What should never be missing from your camera bag?

kok.f@ziggo.nl wrote on Tuesday 31 May 2022 at 09:22  | reply

A familiar dilemma, because often you end up lugging around an overload of stuff. For me, it starts with thinking through what I am going to do and where. I have different bags and the first choice I make is which type of bag is most convenient for my plan. How am I going to travel? By car, bicycle or public transport? How mobile or stationary can/may I be when I am at the location? If I am stationary, I can easily bring a large bag with lots of stuff. I can then put it somewhere in a corner. If I need to be mobile, then it all becomes much more critical. Besides the standard things like an extra battery, sd cards, etc., my first thought is which type of lenses I might need. Is it worth lugging that large telephoto lens along, or do I need that macro lens, etc.? Then the question of whether I might need extra light and if so, what do I take with me. Do I want to use filters, do I expect to need a tripod, and so on. With everything I could potentially take with me, I therefore ask myself how likely it is that I will really need it.
Of course I regularly misjudge that and have too much with me, or I don't have something with me that would actually be useful. But don't worry, it stimulates your creativity to find a solution despite the lack of something.

Besides the things already mentioned, I always have a thin foldable poncho, a small bottle of water and paracetamo with me.

A lot of stuff that I haven't used for a long time (or never) I take out after a while, except for a garbage bag. That one stays in, I've gotten so much use out of it. Sometimes because of the weather, often also as a little workspace, but a while ago I was taking photos of the kids with a family and they found pinecones and stuff and wanted to take them with them, yep, the garbage bag.

Marijke wrote on Tuesday 31 May 2022 at 14:01  | reply

Plastic. A bag to sit on, even if it’s just for lunch, one of those feather-light 50-cent rain capes, plastic bag + elastic band to keep the camera dry. And a roll of old-fashioned Leukoplast (which you don’t need scissors for).

I take with me:
Sony a68 with 25-74 Tamron lens 2.8 throughout the entire range
Nikon p900
2 spare batteries
1 spare SD card
Blower to remove dust from the lens
Tripod if I am going to take nature shots

Hans den Boer wrote on Tuesday 31 May 2022 at 21:39  | reply

Of course it depends on what I’m going to do. If it’s, for example, a musical performance, then I’ll take 2 bodies, a 70-200/F2.8, a 24-70/F2.8 and a 50mm F1.4 (along with, of course, spare batteries and spare cards)

Portrait&model on location isn’t much of a problem either. Then you can often choose your equipment much more deliberately and/or you can get very close to the place where you’re going to photograph by car.

On holidays including day trips, a (whole) lot goes along. Medium format with 4 lenses + 1.4 extender with a total range of 23-280mm), a Canon 5D converted to infrared, spare batteries, spare cards, lens cloths, blower, cable release (+spare), Pola + ND filters (3, 10 and 15 stops) and an extremely stable (and therefore heavier) tripod (even though it’s made of carbon).

Besides that, of course the “standard” things like a plastic bag, a set of Allen keys for my tripod, GPS tracker

Things like battery chargers (with 220 converter), laptop+card reader, extremely heavy flashlight (if I want to go into a cave system and photograph there) and all kinds of small “extra” things remain in the car. In addition, a somewhat smaller but waterproof backpack. Extremely handy if you want to go through deep(er) water and don’t want to take any risks. In such a case I often know fairly precisely what I want to photograph and limit myself to medium format + 2 zoom lenses with a range of 32-200mm, filter set and again that heavy tripod (and of course lens cloths etc.)

All in all I lug around about 20kg of luggage through the landscape (and mountains), you don’t use everything equally often, of course. It does cost energy when you have to climb many hundreds of metres and sometimes more than 1000m. It’s a choice where one person says: “you’re completely crazy” (and of course they’re also right about that somewhere…) and another understands it. Besides, it rarely happens that there is a holiday during which I don’t need (virtually) all the equipment at least once.

But of course you do have to be physically able to manage that. Even though I’m already well over 63 years old (and have been doing this for decades), that’s still something different from Mr Raemakers, who at 88 still goes out. All credit to him in that respect.