In the planning for this trip something to be considered was how to record the journey, bearing in mind we would be sending luggage ahead and living out of only what we could carry in rucksacks. We also didn’t want to take only one camera, in the event of a breakage, but couldn’t take more than a few lenses. Lenses could also not really be swapped once outside due to the humidity, meaning what you picked for the day was the body/lens choice for that day! Add to this the need for something to photo-edit whilst on trains and in the evening to keep on top of the hundreds (now thousands) of pictures being taken by everyone. So, we settled on the following:
Equipment list as follows:
- Canon 6d Mk2 body (full frame, so lenses zoom as indicated on the lens body) – a heavy but high quality camera.
- Canon 200d body (crop sensor, so lenses zoom 1.6x indicated on the lens body) – a light and reasonable quality camera, mostly taken as a backup.
- Canon 17-40mm L f4 zoom lens – a wide-angle lens, but also relatively lightweight. On the 200d it is effectively 27-64mm, so a good general use lens; on the 6d it’s a brilliant wide-angle lens.
- Canon 24-70mm L f2.8 zoom lens – a superb general use lens with wide aperture meaning great low-light performance, and on the 200d this is almost a decent medium distance zoom as it’s effectively 38-112mm. It’s really heavy though, at just under 1 kg….
- Canon 50mm f1.4 prime lens – really lightweight, general use and great for portraits. Coupled with the 200d the whole camera weighs very little and it’s great in low light.
- Panasonic Lumix compact camera – great quality compact, and very light. Good for when you can’t be bothered carrying the SLR around! For this trip, it was Danny’s to use.
- Sony compact camera – Amelia’s camera, point and click!
- Microsoft Surface Book 2 laptop – to edit photos at the end of the day, an amazing laptop with detachable screen making it a tablet. Not too heavy at 1.5 kg but the screen is incredible quality. Photo editing is done using a mixture of Lightroom and GIMP, with this blog running on WordPress.
- Samsung Galaxy S8 – Jo and I both have one, amazing camera and a lot of the blog drafts are done using the WordPress app for ease.
- Pocket WiFi – wouldn’t it be nice to have 187 Mbps with unlimited use for 3 weeks…..well we have it! Good job, as after a week we’d downloaded 19 GB and uploaded 7 GB of data!
So there you have it, that’s what we’ve brought to bring you what you’re seeing here!