How does a professional photographer travel? 1/3
Images from China, Haiti, Tanzania, Russia or Brazil — that's all very well. But nothing should be left to chance.
How do you make good images, and above all, how do you organise a trip to make them as a professional photographer?
Travel for a pro
To bring back images from the other side of the world, reliably, there is no mystery: you have to be organised and anticipate the unforeseen. In a series of three articles, we'll look at different key moments of a professional's journey:
- The outward journey
- A typical shooting day
- The return journey
Let's get straight to the point with the outward journey.
Heading out on assignment
Heading off on assignment is pointless if you don't arrive with your shooting gear. But when you fly, it's nearly impossible to take all your gear as carry-on. The first stage of organising is to divide the gear in two: what goes in the hold, and what goes in the cabin.
I follow a simple rule: take in the cabin everything you need to shoot for 3 to 4 days. With this rule, you mitigate the problem of checked bags that go astray and take a while to arrive. Here is a near-exhaustive list of what I take as carry-on if I'm leaving solely to shoot stills. I've put a * after gear I don't take if I'm doing a photo/video shoot.
- One body:
- Two lenses: and
- The camera charger
- Two memory cards in the camera:
- A laptop and its power supply
- One flash: *
- Two *
With that, I'm sure I can work as soon as I land. I put it all in a fairly large backpack, except the tripods.
For the rest, I take a — neither too big (hence too heavy; and even lighter with the newcomer 1535) nor too small for the remaining gear. The remaining gear: a second body, a , one or two extra batteries, batteries for the flashes, a few clamps to mount flashes, flash supports, a magic arm, a tripod for the camera and a light stand.
One step left: actually getting on the plane.
While the hold is rarely a problem if conditions allow 2 checked bags of 23 kg, getting into the cabin with a bag weighing between 14 and 16 kg can be a bit tricky. I'm "lucky" enough to travel on assignment for major NGOs — so with international mission orders — or to travel with my press card. In either case, at boarding I calmly explain my situation and 99.9% of the time it goes fine. For the remaining 0.1%, it takes a bit of talent to smooth things over and still get on the plane.
In the next article, we'll see what a typical shooting day looks like in the field.