017 - Gear You Should Have for Travel Photography
There are a plethora of camera accessories out on the market today and it can all be a bit confusing about which ones you need and which ones you don’t and choosing the right gear can be a bit overwhelming. Well, today, my aim is to help cut through some of that confusion and give you a list of the gear I think is fundamental for anyone doing travel or adventure photography.
One of the things we won’t address is which camera you should buy or which specific lens you should buy. That will come down to many personal choices and factors like what you are photographing, how you photograph, how much weight you want to carry, and your budget. So no direct camera recommendations here. We also won’t talk about the obvious things, like bringing extra batteries and memory cards.
Two Lens Recommendations
A Walk Around Lens
A walk around lens that covers a semi-wide angle of view to a semi-telephoto view. This would be something like a 24-105mm lens that every camera maker has. One of the reasons I love the 24-105 focal range for a walk around travel lens is that you can photograph most subjects in most situations you will come across. The other reason I love this focal length is the lenses aren’t too big and heavy, meaning they aren’t really a burden to carry around for a day. I would make sure you get one that has a constant aperture if you can afford it. This makes shooting much easier and ensures you have as much available light as you can when you zoom in on a subject.
An Ultra-Wide, Fast Prime
Look for something like a 14mm f/2.8. This gives you a portable lens that you can pop on whenever you enter dark spaces or whenever you are somewhere very tight. These ultra-wide angle lenses are great for getting photos inside cathedrals and other old buildings when it’s dark and you have to step back a long way and you have to try to get the whole building inside your shot. They are also great for getting landscapes and cityscapes. They give you a sweeping look of the world around you with about a 115-degree field of view.
The low light capabilities let you take photos inside buildings without worrying about needing to crank your ISO or drop your shutter speed. These are just such a great option for travelling because too often you will need to stitch back together panos inside buildings or you’re just not going to be able to get the whole scene inside the frame. You will have to make a lot of compromises. And, there’s a lot of spaces where we wont be able to set up tripods to counteract the low light, especially inside historic buildings.
On an iPhone you can use the ultra-wide-angle lens they have installed. But, you can’t shoot in RAW with the ultra-wide lens and night mode doesn’t work either. So you are severely limited when you are inside buildings or other dark spaces when shooting on a phone using an ultra wide angle lens. In these instances a DSLR is going to be much better.
Carrying System
Backpack
I am a firm believer in having a proper carry system to lug around your camera, your water and everything else you will have with you over the course of a day. This means a backpack with an internal frame, waist strap, and proper shoulder straps. I also like having a sternum strap but that, I find, is highly personal. Proper daypacks will make a world of difference for you, regardless of the amount of gear you are carrying.
The size of the daypack you will need will depend on where you are going, what you need with you and the gear you carry. I tend to find I need a 35L bag for day hikes to carry my camera gear and my extra layers and food. Whereas when exploring European cities I was fine using a 15-20L bag because we just needed water and some space for gear. You might end up with 1 or 2 daybags around your house, or if your anything like me you may end up with five or six. But that’s so that you have the right kind of gear for where you are going and what you are doing. I really love the stuff that F-Stop Gear makes, but backpacks are highly personal so you will need to go and look at quite a few to see which one suits your style and which one will go along best with the way you travel.. But check out F-Stop Gear’s Mountain Series for a start.
In 2022, I switched my carry system over to Shimoda Designs and the Explore V2 series.
Camera Strap
The other piece of carry-gear you need to change out is your camera strap. Stop using the strap that puts the camera around your neck if you are carrying it for any length of time. Really, just stop using that strap at all. They put massive stress on your neck and upper back and throw your posture way out, leading to a much higher risk of injury. They also flap in the wind when you have the camera on a tripod and you have no quick and easy way to remove them so they are stuck there. There are so many better camera straps on the market today. Ones that can quickly release so you don’t HAVE to have the strap on and ones that will make carrying slightly less painful for your body. Instead, look for a strap that puts the camera across you in a sling-style if you like using camera straps.
Peak Design Capture Camera Clip
Better yet, would be to get a piece of gear that allows your backpack to carry the camera, on the outside not tucked away inside. It is vital that you have your camera at the ready when you are travelling and adventuring for those moments that spring up out of nowhere. The device I use to carry the camera on the outside is the Capture Camera Clip from Peak Design. This little clip can go onto your belt or your backpack straps and allows you to drop the camera into it to carry it. I’ll put some photos and a quick video up on the show notes to show you how this works. This amazing little device makes sure that my camera is right there for me whenever I need it. The capture camera clip redistrubutes the weight of the camera into the backpack and not around my neck and other joints and really has helped save so many hours of pain and chiropractic visits at this point so I am a huge proponent of getting one of these little clips.
Accessories
Tripod
I’ve talked lots about tripods on here already, so I won’t stick too long here. But it’s essential for you to be able to capture certain types of photos. Like most amazing sunsets and sunrises and lots of those gorgeous cityscapes we drool at on Instagram. Currently, I use a lightweight and tiny Vanguard VEO. It comes up to about five and a half feet and folds down to about two feet tall. It’s a great tripod for carrying around when you need a bit of versatility in what you are doing and what you are composing.
One of the other tripods I use quite frequently is the Joby Gorilliapod. These small, bendable tripods are great for taking shots in tight spaces and for being able to set up on bridge railings and on small rocks.
Finally, there is a new tripod on the market that I love the looks of. I don’t own it just yet, but I will. It’s the Peak Design Travel Tripod. Peak Design redesigned the way tripod legs function, so instead of round tubes with empty space between them, the legs all fold together into a nice tight package saving you quite a bit of space. They have also made it about the size of a Nalgene Water Bottle when it is folded down, so super easy to carry around. They’ve also changed how the tripod head works so you have less knobs to figure out and it looks amazing. We will put up a link up to all of these tripods for you to be able to check out in the shownotes.
Circular Polarizer
Circular polarizers are filters that mount to the front of a lens. They allow you to reduce reflections in water and on glass and make the sky more or less blue. They are a fantastic resource for doing street photography while travelling because of the ability to reduce reflections. Allowing you to more easily take photos on the other side of the glass.
Neutral Density Filter
Neutral Density filters, also known as ND filters, are dark filters you put on your lens (typically on the front) that block light from entering your camera. This allows you to decrease your shutter speed and drag out the way time and light enters your camera. They come in a variety of strengths but are typically talked about in terms of stops of light they block. You can get them in strengths to block everything from a half stop of light up to 10 stops or more. I’ve seen them go up to 22 stops of light at this point.
I love to use neutral density filters to do the normal things like smooth out water and cause blurry clouds, but I also love them when travelling because they let me blur away crowds of people in front of tourist spots. Big neutral density filters (10 stops or more) can allow you to drag your shutter open even in broad daylight long enough to have people blurred out of your image. Which is amazing for packed tourist sites because you can get a photo that makes it look like you were there all by yourself and you don’t need photoshop to do it. You can do it entirely in camera.
To properly use these filters you will need a tripod and some kind of shutter release (although you could use the two-second timer method). There are a number of different styles available, from screw-on mount ones that go on your filter threads on a lens to square ones that go on a filter mount. I currently use square filters made by San Fransocio-based Breakthrough Photography and I love them.
One of the things to watch out for with filters is getting cheap ones. There are tons of cheap filters on the market and they are typically made from plastic or really low quality glass. Cheap filters will cause a horrible colour cast in your images that can be very difficult to remove. So it is worth paying a bit more to get high-quality filters because the quality of your images will be much better.
Microfibre Cleaning Cloth and Cleaner
Keep a couple of these cloths handy along with a very small cleaning solution meant for camera lenses in your bag to clean your lens when it gets spotted or dirty. Inevitably, our camera will get dirty while we are travelling and you don’t want to miss photos because your lens was covered in grime. By very small I mean less than a small bottle of eye drops. You don’t need much with you at all but it is worth having around. I routinely clean my lenses either right after I get back or right before I head out, depending on how much time I have or if how tired I am when I get back. But cleaning them only takes a few minutes and it ensures you will have the highest possible quality with no worry about grime or spots or anything like that interrupting your photos.
Two Memory Card Holders
This one is pretty straight forward but get two memory cardholders. Two may seem like an odd number, but there is a reason for that. Especially if you are shooting with a camera that can record to multiple cards. You don’t want to keep your camera and all your memory cards in the same space. This is because you can easily misplace your bag or have it taken from you so you will lose all your images. Instead, and especially if you can record to two cards at once, put one set of memory cards in a zipped up pocket or give them to your travel partner and a second set (if you can shoot to multiple cards) in your bag. This way you aren’t as likely to lose all of your images. And shooting to two cards also helps with that as you then don’t have the worry about a card corrupting and you losing the images as you have two sets of them. So, when possible, shoot to two cards and keep those cards in separate locations.