It’s half time | Good Bye Asia | Hello Australia

Well, we knew this would come and we also knew it’s going to be quick! You knew it too, right? It’s half time already! We always mentioned that the time on our trip is going very fast. Even though we do not head from one weekend to the other like we did during the past season, we still are always busy with doing something. Just recently over new years we had the first really doing nothing days on Bintan. Hanging out in the bungalow/bed and watching TV and some movies, celebrating New Years Eve very basic and private. We should have stayed in Singapore though, but this is a different story…

iphone shot from 7th October 2010 @ Munich Airport (thanks to our friend Rene)

Exactly three month and seven countries ago we started in Munich with quiet heavy backpacks and “daily bags”. People have been asking us what equipment and stuff in general we bring for such a trip. To be honest, we travel with way too much things compared to other backpackers. Even if Carmen rarely uses sneakers and jeans, Ingo has not given them a chance at all. So they are quite big and heavy but the real big difference to fellow travelers is the photo gear we carry with us.

So what’s in the “camera bag” if we travel for six month?

iphone shot from the entire gear before it went into the backpacks

The picture above shows basically all the gear we carry around except one umbrella and the small reflector we decided to leave back home and we are not missing it right now. So here we go…

• Two 5dmkII
• Lenses from 12 to 200 mm plus a 1,5 tele converter
• 60cm softbox (similar to the lastolite’s ezybox but it folds much smaller)
• 3 small flashes
• Skyports
• Honel grid
• Lumiquest soft box
• Shoot through umbrella (with reflector cover and mounting gear)
• Interval timer
• IR control
• Cleaning stuff, sensor (wet and dry) and general for lenses and bodies
• Audio recording device and microphones
• Zoom microphone for DSLR
• Two card readers
• Kodak playsport
• iPad
• 13″ Macbook Pro
• 2 external mini hard drives 500GB
• Tripod
• One camera backpack and one slingshot backpack to hold a bunch of the stuff listed here
• Polfilter
• Pinhole lens-cap
• Shotsac (made by our friends from Sting-Light Photography, Ingrid and Stefan) very very useful! Thanks so much for this one!
• AA batteries
• Leatherman
• LED Flashlights
• Strobist gel set
• Mini USB hub
• 2 thermal blankets
• Power strip
• International power adapter (no need so far, Australia is the first time we use it)
• Approximate 100GB compact flash cards
• Gaffer tape (never leave the house without your iPhone and a roll of gaffer tape ;-)
• 2 additional batteries for the 5d’s
• And sure all the batteries have different charges along and do not forget all the USB and other cables necessary.

Just realized that this is quite a long list ;-) but frankly we have almost used everything already. Sure some is more in use than others but still three month to go.

We of course have insured most of the equipment, basically the expensive stuff. Small (cheaper gear) would be covered by a general travel insurence. You never know what could happen but we have not experienced any situation where we were afraid of thieves or robbers. Most of the time the expensive things are always with us and we never leave it alone or unwatched. We heard it now and then that people got stolen from somebody e.g. on the street from passing motorbikes. We always are aware that something could happen and you might not be too surprised if it really does. We hardly let people touch our camera bags, we take care of them while traveling and both of us really hope that this does not change during the next three countries!

For those of you who are waiting for the next blog post, which will be about Malaysia, we kindly ask to be patient with us we are working on it ;-) and if it is not getting sunny very soon here in Australia, we might blog very very soon :-)

If you have any questions, about traveling in gerneral or the monster of gear we are carrying around, just drop us a comment and we are happy to answer.

Love from Australia

Carmen and Ingoman