Micro Blog: 15th December 2010 (Travel)
The deal was set. My assistant, WeeHow and I will be heading down to India for a 2 to 3 week shoot that will have us shooting everything from architecture, street to timelapses.
My excitement soon however faded away slowly as I wrote down all the gear that would have to be brought over. The amount of gear that had to be lugged along for the timelapses was a little daunting. Sure we could have used shipping expeditors but I have always wanted to minimize the distance between my gear and I so everything will have to be on the same plane as we are.
First thing on my mind were the cameras. We will be lugging 5 bodies (3 5D Mark IIs and 2 7Ds) as we will be trying to capture as many angles of timelapses as we can within the shortest time frame. Lenses, 10 of them. From the 17 TSE for interior and architecture to a 200mm for compressed scenes. All the lenses and cameras will be packed into a Thinktank Ultralight and a Thinktank Streetwalker.
Compactflash cards were in Lowepro and Sandisk pouches. 10 pcs of Transcend 32gb cards and 6 pcs of Sandisk 16gb cards should suffice for a whole day's worth of shooting.
Tripods are a definite inclusion and I packed in a couple of Sirui tripods. Sirui? Well, it is to put it bluntly, it is an extremely well-made copy of the Gitzos (which btw, I do own a couple of as well). The reason I got the Siruis is because of the fact that they are small enough to walk around unknown areas without looking too much of a photographer. My Gitzos are pretty huge in comparison and would be more of a hassle than benefit. Sirui ballheads are surprisingly really well made as well and I got them with the legs since they are really so affordable. A motion control setup was also packed in and that made up the large portion of the support equipment. A Manfrotto Super Clamp and Magic Arm were also initially planned for but I decided to go without them in the end.
Backing up all the images will be required at the end of each day. 2 laptops, a Macbook Pro and a Macbook Air (the prior being the main machine for its Firewire 800 port) were packed into a Lowepro laptop bag. Many extra cables (both USB and FW800) were packed alongside 2 FW800 readers and 2 USB readers. Getting the 16 terabytes worth of drives was another concern and wrapping them with a towel and packing them in hardcases was the way to go. Hardcases by HPRC and Pelican (courtesy of my good friend cum nature photographer, Dennis Ho) were used and hopefully they could be carried on.
Housing the drives will be 2 RAID-1 casings by Datatale. I have been impressed by the reliability of their products and believe they will hold up to the abuse. The 2 casings were in a smaller HPRC casing as well and it was a perfect fit.
Miscellaneous items such as timer remotes, batteries (2 pouches full of them), bubble levels (8 pcs) were packed into the convenient orange pouches by Lowepro. All these items were packed in such a way that I had 2 bags of each and there was a set of remotes, batteries, chargers on each carry-on bag. An inverter was also brought along for situations where we needed emergency power from the vehicle. Travel adaptors, 4 of them were placed in various bags.
In 3 of the bags, I had a photocopy of our visas and passports as well as official letter from the clients. This will come in useful if we are approached by the authorities or the customs. The key to packing for such an amount of gear was to seperate the essential kit from the replaceables.
Cameras,lenses, batteries, cards and chargers are not as replaceable as tripods. Thus all these were carry-on. Harddrives were carried on as I did not want them to be banged around. We will however by flying domestic in India and that I suspect will pose a few problems with our amount of carry-on items. If that happens, the hardcases will be checked in.
The weight allowance for carry-on bags is always an issue for photogaphers and in this case, we are definitely taking a big risk but packing everything that is fragile into the hardcases is a backup plan and one that I always pray will turn out well at the end of the flight. Yes, that means I will not hopefully be forced to check in any carry on cases.
Links of some specialised gear: