Traveling Photographer – my office on the road

EDIT July 2010:
This article is outdated, CLICK HERE to read the updated What’s in the bag?

I thought it would be fun to show you how my mobile office looks setup here in a hotel room:

My office on the road, click for larger size

Pictured is

  • Asus V6V ultra slim light weight laptop, spyder2 colour calibrated screen
  • Sandisk high speed CF card reader
  • Western Digital 250 GB external harddrive for backups
  • Canon L lenses 17-40mm, 70-200mm and 1.4 extender
  • Creative Ipod external speakers (surprisingly ok, heaps better than the laptop speakers)

Missing from the picture is of course my Canon EOS 5D (using that to take the picture) with 24-105mm f/4.0 L lens, 2 Hoya polarizer filters, 20 blank DVDs for backup, Gorillapod SLR-zoom travel tripod (works really well, very surprised), 2 Ipods and an awful lot of power supplies, battery chargers and a lot of other small gadgets (like a solar powered mossie repellant and a GPS tracker which I unfortunately broke in the outback).

Workflow: I use the brilliant Breeze Systems Downloader Pro to download raw files from my memory cards and it automatically creates a backup copy of the raw files on the external WD harddrive and keeps track of all files, ensures that all files on the memory card are copied with no duplicates etc. Super piece of software. I then burn copies as well on DVDs so I have 3 copies of every RAW file. (can’t be too careful!) I then use the phenomenal Rawshooter to quickly look through today’s shoot and pick out a few shots to develop and post on my website. I use Windows Live Writer to write blog entries (since it works offline as well). I am quickly approaching 2000 shots (and I don’t shoot heaps of every scene) and everything has worked perfectly so far (with a small 5D hiccup).

Everything fits in my Lowepro Computrekker laptop&camera backpack (it gets a bit too heavy but don’t tell that to Qantas) so I can bring everything onboard my flights as hand luggage! For daily use I have a Lowepro Stealth reporter shoulder bag for the camera + 1 or 2 lenses (on flights this then has to fit inside my 1 large check-in luggage bag since you can’t have more than 1 hand luggage and 1 check-in bag). It takes good organizational skills to be a traveling photographer and quite a bit of equipment and I reckon I’m traveling very light compared to some!

Wishlist: Oh there’s always  a tonnes of stuff that would be great to have. I’m fairly satisfied though. It’s expensive to be a gadget freak AND a computer freak AND a photographer. A new faster core2duo laptop with better screen would be nice. If I sell a lot of pictures – I might also get the soon-to-be-released Canon EOS 1Ds mkIII 21 megapixel full frame camera! And if I sell a truckload of pictures some day – a 6x17cm panorama camera! Ah actually I think the money will go into funding my next trip. Not much fun to have all that gear and not being able to afford to leave my flat 😀

6 Comments on “Traveling Photographer – my office on the road”

  1. You broke the GPS? But how? Is it just a case of Sony GPS roadworthiness leaving much to be desired or did an emu accidently swallow it? Please, tell me that you didn't "have an accident" on it while sqatting in the bushes…..

  2. Haha using the "bush dunny" as it's called 😀 Now that would have been a funny story! No it fell off my bag while climbing rocks and hit a lot of hard rocks on the way down (not the fall that killed it but the sudden stop!) and that did not seem to go down too well.

  3. Hi man! I love your job!
    Ehi, why dont' you use a MacBook? Better screen, fast automatic backup on external HDD and something more… U can always use Camera RAW and Lightrooom..

    Have a safe trip, good luck !

    1. On my new website, there'll be a new blog and I'll write a permanent and updated "What's in the bag" post 🙂 I just updated this to let people know that this is outdated. Thanks for commenting and reading 🙂

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