As anyone who has traveled before knows, packing light is key. Those who pack too heavy soon learn to regret it as they are forced to lug their luggage (no coincidence with that name I’m afraid) with them wherever they go. I myself try to travel with nothing more than a soft sided carry on bag.
However, for the serious photographer, traveling light can be difficult. If you want to the flexibility that you’ll only get with a SLR camera, your travel weight just went up much higher than someone with only a point and shoot. However, traveling with a decent SLR kit doesn’t have to be like lugging a boat anchor around if you make the right choices. The following is my setup which worked well for me on my recent trip to Europe. This won’t work for everyone, but I don’t think its a bad place to start.
Nikon D60 with 18-55mm VR Kit Lens
This is a very lightweight, compact camera with a versatile kit lens. Sure, it doesn’t have all the features of a high end model, but its miles better than any point and shoot, while not being overly large and unwieldy. The kit lens nice, lightweight, and flexible. The Vibration Reduction (VR) feature can be a lifesaver in low light. Of course, it is rather cheaply constructed, which lead to its downfall when a traveling companion inadvertently dropped the camera, breaking the plastic lens mount. The camera survived unscathed, but the lens needed replacing. Still, this (or a D40) is a great choice for those looking for a compromise between image quality and weight.
Nikon SB600 Speedlight
Very well built strobe that works awesome in TTL mode on my D60. Great for bounce flash and fill. In the future I might bring some sort of wireless triggers to allow off camera flash options, but this did the job great and is pretty much an essential accessory for any Nikon shooter.
Gorilla Pod SLR Zoom
My secret weapon. This handy little device is super small and light compared to a real tripod, and allowed my to take some good night shots with a little ingenuity. The legs can wrap around pretty much anything, making it very useful in urban environments. Highly reccomended.
So, I hope that gives you an idea of just how light you can travel with an SLR. I really had no issues carrying my gear around the whole time. In the future, I hope to upgrade to a better quality lens, but the kit setup really did do an excellent job without costing much at all. Of course, everyone has different needs and wants, so your kit might look completely different. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading.
SmugMug vs. ZenFolio
This site started out as just this blog, but I’ve been spending the last week researching and working on the site to make it a little more versatile. I realized that I needed to step up from Flickr hosting of my images in order to provide better security for myself and to provide an avenue for print and digital sales, as well. I thought of hosting my own application to provide this service, but I began to realize that going with a third party service would make my life a lot easier.
A third party service provides all the storage, bandwidth, and order fulfillment back end. They should also have a good client and owner interface to make managing photos easy for the owner, and browsing and buying easy for the client. In exchange for this service, they typically charge a yearly fee and take a cut of sales. To me, though, this is worth it from an ease of use perspective.
As it turns out, there are many such services available, but after poking around for a while I decided to get the free trials of both Zenfolio and SmugMug. Both offer similar services, and are close to the same price at the Pro level, at least when compared to other options.
After messing around with both for a bit, I decided to go with SmugMug. The biggest feature that sold me on their service is that you can really customize the look for your gallery to help it belnd in with your site. Zenfolio let’s you change the look and feel of your galleries around, but SmugMug let’s you actually modify the CSS for your site so you can get almost exactly the look you want. Notice how my SmugMug gallery site fits right in with the look of this blog. My navbar even stays intact, providing a nice, clean browsing experience.
Both services, it seems, offer excellent support, but SmugMug has a bit of a leg up with it’s massive Digital Grin forums which pretty much contain all of the information you could want on using SmugMug. I’m sure you can’t really go wrong with either service, but for me, SmugMug had the edge. If you’re looking for a simliar service, you get two week free trials from both Zenfolio and SmugMug, so be sure to give them botha try and see what you think.