Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Travel Photography mimimalism

Soon, I'm going to head on back to SE Asia.

Because of the complex nature of baggage weight and International travel, I've been trying to ditch the laptop in favor of my iPad.  Actually, I bought the darn thing specifically for the sake of traveling.  In addition, I upgraded my home computer to a desktop iMac, so when I return, I can actually see what I am editing.

Macworld published an article called, "On the Road with a camera, an iPod, and a Hyperdrive."  The article didn't mention the camera, but the iPad and Hyperdrive thing was intriguing.  I checked out the price of the Hyperdrive on their website, but alas could not find it listed, so I went to Amazon, and I picked up a case.  I'm going to pick up a discounted hard drive from my local vendor, and it will end up being cheaper with more hard drive capacity.   How is this process going to work?

1.  Carry a few more SDHC cards,
2.  Carry the iPad photo attachment.
3.  Download the photos to the Hyperdrive, and load specific pictures into the iPad.  Photos that need to be worked on will be backed up.

The other thing is what type of rig do you want?  My Nikon D80 is now sort of passe as it doesn't shoot video, but then I never saw a DSLR as a movie gadget.  DSLR rigs are now very hard to manage when you are traveling, as they have so much "stuff" now to carry.  So what do you do with travel photography?  Lately, this has been changing.  My Olympus EPL-1 has been somewhat reliable, but it has issues with focusing.  It does shoot better than the old Sony and Panny point and shoot compacts though.   My old Nikon D80 spanks all of them.  This brings up a few decisions, which might be pricey.

1.  Upgrade to the EP 3.  For the most part, it has a better focusing mechanism.  It has better software, and it does have a better build quality in being housed in an aluminum case.  The price is about 799.00 USD.
2.  Pick up the new Olympus 12mm F2.0 prime?  This is another 799.00 USD.

Combined, they sort of equal the price of the Fuji X Pro 1.  The price for that puppy is almost 1600.00 USD.  Ultimately, I'm not going to go that route, unless I get a better pay hike.  The 1600.00 USD price is without even a frinkin' lens.  I've been using an Olympus EPL 1 for a while, and the images have not been half bad. In fact, I've done a few shoots with it, and the results have been ok.





The unit itself is very compact, and it may work well with my Panny 20mm pancake lens.  In addition, I've never really used the 14-45 kit lens on my EPL-1, so I may try to set up the EPL-1 as a backup camera.

Because of the nature of what I shoot, and how I shoot, and where I shoot, I've been slowly moving towards the Micro 4/3 model a la Olympus/Panasonic.  So far, the lenses have not been too bad, and I'm not entirely displeased with what I shoot.  The Olympus JPEG engine actually is making it that I may not really have to shoot with RAW which can eat up a lot of memory.

Nothing is ever certain, but I am going to try out the 12mm / EP3 combo as a base.  My 20mm Pany is going regardless.  From here, who knows?