My Camera Bag Diet

I’m not obsessive about my gear, but I do like it to be safely stowed, I have been very happy with my thinktank bag I bought last year for my trip to Canada. Even though its a Mirrorless Mover 30i it has plenty of room for my bulky Pentax K20 with my big tamron zoom and a 300mm zoom sigma lens, also on the large size. However I have been slowly trimming the ancillary stuff to give plenty of room for my sketcking gear. I have the mandatory clean small towels (aka face washers). I also have two lens cleaners, an old fashion blower brush and a lens pen. There is also a polarizing filter and a case for SD cards. I am rotating the SD cards, so there is a temporary backup of photos there as well as on the two external backup drive (back at my accommodation). I also have an old HTC phone that has no sim card but it has a good gps receiver so I just need to turn it on, start My Tracks and put it back in the camera bag to get a continuous wayfile. I also have my trusty but redesigned string monopod.

Art gear wise I still carry an A5 sketchbook, and a couple of pencils and/or pens, often a water brush style pen. And of course my small Cotman sketcher box. I am now even move convinced a sketckbook is a great camera accessory (for seeing).

My “Endless Summer” Sketching Kit

I've been progressively refining the gear I take on my endless summer travels, my sketching kit is now cut back to just the essentials.

I've had a little fun posting the contents of my stuff on KIT.com. It’s very sales oriented (with big green buy me buttons under each item, and I get no commission by the way) but it is fun, a nice and clean presentation and a FREE way for me to share a little of what I find useful, and I get to tell a brief story or two of why I like/use the stuff. My advice is read the stories and look though the kit, before you hit the green buttons.

Refining the Travelling Kit

This is my third endless summer trip and I am starting to refine the gear I am carting around. I can almost carry everything at once but normally I don’t have too, The backpack in which I carry two computers, (why two computers? why not) is fine for travelling on an airline, where one of the camera also goes in the backpack and the second camera (normally the Pentax) becomes my hand carried ba). The art gear travels in my luggage for flights.

In the field I leave the computer back in the room (or car) and just carry one of the cameras and the sketching gear, with papers (A4 or quarter watercolour sheet size) already taped to my A4 plus sized drawing board that fits inside the little red backpack.

For more established and longer sketching I have an A3 sized sketch board in the blue folio which takes half sized Watercolour paper, it also has a bolt on the underside that can screw into a tripod for a make shift portable easel. The blue folder also holds about half a dozen watercolor sheets and a couple of extra sketch book.