Travel Photography

Traveling on assignment, the stressful part of my job is what bags to bring, how to protect my gear when I travel. Most oftentimes when I'm traveling, and especially doing street photography and bouncing around a town shooting architecture and people, I tend to travel with my handbag. And my handbag is easy to use because my camera gear is accessible. It's easy for me to get in and out of the bag and pull lenses and put lenses on very quickly. But one of the things that you have to be aware of when you are traveling, is whenever I am and I have my camera out, is I always make sure that I have at least one latch on so somebody can't bump up to me in a crowded area and pull a piece of equipment out without my knowledge. So that's important to do whenever you're traveling and you're someplace in a close environment with a lot of people. And if I'm crossing a river, I actually cross both of them because if I fall down my equipment doesn't fall out and then consequently water doesn't come in and fill my bag and ruin my equipment. Every photographer kind of customizes their bags on how they do things. With my backpack bag, because I'm dropping it and setting it down and picking it up and cramming it in places, oftentimes I can take little things like this dry cell foam and I stick it inside areas where I know there's going to be potential impact on my bag, whether it be in an airplane or in the back of a raft. It allows me to get a little bit more padding on my camera gear. But this bag for the most part is pretty watertight. There's even a sleeve on the back that if it starts to rain you can pull it over and it protects your gear from rain. If the weather's going to be continuously wet and I have to really worry about it, then I move into more of a hard case type of item like this Pelican case that has a seal always around it. It's a pressure seal and my camera equipment can go in here, it can get beat up like crazy because there's foam inside to protect it. But this is perfect for whitewater rafting or for long trips in the desert where you've got to pull gear in and out of a vehicle and you don't worry about it being jostled around. I take careful consideration whenever I'm preparing to travel with my photography. Even when I'm leaving my house, I make sure that I'm not exposing my camera gear to anybody who's around to see that I have camera gear, lots of camera gear, and I'm loading it into a vehicle, which it will sit in for a long period of time. So in my vehicle, I actually have a safe that I can pull a big drawer in and out. So if I have to go to a trailhead and go in for a couple of days, I have my equipment locked in a safe, the equipment that I don't want to take is there and it's not visible. Other tricks, if you don't have a safe in your vehicle. One of my old tricks was I used to buy an old $5 styrofoam cooler and I would take whatever camera equipment I had in there and throw it inside the cooler and just throw an old towel or something in my backseat. And when somebody peers into my vehicle, it doesn't look as though I've got expensive camera bags sitting inside, it's just an old cooler. And my old trick when my kids were small is I actually had an old diaper that I would just throw in, I'd put it inside there. And that would keep anybody from coming in. So if you can hide your gear, keep your gear from being visible, don't make yourself obvious. Don't look like a photographer, blend in, and your camera gear will be a lot safer.