editing RAW's. But at 80GB each, I was running out of space. The same was true of the 8GB and 16GB compact flash cards. After 4-6 weeks, I'd have filled the photo bricks and would then start rationing compact flash cards. It worked. Barely. To go bigger you need a computer. So I tried a netbook and a 1TB drive. The drive was defective and mercifully failed early on a trip to India, so I only lost a few pictures. That's a few too many. Fail. Now we have a Mac Air (so we can blog too!), and multiple 512GB server SSD's which we will mirror using a python system I am writing. We use only 64GB and 128GB SD cards now, and I use a 128GB compact flash card as a mirror/backup inside the 5D. In fact, the entire compact flash card concept is a fail. The teeny tiny pins on the reader will eventually bend or break. They are crazy-expensive. Just say no. I have a few 128GB compact flash cards for this trip, but I hope to eventually get that down to 2. One is for backup in the camera for whatever 128GB SD is in there. And the other is in case that first one fails, or I need to mirror a second SD. I'm looking forward to a (nearly) CF-free future... Photo gear, 2013:I know this is turning into a book, but the end result of all this testing and failure is simplification. I've color coded the key differences. Green is for a substantially lower weight. Red is for deprecated and not packed in the future. Blue is for an increase in weight. Mobile viewers won't see the color coding.
Here's the setup now:
Much better, huh? I can tell you it is a lot lighter! And it will get lighter in the future. Also, my wife can carry a couple items, as they are not super heavy. So the amount I carry feels like half, even though it is probably only 30% less. More importantly, the photos are better protected and we have more control over the flow. Finally, the little Fuji is great for walking around, so I'll miss fewer opportunities. * Ken Rockwell is the Chuck Norris of photography Hong Kong has great food, electronics, ... shopping in general. In particular, Hong Kong people seem to really appreciate Japanese delicacies. One of these is Milk Tea. Milk tea is basically a mild black tea with milk and sugar. It can be served hot or cold, as bubble tea, and even as ice cream or gelato (in Singapore). It's great stuff! I particularly like it as a dessert or noon snack. The variety of black tea varies, but it is similar to a British afternoon tea, from India or nearby (e.g. Sri Lanka). I like it bottled from Japan and ice cold. What is it most similar to? If you've had Thai or Vietnamese iced milk tea, and you diluted it with water 1-to-1, that's about it. Japanese brands are brewed lighter, and they also use less sugar. Generally they use milk and perhaps some cream, but no sweetened condensed milk. It is surprisingly low calorie, considering how rich and delicious it tastes. A 500 mL bottle contains 175-215 calories. Mmmmmm. Writing this is making me thirsty...I'm cracking one open now! :) I can go to a 7-Eleven (24 hours) or similar, grab one, wave my wallet by an Octopus Card scanner, and BUH-BYE! --- I have a yummy snack to chill for later. Kick. Ass. In the US, I can sometimes get the Kirin on the left below. But I haven't been able to get any at all, for over 6 months. Even the Super 88 stores don't have it. It's just not as popular as iced coffee. And nobody wants to see me that caffeinated! Here I can get many kinds, so I decided to do a taste-test. The rules are simple. They must all be at the same ice-cold temperature. They must be a Japanese brand, but in addition they can be brewed/bottled in Singapore or some place where I can drink the water without getting deathly ill. I don't want that lead-paint aftertaste from Guangdong milk tea please. Just kidding. I haven't tried that. Maybe it's great. And heavy. The Contenders:The ResultsThe summary is that they are all delicious. Going from left to right, we have "normal" Kirin, The Pungency (also by Kirin), and Pokka (Japanese company but brewed/bottled in Singapore).
The winner of Most Disgusting Name goes to The Pungency, of course. It is a little stronger than the normal Kirin, but both are light and made by Kirin. The Pungency has a little more tea flavor, the same sweetness, and slightly more sweetness. None of these changes are worth trekking out to find the more obscure Pungency. Also, the regular Kirin has fewer calories and roughly the same flavor. Both Kirin brands use extremely high quality brewed teas...you can really taste that. Pokka tastes a little richer and creamier. It has a less tannic tea taste. It has a few more calories too. So the overall winner is: The normal Kirin. This is a delicious milk tea, and it is light and relatively low calorie. As a bonus, it is the easiest to find. They are all great. But none are stunningly better than the others, so normal Kirin for the win! I will celebrate with a (hopefully) limited-edition Donald Duck labelled normal Kirin. Cheers! |
AuthorI'm an applied-math-research Ph.D. and serial startup founder. I am a recognized computer security expert, fortunate to join the ranks of many, great CTO's. I've founded and seed-funded multiple, successful, VC-backed companies. I'm still at it! Archives
December 2020
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