Philosophy on travel photography
The main philosophy is that I want to cover as much focal length as possible with minimum bulk, and I also want to add a little fast lens with a normal field of view to use for low-light situation. I'm not doing portrait in this travel, I'll be shooting mostly landscape, so I don't really need to carry lighting gear or wide aperture telephoto.As with most travel, unless you specifically know what you're going to photograph, it'll be more beneficial to you to carry wide angle lens rather than ultra telephoto lens. Yes, a little bit of telephoto won't hurt if it's not too big and too heavy, just to photograph details of a far-away things; but a wide angle will help to frame everything in a single shot.
This doesn't mean that shooting wide angle is easy though. With wide angle lens, everything will be in focus, and your subject needs to really stand out from the rest of the frame to make your photo more meaningful. Distortion will become a problem too, not the lens distortion(which can be easily fixed in software), but the perspective distortion that every ultra-wide angle lens has. These issues will require extra care from you to get the best composition in your shot.
What I will carry
For this travel, I will go to Europe. I want to pack as light as possible, so I can have less weight and be able to move around better. My camera bag of choice is my Billingham Hadley Small, and the cameras that I will bring are the Panasonic GX8 and the GX7. They are both very capable cameras, but the GX8 performs slightly snappier than the GX7, so I will use my main lens with the GX8, and my secondary lens with the GX7.On the GX8, I will mount the Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm f/3.5-5.6 as my main lens. It doesn't have fast aperture, but it's sharp(almost as sharp as the 12-35mm f/2.8), and it can go from moderate wide to moderate telephoto, which eliminates the need to carry a separate telephoto lens. It's as big as the 12-35mm f/2.8 too, which is only as big as the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens of a regular Canon crop DSLR.
On the GX7, I will mount the ultra wide angle Panasonic Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f/4.0 as my secondary lens. The UWA(ultra wide angle) lens won't get a lot of use for sure, but for general city-scape, architecture, landscape, and interior, this is the right lens. It'll also be used for daytime shooting.
I will pack two extra lens, one is the Panasonic Lumix G X Vario 12-35mm f/2.8 which I will use on the GX8 only if needed(I don't plan to use it, so I'll pack it on my separate carry-on bag). And another lens is the Panasonic Lumix G Vario 20mm f/1.7 II, which I will mount on the GX7 during low light situation. The 20mm translates to a focal length of 40mm in 35mm equivalent term, which is right between moderate wide 35mm and normal angle 50mm. This will allow me to take natural perspective shots, especially during low light, that isn't too wide or too tight. I'm expecting this lens to perform well for street photography too.
Other than that, I will also carry a small Sirui T-005X tripod in the checked-luggage, just in case there's an opportunity to shoot beautiful landscape with long exposure. I don't think I'll have a chance to use it, but I'll carry it anyway since it's only 1kg. I'm using a separate ball-head from my older Victory tripod, which is quite heavy, but it's very easy to use and doesn't require coin to tighten/loosen the camera plate, unlike the Sirui ball head that comes with the tripod itself.
Video
Here's my video of what's in my main camera bag. I won't do the video of the separate carry-on bag, but it's just a standard 4-wheeler small roller luggage to fit the 12-35mm and a few clothes.That is all for this post, I hope you enjoy reading this post. Until next time, cheers and God bless you :)
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