AcutancePhotography said:
miah said:
I just returned from 3 weeks on the big island of Hawaii with my wife. (replete with 2 bodies, 6 lenses, tripod, filters, timers, flash, etc
I would say that was a bit execessive unless you went on a photography only trip. But for a normal with family vacation, yeah, that's an insane amount of equipment.
Nah. Other than the filters (which I pretty much never use except for permanently mounted IR filters), that's actually pretty tame compared with my usual vacation kit. Unless I'm vacationing in a place where I go frequently, I generally overpack gear-wise, under the assumption that I might not get a second chance to take any given shot.
My normal vacation kit contains eight lenses and two TCs, though two of those lenses are rarely on my person. About 99% of the time, I'm shooting with a 16–35L II, a 24–105L, and a 70–300L. I also may or may not carry 1.4x and/or 3x TCs, depending on where I'm going. I usually have my shorty 40 (for when I need to be more discreet), and sometimes a 58mm Helios 44M and 44M-4 pair that mostly ride around in the bag unless I have lots of extra time to do portrait shooting.
My flash stays in the bag 99% of the time, but comes out when I want to brighten shadowed faces against a backlit sky.
In my luggage, I carry a backup (crop) body so that if something were to happen to my main body, I could shoot with an iPhone for the rest of the day, and swap to the older camera when I get back to the hotel. This also means carrying an EF-S 17–85 and a 10–22 just in case I end up shooting with the backup body.
And of course, I also carry several empty 32GB flash cards, which tend to end up full by the end of the trip. A normal vacation is one where I only average 600-700 photos per day.
Maybe it's just me.
chauncey said:
Photography against the clock is an exercise in futility.
Nah. It just requires a lot more preparation.
unfocused said:
There are studies, by the way, that show that memories are more vivid and lasting when you don't take pictures than when you do.
Their methodology must have been seriously flawed to come to that conclusion, or at least the style of vacation that they studied must be very different from my own. When I'm on vacation, I'm almost always
constantly under a severe time crunch because of other people's schedules, whether it's because we have to meet at a particular time to go sing Vespers with the Cappella Giulia, or because our tube travel pass isn't valid until 9:30 and every freaking tourist destination in London stops doing tours at three in the afternoon. If you want to see everything, you have to be very agile, and constantly adjust your plans when certain locations take longer than expected, and even then, you often have to cut things.
Of course, occasionally, the time crunch is because we simply didn't schedule enough time in a particular city... like our infamously grueling "Paris in a day" Metro tour that started at Gare du Nord at noon-ish, and included the Eiffel Tower (to the top), Notre Dame, Sacré Coeur, the Louvre (outside), the small arch, the Tuileries Garden, Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe (where you get a beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower at night), and ended at our hotel at Place de la République some time after 11 P.M.
Because of the borderline frantic nature of my vacations, there's never enough time in any one place to fully take it in, so the places that I remember most vividly are the ones where (after I get home) I can look back at photographs that I took while taking it in. The places where I wasn't allowed to take pictures are pretty much blurs. I'm unlikely to remember much about any of those locations, because there simply wasn't enough time to properly form memories without the reinforcement of photographs.
This is why I absolutely
hate it when churches and castles and other tourist locations don't allow photography. It really ruins it for me. Ask me what I remember of Sacré Coeur, and I'll tell you, "The outside". I don't remember a single thing from the interior. I couldn't even tell you if it was Gothic or Romanesque. But ask me about Notre Dame, and I'll tell you about the stained glass windows that hinged open, the huge backlit cross in the area behind the altar, and the cardinal (presumably, based on his attire) who was preaching at the center altar. I'll tell you about how puzzled I was at seeing Spanish text at the baptismal font. I'll tell you about how yellow the stone columns looked in the artificial lighting. And so on.
If studies show that somehow my memories of Sacré Coeur should be more vivid, then either they didn't study people who vacation like I do or they falsified the data outright. Because there's no way in you-know-where that I would remember something more vividly without photos than with. I'm lucky to remember those locations at all.
