What to Pack

We call it a list, and the word makes the oldest mistake: it assumes you already know what you are going to meet. You don’t. Sand is not salt, salt is not rain, and each of them gets into a camera by a different door. So there is no universal kit here, only what each place breaks.

On Hashima the enemy is not sand but salt, which eats metal and joints. In the desert it is sand, and then heat. In Iceland and in the Scottish Islands it is water, in the rain and in the spray.

We do not buy a name. From each name we take the one thing it does for us, and we leave the rest on the shelf. We choose what has no wrong way of being used, and what can be read at a glance.

Every event page, and the pre-departure information sent to confirmed participants, says what its own place asks for. This page holds the part that never changes: how we think about the tools, and why we carry them the way we do.

Your own camera should be one you know well enough to work with in rain, cold, wind, dust or failing light. Lens choice follows the subject and your visual intention, not a generic checklist. Bring only what you can carry, use and protect with confidence.

The point is found on foot and decided once. It is the part that costs. After that the camera stays where it is and lets the seeing move: every lens you own, one after another, from the same spot, each one taking a different truth out of the same subject. The tripod does not keep a decision. It multiplies it.

The second body is not there to be quicker. On a tripod, changing a lens means opening the camera to spray, sand or snow and losing minutes of light that do not come back. Two bodies, two lenses, and the point does not move.

Beside the digital, the cameras of film that made the history of landscape: the Sinar view camera in 4×5 and 8×10, and the panoramic Fuji that sees in 6×17. And the Hasselblad, in medium format.

Each format answers a place. The panoramic is for the horizon of the sea, a single line from edge to edge; it has more sense in landscape, and it can work with a model too. The large format is for what is monumental, like the concrete of Hashima. It makes most sense where you do not travel, and it can be carried on the road too. And in digital the Hasselblad plays in another league: you see it where the work ends, in the large print.

Held in the hand, a camera sees from where your legs put it: five foot seven, the height from which everything has already been seen. A tripod takes it out of your hands, and the point of view stops being a habit. It becomes the first decision you make about a picture.

A camera nobody touches does not shake, so it holds up to enlargements no handheld frame survives, most of all the leaf-shutter cameras. It is also one fixed frame that two people can look into, in turn, and speak about. That is why the tripod always comes, with four heads: three-way for one axis at a time, ball for moving with you, geared for the millimetre, panoramic for turning on the nodal point. A joystick head is good to know, and we mostly do not use it: it goes on the monopod, for practicality.

The monopod comes too, and it may matter more. With a small video assist at the grip and a remote release in your hand it becomes a second arm up to ten feet long: above a crowded souk, an inch off the ground, past a railing you must not lean over, ten feet out from the side of a boat, under a waterfall, well protected. It is in no manual.

The best tripods are made of wood, by esoteric makers, because wood does not suffer vibration. Ours are the Manfrotto 055 carbon tripod, whose column swings to horizontal with one finger and takes the camera to the ground, and the Manfrotto XPRO carbon monopod, light enough that taking it is never a decision.

Filters and a proper matte box are among the most useful tools of location work. A lens hood is made for the average case; the matte box is made for the real one. Stray light is not only the sun on the front glass: most of it is the brightness of the whole scene bouncing into it, a thin veil that lifts the blacks and drains the colour, and the matte box shuts it out. In hard or unstable light, in deserts, on snow, around water, steel or pale stone, it preserves contrast and protects the front element from flare, spray and dust.

Ours is LEE, one block with the filter holder, so every filter works in the same shade. It keeps off the weather, protects the front glass, stops the sun that arrives without warning, and makes room for a pack of filters, which give precise control in the camera over reflections, contrast, exposure and atmosphere: graduated and solid neutral density, polariser, colour correction read from the Sekonic colour meter, black-and-white, soft filters for Venice in the fog.

The holder is the old LEE Series 100, out of production and still the standard, the standard of an industry that no longer exists, like the Durst enlargers. It is modular: with a screwdriver and a few small screws one filter becomes two, three, even four.

People say software has replaced them. It has not, and the reason is elementary physics: a filter filters light, and light is continuous. A sensor cuts the real into steps. Nothing you do afterwards gives back what was never let in.

When the subject is a person, light stops being found and is made. ARRI for continuous light from the school of cinema, Profoto for light flash in the open, Bowens for power in a studio or a fixed house. Sunbounce tames the ambient light and throws back the artificial. Matthews grip keeps every stand and panel where it was put, with nobody holding it. PocketWizard ties cameras to flashes, and gels change the colour.

A stand is not a tripod: stands carry lights, panels and grip, tripods carry cameras. We do not mix the words, because we do not mix the jobs.

The Bowens are the old ones, analogue and indestructible: modern studio flash is not made to survive an incompetent student. Powerful, old and heavy, and when they are repaired it is by a professional, because with capacitors you do not play. The one exception is the Profoto B1X, bought for its battery, for the places with no socket.

In a Meet the Model the set is the same wherever it takes place. The place changes, the light we bring does not. Gels are used only here.

On workshops without models none of this travels.

A case, a bag, never a rucksack. The rigid case is the transport: the Peli 1510, born for the military and developed for photographic equipment, shut against every weather, carry-on size so the sensitive kit travels with you. In the field, the bag. A rucksack puts the camera behind your shoulders, out of reach, and things fall out of it: on sand it costs a cleaning, on lava rock it costs the camera.

The bag is the Domke, drawn in 1975 by Jim Domke for the Philadelphia Inquirer so a photographer could take a lens without putting it down, and it is used emptied. The padding comes out, every piece sits in its own wrap or pouch. Without the padding the bag loses its rigidity and adapts to you: it flattens against the body, where a semi-rigid box juts out under the arm and levers at every step. A short strap with two carabiners, the arm under the armpit, and the bag does not move even if you run or throw yourself down.

Lithium batteries travel in the cabin, never in the hold, never by sea. And gloves that let the fingers work: the Dirty Rigger, or those by Dice Photographic.

Weight is never a minor matter. We say it is, and we know it is a lie: pull the strap at the end of the day and you will know you lied.

Protection is not an accessory. It is a procedure, an order of gestures that removes the moment when the camera is exposed. A Ziploc sealed around the camera while it works, lens out and the rest closed, with a Bongo Tie at the barrel that does not crack in the cold like nylon. The bag that holds it. A thermal blanket around the bag.

In a storm of rain or sand you open the bag, put everything into the sealed bags and close them: the bag is protected from the inside. The blanket keeps out excess cold and excess heat, and once closed it keeps out damp and sand. Two of them, one for the bag and one for you, folded together with the Ziploc bags. They take up almost no room and weigh almost nothing. First the photographer, then the equipment.

Carry the bags in several sizes, rain covers made to fit the camera, and Bongo Ties or strong elastic ties. In dust and in sandstorms a sealed bag is among the most dependable safeguards there is for cameras, lenses and accessories.

In the wet, in the Scottish Islands or in Iceland, a fully waterproof dry bag protects the whole camera bag better than its own rain cover: seal the bag and everything in it before the rain or the spray arrives, not after.

We travel with the things nobody thinks about until the wind arrives: protective bags, rain covers, Bongo Ties, elastic ties, cleaning materials. They are there, and cost nothing, when the field turns. A second body that nobody touches for days, an extra tripod, a long lens you can do without until the moment you cannot, batteries that are not for us.

They do not replace your own preparation. They protect a camera, and minutes of work, when the day stops being predictable.

Where we go there is nothing to buy and nobody to repair, so what matters travels more than once. Only what is new arrives as a single piece: it is tried in the field, and if it held, it is bought again, in more copies.

For those who arrive without a camera, or would rather not bring theirs, Nikon kits wait, digital or 35 mm film, with lenses up to 300 mm. It is a courtesy. And if you are not equipped for the journey, Pelican cases and transport bags are available on request.

Radios, and phones with local SIM cards. The assistant’s bag, with everything inside: small accessories and cleaning materials.