What’s In My Bag: Atlanta Bound
It’s been a pretty quiet couple of weeks in my photography world, and I’m off to Atlanta with my family tomorrow, to spend a weekend exploring the Georgia Aquarium, Underground Atlanta, the Legoland Discovery Center and to generally explore another notable Southern city. I figured I’d take a quick minute to do a What’s in My Bag? post–I think one of my first with the Fuji gear.
As usual with the Fuji X-mount cameras, the kit is delightfully small, with everything pictured going into a tiny Tamrac Zuma Compact bag, which, in turn, fits into my venerable Samsonite backpack that I’ve been traveling with for years. An alternative set up that would work equally as well would be to use my Domke padded insert, either in my Chrome messenger bag, as I detailed in this post, or in the backpack. The advantage to the Tamrac bag is, of course, that I have the flexibility of carrying a smaller bag while walking around in the city.
There are nearly limitless possible combinations of kit, of course, and with the Fuji stuff it’s entirely possible and reasonable to bring everything, as it’s still significantly smaller and lighter than a comparable DSLR kit would be. As this trip is primarily about family fun time and photography takes a back seat, I wanted a more minimal, but competent kit. One obvious alternative would be to just take one of the camera bodies with the excellent XF 18-55 f/2.8-4 R LM OIS and call it a day. However, I prefer Fuji’s fast primes over the the zooms (this is purely personal preference, as the zooms are excellent), so this is what I ended up with.
- Fujifilm X-E1–I have this camera and the X-E2 to choose from, and it’s a tough choice between the two. For once, I am planning NOT to take my Macbook Pro with me on the trip, so having the WiFi capability of the X-E2 is tempting. In the end, however, I decided to take the older, cheaper body both to minimize risk (my gear is insured), and to discourage myself from editing photos and to focus on the family activities instead. Essentially, I am leaving the laptop and the fancy camera at home so that I can focus more on the experience and less on the editing and post-processing, which I will do when I’m back home and bored. Also rare, I am only taking one camera body–another would be easy enough and small, but because this is a casual family trip, if the X-E1 goes down, I’ll survive with my iPhone.
- Fujinon XF 18mm f/2 R–A great little lens that I have come to enjoy a lot more than I expected. Recent rebates on Fuji lenses have tempted me to change it out for the 14mm f/2.8, but I don’t generally shoot that wide, and the 18mm is significantly smaller, nearly weightless, and a stop faster.
- Fujinon XF 35mm f/1.4 R–This lens, along with the larger, heavier Fujinon 23mm f/1.4 R, are pretty much requisite lenses in a Fuji kit, and every photographer should have one or the other, if not both. I have chosen to keep the 35mm as it is relatively smaller and lighter than the 23mm, and with the 18mm and 60mm (soon-to-be-56mm f/1.2) completes the classic wide-normal-tele rangefinder prime set. This is my favorite lens, and is crucial for me right now, as it often stands in as a portrait lens while I wait for the 56mm to arrive.
- Fujinon XF 60mm f/2.4 Macro–This lens is the odd duck, and is really only coming along because my pre-ordered–and eagerly anticipated–Fujinon 56mm f/1.2 hasn’t shipped yet. For my daily carry kit, the 18-55 usually takes the place of the 60mm as it offers a similar focal length on the long end, but adds zoom flexibility and optical image stabilization. Either lens would fit the bill, and I could probably live without either, but I have one spot left in my little bag and there’s not much of a penalty to fill it, so I chose the 60mm this time–one never knows when an interesting macro opportunity might present itself, and optically, this is a lovely lens–it’s just the focus insecurity that lets it down.
- Thinktank DSLR Battery Holder 4—If you are a Fuji X-mount shooter, then you no doubt have a grip of spare batteries. I could probably get by with two, but I have space for four, and you just never know. The Thinktank holder is perfect for keeping up with a bunch of batteries. I love ThinkTank gear in general, but I find that it’s their smaller accessories like this and the Pixel Pocket Rockets that are really useful.
- Tiffen 52mm Circular Polarizer–This is a pretty standard, middle-of-the-road circular polarizer. I don’t use it much so didn’t spring for a fancy one. The important things are that it doesn’t vignette with the 18mm lens, it does its job as a polarizer, and it also doubles as an ND filter so I can shoot more wide open in daylight, relatively limited as I am by the 200 base ISO and 1/4000th maximum shutter speeds of the Fujis.
- Canon Microfiber lens cloth (not pictured)
- Manfrotto Quick Release Plate (not pictured)
- Fuji lens and body caps (not pictured)–always handy, just in case.
In addition to the stuff in the Tamrac bag, I packed a remote shutter release, a filter pouch (with 3-stop and 10-stop ND filters and step up rings), a small rocket blower, two Wasabi battery chargers, and a ThinkTank SD Pixel Pocket Rocket full of SD cards in the larger backpack. As a single 8gb SD card will yield ~1,200 JPEGs, I don’t expect to be doing any card changing, so more than one spare doesn’t really need to go into the bag. In fact, as I’m writing this, I’m considering leaving the bulk of them at home. I keep a basic, smallish Manfrotto tripod in the trunk of my car–if I were flying, I might consider no tripod, a small travel tripod, or maybe a GorillaPod.
One of the nice things about the 18mm and 35mm lenses is that they share filter ring size, so I can use the same 52mm–>77mm step-up ring for both (I have 77mm filters leftover from my Canon DSLR days).
I think that pretty much covers it. I love that I have so much capability in such a small kit, and that I can feel pretty comfortable traveling without a laptop for the first time in forever. If I felt the need, I could always swap out the X-E2 for the X-E1 and backup photos to my phone, iPad, and/or the cloud as necessary. It’s nice to be able to leave the card readers, cables, and other accessories at home this time around. Also, as I mentioned above, I could be perfectly happy traveling with just the 18-55 or just the 18mm and 35mm lenses. In the end, though, I prefer the extra little bit of possible subject isolation, and the size/weight penalty of each Fuji lens is so slight that you don’t need a bare bones kit unless it’s a creative choice. I find a basic set of two to three prime lenses is about the right balance between creativity and flexibility (at least for me), so that’s what I’ve chosen. If I knew I’d be photographing wildlife or certain kinds of nature-y stuff, I would bring the 55-200 as well, but with it comes more significant size and weight penalties.
Judging by the popularity of my Fuji gear posts and by the existence of websites dedicated to showing what is in photographers’ bags, I’m guessing this will be useful/interesting to someone. I hope so. Just remember when traveling with family, there is delicate balance to having fun and documenting the experience.
