Edited by Kyle Cassidy with not unconsiderable input from: Dante Stella, Nathan Wajsman, Mark E Davison, Mitch Zeissler
Philosophy |
Most times someone posts to the Leica Users Group about travel, it goes like this:Hi people, I'm going to Shri Lanka for four weeks and don't know what to bring. I have:
- 2 M6J's
- 3 Leicavit's (MIB)
- 35mm Summilux
- 50mm 1.0 noctilux (two versions, new and old)
- M4 snake skin
- M3 Olympic Model
- M6 Royal Danish Wedding Commemorative
- etc. etc. etc.
which is not really a request for advice but just a chance to brag about Where I'm Going and What I Own. Which is frightfully annoying. This FAQ is an attempt to keep the territorial bragging to a minimum.
This is both photography while travelling and photography of your travels. The great appeal of travel photography is that it allows you to capture exotic sights when they are new and fresh. The miracle of the photograph allows you to record more than you immediately see and understand so that you can examine it later. Travel photographs can be both aid the memory and reveal more than the memory retains. MD
There are three classes of difference: cultural, aesthetic and logistical.Cultural
Both the laws and the implicit rules on what and whom may be photographed can be different. It may be impossible to research all of these in advance, so a heightened level of cultural sensitivity may be required. Being pleasant, outgoing, and gently persistent can help.
Aesthetic
If you are travelling to a new place you will be presented with new visual delights and their attendant challenges: new colors, new qualities of light, new buildings. It is a challenge to maintain the artistic discipline to capture these new delights without being overwhelmed by them. Too much excitement can lead to sloppy shooting and subsesquent disappointment.
Logistical
When you are travelling it is often hard to replace or rent equipment. You are stuck with what you brought with no recourse to returning home for that forgotten piece of equipment. Your initial tendency may be to pack everything you own, just in case, but this will lead to the misery of being weighed down. Suddenly your lovely camera equipment is transmogrified into a loathsome, back-killing lump of over-priced impedimenta.
Practical Advice |
Some practical, some not so, but lots of advice anyway.
This is true. The best thing you can have on vacation is a friend who knows their way around -- who knows where to find Scalia at 2 a.m., who knows the bars, the view's, the good stuff to see. Post before you go and don't ask what to bring. Instead ask who's there. Meeting your fellow Leica users in foreign lands can be a great experience.
Taking Photos |
You're bringing all this camera equipment for a reason -- now what do you want to do with it?
Your choice of equipment and film should depend on what you want to photograph. You must resign yourself to the fact that if you are going to a place for the first time, you may not know exactly what you want to photograph. If, on the other hand, you are doing a personal project on lofty church interiors, you will already know that you need your super wide angle 15mm Heliar.
$5 worth of postcards will save you a lot of wasted effort
Suprisingly, many, if not most, people go off on vacation not really sure what they want to photograph and they come back with a whole lotta nothin. First suggestion is you probably don't want to photograph what you think you want to photograph. Which is to say, mostly, buildings. You may feel the urge to snap a shot of Notre Dame or St. Patricks, but this has already been done by photographers a lot better than you are and you can buy a fantastic post card for fifty-cents in the gift shop. What all these other photographers can't photograph better than you is your friends and family. After all, when you get home, what are you going to want to look at? A picture of some church pews or a photo of the subtle smile on your boyfriend's face in the fantastic window light the first morning in Paris? Travel, after all, is the act of carting your body somewhere else. Make sure you include all that in your pictures. Which is not to say "don't ever photograph the Eiffel Tower", just make sure you're standing in front of it.
Remember, you're not a tourist, you're a Leica Photographer. Okay, you're a tourist, but try not to act too much like one.
Preparation is everything in getting good photos -- much more important than what lenses you bring is what kind of access you have to interesting images. Know what you want to see, know how to get there, and, most of all, know why you want to photograph it. The best preparation is with the aid of a local -- either someone you met before you left home, or someone you meet while you're there.
| Interesting Travel Photo Projects | Dull Travel Photo Projects |
| Farm Life
Neuvo Druids who run around Stonehenge with silly hats A family who owns a fishing boat |
Buildings
Stonehenge A fishing boat |
What To Bring |
One question here: will you be travelling continuously, hauling all of your stuff with you, or will you establish a base from which you take walks. In the second case you may want to bring more equipment with you, because you can come back for it. An example: you might only use your Noctilux at night, so you keep it in the hotel room safe during the day.Black Lenses Weigh Less
It's true. Black leica lenses are made of aluminum, the silver ones are made of chrome. This makes the black ones significantly lighter. Keep this in mind when you buy your stuff.
If you bring everything and the kitchen sink, remember that you have to store it somewhere. Be very careful at what you leave lying around in the hotel room. If you are going to bring expensive equipment that you're not going to carry around all day, leave it in the hotel safe, or get a camera case with a lock and bicycle chain it to some heavy furniture in your room.
I hope not.
Bodies |
Advantages of one body: lighter than two bodies, easier to bring to dinner, cheaper. Advantages of two bodies: you have a backup in case one body fails or is stolen. You can have color film in one and black and white in the other. You can have the same film in each but different lenses. You can loan one body to your nere-do-well boyfriend.
Point and shoots are good backups if you don't own a second body or want to save weight. They are also easier to sneak into places and social events where a larger camera might be frowned on. One caveat, most modern point and shoots suffer from so much shutter lag that they are nearly worthless for capturing fleeting facial expressions. If you need or want to shoot indoors with no flash, you will want to get one with a fixed focal length lens. Suprisingly, there is a general consensus on what Point-and-shoot to own: the Olympus Stylus Epic (don't get the zoom) has a 35mm f 2.8 lens, fast focusing, excellent exposure, and fitis in your shirt pocket. The other frequent choice is the Yashica T4 which has a slower lens and slower focusing but comes with a waist level finder and Carl Zeiss lens.
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Lenses |
While it's nice to have a bunch of stuff at your disposal, there's a point where you have too much, even if you have porters to carry it all around in Pelican cases, the logistics of choosing between your equipment begin to affect your output. This means you shouldn't bring redundant lenses or lenses with limited purpose unless you have something specific in mind.
The basic kit has long been defined as wide, normal telephoto. The classic kit is 35, 50, 90 or some slight variation thereof. With these, you're covered for most situations and lots of photographers more fameous than you are have done very well by this setup. There's something to be said for the simplicity of traveling with three lenses. If you have too many, you'll often be worrying too much about your lens and not enough about the shot.
A superwide is often a nice thing to bring when traveling -- especially if you'll be viewing scenic vistas, close crowds or splendid interioriors. The availability and relative inexpense of the new Voigtlander 15, 24, and 12's make one of them a reasonable addition to your basic kit.
Depending on what you normally shoot, you may want to replace the shallow end of your basic kit with a 28mm. This gives you a little more space in a crowd.
You can also step down the basic kit to something like a 15mm, 35mm, and 50mm -- 50 being the telephoto. This setup works for a lot of photographers.
Accessories |
Filters
Tabletop Tripods
It makes sense to bring along a light meter if you're relying on a camera that has no built in meter. Weigh in weight along with your film choice e.g. if you're shooting Ttri-x a working light meter is less necessary than if you're shooting Velvia.
Bags |
You always need a new bag.
I prefer a vest to a bag -- it's more convenient and distributes your weight. The Domke Photojournalists vest still hasn't been beat and can be got for about $99.
Bigger on the inside than the outside, room for nicknacks as well as a book, map and other travel essentials.
Domke Bags
Many luggers recommend the Domke F2 series of bags, including the "little bit bigger" bag and the "little bit smaller bag".
Tripods |
Unless you are troubled by Delirum Tremins or you're some sort of nature photographer and you're carting around a 300 mm f 2.8 lens or a toyo view camera, leave the tripod at home. You've not suffered until you've carried a Bogen 2001 through the streets of Cairo for a week and not used it once.
Usually the best tripod is one that someone else carries up the mountian for you.
You may want to bring a tabletop tripod, these little things fold up about the size of a fat cigar and fit in a pocket of your camera bag or vest. I'm not entirely sure what they're useful for, except photographing yourself.
Film |
I'm not sure why there's more hullabaloo about what film to bring on a vacation than what film to use on a daily basis....
Bring more film than you think you'll need. As far as what type of film to bring -- what type of film do you normally use? Bring lots of that -- and then if you want to try out that new Scalia everybody's raving about, go ahead and drop a couple of rolls in. The Ultimate Destination of your images will have some factor in what film you bring, e.g. do you want to show people 4x6 1 hour lab prints, or do you expect to have a slide show? Will you be scanning your images? If you've one of those antique Leicas with no light meter be wary of trusting all your exposures to chrome.
Most airport x-ray machines won't damage your film. While I'm told that some will, I have no personal experience with it and I've not seen any example images. Still, it's not a bad idea to keep your film OUT of the x-ray machine whenever possible. The best way to do this is to take the film out of the boxes, then out of those stupid little plastic containers and put them in Ziplock bags. Then as you're going through the metal detector, put your cameras through the x-ray and drop your film in the basket for wristwatches, keys, and personal effects. I've done this dozens of times -- sometimes security calls someone over for a hand check of your film, but mostly they just hand it back to you.
I live in Philadelphia on the east coast of the United States. Philly's a big tourist town. For the life of me I don't know why, but people come from Europe and Japan just to look around. To some people, this is foreign lands, though I think of it as pretty normal; we have lots of film here. Most big cities anywhere in the world will have most of the film you want. Most of the tourist places will have color print film. To get the good stuff you'll probably need to look in the phone book. You can get Tri-X in Bucharest, you just have to look. Undoubtedly, a roll of Kodak Gold 100 ASA 24 exposures is going to cost you an arm and a leg at the kiosk at the foot of the Eiffel Tower
European museums often permit photography, but prohibit the use of flash and tripods. The interiors are not particularly bright (metering f2.8 and 1/15 to 1/60 of a sec with ISO 400 film) Church interiors can be really dim, metering f2.0 and 1/2 to 1/8 sec, ISO 400. If you depend on the Tri-Elmar for most of your shooting, you may want to have one other faster lens for these situations. Of course, one may ask "Why photograph in a museum anyway when you can just buy the post card."
Theft |
Avoiding Theft
Insuring your Leicas
What to do if your Leicas are Stolen