Gearhead

Gearhead alert



It occurs to me that I've been writing this blog for almost a month now, and much of it has revolved around the issues of getting my photography gear out west and then being able to carry it around with me in the car, while sightseeing or on a hike. But I haven't actually written hardly anything about the photo gear itself, or why I'm planning to take this particular set, or to describe some of the trade-offs involved. This will likely take a couple of posts.

Nikon V1 kit in Fstop small ICU, or "Grandpa, you have pirate skeletons on your strap", April 2012

Since many of my friends know of my interest in photography, I often get asked the immortal question: what camera should I buy? The answer, of course, depends on what you want to do with it. So I started my own questioning by asking: what am I planning to do with it on this trip? Here's my answer:

1. We'll be visiting seven National Parks, and so I will indulge in my landscape photography hobby.
2. We'll be on vacation for a month, including our 40th Anniversary, so I'll be taking vacation/documentation snaps.
3. We'll be doing both casual and serious hiking, and I'd like to be able to not kill myself by carrying too much heavy gear. But I expect to have some great shooting opportunities on these hikes.

The first two can be satisfied with my traditional DLSR kit, which weighs in at about 20 lbs. fully loaded. But 20 lbs. of photo gear makes the available payload for other hiking-specific gear pretty limited. Water, for instance, comes in at 2 lbs. per quart. A quart doesn't take you very far on a warm day, especially in a dry climate. So the next few posts will explore this in some detail.

Also, this and the next few posts will be completely created using only Blogsy on my iPad and the camera gear I have on ths short trip. The picture above was taken with my iPhone (a better camera than the iPad) and then edited on the iPad using Photogene, and finally uploaded to Blogsy.