What's In An Adventure Photographers Bag
As an adventure travel photographer I’m always looking to balance the need for enough camera kit to shoot creatively with the practicalities of transporting that gear and having easy access to it.
Travelling as light as possible is often the best approach but for a recent 18-day trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon I had the luxury of a raft to carry my equipment and so I was free to pack pretty much anything I wanted!
Reliable cameras and lenses are important but so is redundancy when photographing in a remote environment so two camera bodies are essential.
For this trip these are the items I took that I couldn’t have gone without:
I like using the Clik Elite range of camera bags but for my Colorado River trip I relied on a Pelicase to keep my stuff safe on the raft through the big volume rapids. Missing from the photo of my kit is the Gitzo tripod that I use for landscape photography.
Canon 7D Mark II camera body
As a second camera body this is the perfect model for me. The smaller sensor means I get a longer focal length at the far range of the zoom lenses I use and the excellent autofocus system makes shooting action in the river a breeze. I also really love that switching between it and my 5D MarkIII is almost seamless because they functionally they are so similar to use.
Note: This model has now been discontinued. Please see here for currently available models.
Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens
This is my ‘go to’ travel lens, the zoom range is very useful and the image stabilizer function allows me to handhold in low light and reduce the need to bump up the ISO which admittedly is less of an issue with the amazing capabilities of modern sensors in low light. I knew I could jump off the raft and head out for a hike with just this one lens that would be all I needed to capture some great images.
Aquatech water housing
Purely and simply I love the creative possibilities that shooting from the water allows. Swimming through a few rapids made for hit and miss frames for sure but in the end I grabbed some fun and interesting images.
Wireless timer remote
I enjoy shooting time-lapse video and to do so with a Canon 5D MarkIII I use one of these gadgets. In the Canyon I could set up the camera on a tripod, use the remote to dial in the settings I wanted and then walk away for a few hours, free to shoot with my other camera if necessary.
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