And I'm off...

Posted Friday, 27 February 2009 by Sven Seebeck

As some of you might have noticed it my Twitter stream or here from the blog of course, is that I'm about to leave to the beautiful area of Cornwall to do some, hopefully nice, landscape photography.

The bags are packed, the batteries charged and the journey starts in about an hour and now there are about 27 hrs of traveling ahead of me. As with some of my previous shoots, I will try to do some sort of live covering from there if possible. It depends surely on the availability of free internet access of course. Since I'm not sure yet about this I can't promise anything. I will at least try to cover as much as possible from there, that's for sure.

The whole thing will go live as usual from my Twitter/Twitpic feed which you can see here on the blog or on Twitter of course. When I'm back, I will also post some sort of diary here on the blog, which will accompany the images that I hopefully take.

I think I have prepared as much as I could and so far the weather report so far looks... say interesting. I have checked three different reports and all said something different. Since there's nothing I can do about that, I chose to believe in the better one and I'm looking forward to a week (well almost) of landscape photography.

In case we don't hear from each other, see you next week.

Tags: liveblog news travel  |  Comments

Backpacking and camera gear or trying to solve a problem

Posted Saturday, 6 December 2008 by Sven Seebeck

As the days are getting shorter and shorter up here, I use the time to plan next years phototrips. I have some plans to maybe explore the south west coast of England and also planning a little hike in the border area between Finland, Norway and Sweden during the next summer.

While the when and where and how-to get there is one issue, the how-to carry the gear will be another issue.

Since the pupose of these is trips is to take pictures, I can't leave any of my gear at home, besides the flash maybe. This sums up to this:
  • 5d
  • 17-40
  • 24-105
  • 70-200
  • Lee Filtersystem
  • Tripod
  • Remote Release and other small things
So this is what has to go, plus of course clothing and other necessary things for the trip to England and additionally food and sleeping bag for the trip to Lapland.

The trips will be most likely to be organized such that, at least in England, I'm going to travel/hike during the day time and find a spot (hotel or whatever) to stay for the night as a "base" and then go out shooting. Same idea I have in mind for the Lapland trip.

So using the backpack also as camera bag seems to be unreasonable, because that way I would need to carry around the whole bag when I go shooting. But carrying two bags doesn't seem to be wisest of all ideas either.
Another side effect would be that I have to check in the whole bag, including the camera gear, at the airport. This thought alone makes me shiver.

How to solve this problem?

If any of you has a better idea you're welcome to leave me a comment or drop me an email, but my plan is to get me a real good hiking backpack which is big enough to fit the MiniTrekker into it. This way I should be able to get some clothing and so on into the bottom of the back and the camera on top. When I then fly or go out shooting on location I simply can take out the MiniTrekker and go on lightweight.

I also considered packing the gear into lens-pouches etc., which would make it a lot easier, but then again I would need to carry the whole bag around when I go shooting, or take another one with me to carry the gear to location.

I know that there are some camera bags, which have a camera compartment and another one for other stuff, such as the Primus AW, which is one of the many bags that I own, but at least that one is too small for a longer trip like this.

For the time being I will stick to my plan using two bags, knowing that's it's not going to be the wisest one, but maybe someone of you has experience with that or some ideas, then you're more than welcome to share it in the comments.

I will keep you posted about the progress and maybe post a little video, once I figured out how to do that.

Tags: bags travel  |  Comments