Every Landscape Photographer Needs One of These

[Music] i can absolutely guarantee that you've never seen a vantour quite like this one how's your hemorrhoid level it's acting up a little bit yeah it's not too bad how long is it now probably about half an inch about half an inch have you got any preparation hedge yeah there's one in there right now oh that's nice with the clay pipe situation sorted we packed up to film the vanturer right let's get straight into this van tour so strictly speaking it's not a van is it it's a camper on top of a truck so this is a 2005 big foot camper on top of a one-ton chevy truck now this road noise is brutal so let's get inside and finish the rest of this tour you never know what you're gonna find in the camper especially with amanda in there i love y'all cozy what you doing having my lollipop you know that you can take the wrapper off and actually taste it you know that yeah right so this is hard castle hotel can you just grab that for me love i'm just going to take me off right so this is the inside of the bigfoot and the main reason why i wanted to get a camper is because of this let me just flip this round it's basically this whole um what they call a dinette area and as you can see cletus is just uh he's taking care of my customer service email so i apologize if you've emailed me and nobody responded he's not very professional to be honest as a personal assistant in fact let's just get you out of the way cletus you just you just have a little little nap over there so yeah as you can see this is basically my workstation so as a traveling landscape photographer you know i needed something that i could use for downloading my stills downloading my video footage and an actual workstation to work on footage and maybe do a few edits whilst i'm traveling and if you compare this dinette space in terms of size and comfort to something like a mercedes sprinter not all of them but typically this is a lot bigger a lot more comfortable and a lot more usable so yeah first and foremost that's what i needed as a travelling landscape photographer and then the rest of it it's all kind of like domestic stuff it's the day-to-day life so this is the kitchenette area if you can call it that so there's the stove it's a gas stove i can't lift that up so i've got the camera on there but it works it does the job it's not as fast as a jetboil when making coffee in the morning but it does the job so that's pretty cool over here we've got the monitor system so what you do is you just push this down and then it shows you what's going on with your tanks so as you can see the holding tank the poo tank it's a bit full the grey tank which is basically anything that goes down the sink is almost full the fresh water is half empty and my battery power is flaccid which is a bit of a concern here we have the water pump so you put that on and now we can anytime you open the faucet or flush the the crapper it'll actually bring water there we have the water heater so if you want a shower you just make sure that's switched on for about what 15-20 minutes yeah and then you've got hot water for a shower or a wash in your face or stinky feet whatever hood light brilliant good fan that comes in handy the hood fan absolutely has to go on every time we make anything on the stove because otherwise not only does the the bedroom area end up stinking but the smoke alarm goes off so that is vitally important up here you can see just storage compartments super exciting more storage compartments up here if you're watching this video because you're into van life i should explain that this is a landscape photography channel so prepare yourself wouldn't it be epic if there was a massive mountain behind those clouds well there is and that's why i'm here waiting for these clouds to bugger off so i can get an epic shot of mount robson and through the magic of modern technology i can be in two places at once so while you're watching the van tour i'll also be over here waiting for these clouds to lift so i can get an epic shot of robson surrounded by beautiful yellow poplars now let's talk money not having to spend six grand every time we visit the rockies just on hotels and car rentals well that's freedom now the camper came with a cd player um i don't know what cd stands for um maybe if you if you know what cd stands for you can let me know anyway it had a radio on it we tried it came through these speakers they were absolutely atrocious so we pretty much don't have any music to listen to in here we need to figure out a mobile audio system yeah it's just clearing up oh hey oh if you're here and i'm here who's doing the van tour i am oh you're still there yeah what which bit are you doing now i'm just showing the fridge oh the fridge that's a good bit though so this is the fridge freezer so at the top we've got a freezer freezer not much in it just your glutes and free bread and some of your energy bowls yeah some chilies yeah actually just grab them in every meal and then what's in the fridge it's slim pickings because it's the end of the trip yeah so we just got back from a camping trip we pretty much emptied the fridge before the camping trip but i like this pollen bee pollen yes very good so the fridge will run off either propane gas or shaw power the mains as people in the uk call it so basically you plug into your house or if you're a campsite you plug into there and you can then switch it off of the propane so you're not wasting propane and it'll keep the fridge freezer going but we hardly ever do that in fact to be honest we've never once hooked up to power average at a campsite yeah we tried last night but we forgot the cord at home i forgot the cable so so yeah basically everything at the moment is running off the two vehicle batteries that are stored inside the camper and propane and the jackery so let me show you the jackery right so this is the jackery 500 and they sent me one of these for free but they're not paying me to talk about this and this thing is an absolute life saver so because we're off grid all of the time and we don't have solar panels the way that we charge the jackery is two methods we can plug it into the cigarette lighter on the truck and if you go in maybe like uh what five or seven hours maybe even eight hours like a long drive which is typical for what we do right because we we're driving from landscape photography location to location that'll get a full charge in a full day the other way that you can charge it is a solar panel and we did have that on the last trip but we didn't bother bringing it on this trip because space is at premium in here and the panel's quite large i'll show you a clip of the panel but that does work quite brilliantly and the panel takes about about seven to eight hours of very very bright sunlight to get 100 charge on this the only thing that we struggled with with the solar power with the panel is you know i don't really stick in one location for eight hours and we tried it a couple of times where we just left it at a campsite and you know you just leave it out at the campsite but you're kind of a little bit nervous about someone stealing both the jackery and the solar panel because you know it's worth something so luckily we still got it nobody pinched it but that did kind of stress me out a little bit and then the other thing as well is you can set it up at a campsite the panel but obviously the sun is moving around in the sky and you sometimes when you come back to check on it it's now in shade so it's not an ideal solution we've left that at home on this trip and so we've we've only charged this purely from the truck and it's it's worked brilliantly so it's at 30 now now what i use this for again as a traveling landscape photographer every single day and especially as a vlogger i have to do a media dump every single day i have to download my image files and i have to download my video files from an assortment of devices so i can plug in my laptop to the jackery switch on ac and get i don't know a few hours of power at full steam now if you're trying to edit 4k video and you're doing really really processor intensive edits this is going to deplete really quick so in addition to the ac actually i'll show you what else we use the ac for the coffee grinder we used to have as well we've still got where's that hand grinder so we saw this youtube video from someone saying oh don't waste your power on uh you know a grinder use a hand grinder so we bought this hand grinder that was hard oh we all right look yeah so we bought this outrageously expensive hand grinder and it's just a pain in the ass it's a hard work it's bollocks in it who wants to do this first thing in the morning just rubbish so we brought this from home grinder beans properly and it it hardly uses any it power down from 30 to 29. it hardly uses any power but i mean we've used this i don't know twice every single day you hardly see it deplete the other way that you can power up the uh jackery is just to plug it into the mains just to plug it into power and then of course it's done real quick so you've got three usb ports i use those for charging my phone my osmo and my camera batteries as well and then all you've got is just this little display so you can see what the percentage is you can see how much energy is coming in how much energy is going out that is pretty much it but for a tiny little unit that's our only source of power other than the vehicle batteries this has been an absolute lifesaver how's the van tour going i'm still waiting for these clouds to lift rubbish have i shown you the shower and the toilet yet you're gonna love this so the feature that i enjoy most about having a camper on a truck is the luxury of hiking down off of a mountain completely sweaty desperate for a shower maybe even a number two and having on board a and a shower so let's have a look at that so this is uh you still haven't taken the wrapper off love honestly it's going to taste a lot better if you take that off jesus right so this is the crapper and the shower she she's she's obviously sat on the uh the crapper there but basically you've got this shower which it took me a while to figure it out but what you do is you sit on this little plinth here where you see amanda's foot you sit there like that and then you switch on the shower and you just you just you know wash your hair and get showered with hot water there's the crapper do you want to just show them the gloriousness of it [Music] no no is it bad we'll lift it there you go there's no nuggets that's all right yeah so just pull the flush and show them how the flush works so that's how the crapper works it's kind of like one of those airplane crappers you know you just you just pull a leave and it sucks it down but i cannot tell you how wonderful this luxury is to just be completely off grid you come off of a mountain knackered desperate for a plop and a shower put on some hot water and you're cleaning 15 20 minutes it's the ultimate luxury and that is one of the main reasons that we wanted a camper like this but it's still pretty pathetic over here up i promise there's an epic mountain behind those cloud honestly it's it's it's massive one of my absolute favorite things to do whenever i've got this type of wispy cloud that just wafts in and out of these mountain peaks especially when they're steep ridge lines covered in trees and this side light or backlight is i love to put on the telephoto this is the 100 to 400 and all i'm doing is i'm just going into autofocus mode and i'm just picking out these little vignettes way off in the distance as those smoky clouds just kind of drift in and out of the trees i just love that sort of ethereal mysterious look to it and it's a lot easier to get than you would think you've just got to be ready you just got to kind of hunt around with auto focus on ready to take a shot and you don't even really need a tripod i'm just using this because it's heavy and i'm lazy but yeah you just hand held just kind of hunt around until you see just that nice arrangement of trees with the clouds wafting through absolutely magic [Music] what i love about this moment in time is that it's an image of two halves on the right you have that lovely warm light hitting the treetops and on the left it's like an entirely different season with those cold mysterious clouds hiding and revealing those towering fir trees the fleeting beauty of these forests never fails to captivate my imagination what goes on there what stories could they tell you know sometimes it just works out this way that the shots that you never really planned the locations that you never really researched or expected to get anything from can sometimes give you the best results because i've just spent the last two hours taking pictures of mist just missed blasting through epic fir trees on these cliffs and these are some of my favorite shots from this trip they're just bonus shots and i just absolutely love them i never expected to get these shots [Music] when i see scenes like these they make me feel like i'm looking at some lost citadel or some ancient castles that stand forgotten left to ruination and the ravages of time i don't think i would have captured these images if it hadn't been for the freedom and the flexibility of having the camper and all that it allows me to do oh that reminds me this is supposed to be a vantage right right so finally we'll show you at the bed again this is another luxury just being able to get in your own pit in luxury and be comfortable at night have a look at this oh look at that isn't that nice so basically it's uh i think it's a double bed it's not not that huge there you go and we both fit quite comfortably in this space it's quite luxurious and we don't have it is it bad oh god that's awful we don't have um an air conditioning unit but what we do have is a fantastic fan to keep us cool in this bed at night so let me show you that well i'll explain it from here maybe right so you can see this vent above the bed so we open that then if you look in the middle of the roof there that's the fantastic fan and that basically sucks out warm air and then if you look just beyond that you'll see the first vent there and that when that is open it creates this kind of funnel which makes this lovely cool draft that comes all the way through to this vent here and keeps us nice and cool at night so it's really quite cozy up in the back of here and let me just flip this around i'll get as far back as i can get bang there we go so when you get as far back as you can get into the camper and then i flip this round just look how long this thing is i'm talking about the camper ah it's bloody cozy tell you and then in addition to that there's lots of storage around the bed area there's this little pantry thing here next to the fridge bunch of drawers you know you've got these little cabinets underneath sink for your trash or whatever you want to use and that's about it for the interior so let's go outside and i'll show you what some of the external components and compartments look like and explain what they do so we have two propane tanks and there's a little green indicator in there let me just record that that tells you whether or not there's any pressure so when you when you've run out of gas and there's no pressure it goes red just to let you know that it's done and you can also switch it from this tank to that tank with this little selector or you can run both of them at the same time by putting it in the middle that doesn't work so i'm gonna have to get that fixed which is fun these two propane tanks are basically the energy source for the furnace which we'll go back in and show you which is really good the cooktop the water heater and the fridge when you're not plugged into shore power so it has multiple uses and you'd think it'd be quite expensive but it actually goes quite a long way i think it cost me about 60 dollars to have both tanks full and we still haven't emptied the first tank in what a week so it's it's quite good so these are strapped in with these straps the only thing that's annoying is that a real faff to get out tell you that so stick those back in so this here is the plug socket for the short power so if you're at home you just plug in and you're not using any energy or a campsite or whatever like i said i forgot to bring the cable so we didn't get to use it this time did we what's this i don't know i think it's to do with the fridge this is a utility shower so when we have to camp with brent and he absolutely stinks we don't want him in our shower so he can have a shower outside so this is where we fill up what's supposed to be called fresh water now we don't actually drink the water that comes out of those taps because we've been using this for quite a while and it still has pink antifreeze coming out of the taps so we're not drinking that but we use that water for things like you know washing your hands flushing the toilet washing through having a shower that type of thing so you put that in there so let's talk about the jacks so on all four corners of the camper we have these hydraulic jacks these happy jack jacks and there's a little remote control that will drop all four of them and you can do each one separately two together or all four together and that is for getting the camper on and off but really we don't use those at all because the camper never comes off the truck it basically lives on there the whole purpose of the truck and the camper is as a work vehicle so it's not as if we drop the camper at a campsite and drive off for three or four days and then come back and put it back on we just keep it on the whole time that's where it lives that's its sole purpose so these are called tie-downs this whole system and it fastens to these extensions which are built into the chassis so we had to get these professionally installed by a suspension specialist who attached them to the chassis and then these talk lift fast guns are attached to that and it's supposed to prevent it from moving around it moves around oh god i'm too fat for this job so this is the cable that attaches to the truck so the truck charges the two vehicle batteries which are stored inside the camper which they're not quite the same as a vehicle battery a standard vehicle battery apparently they are made specifically for rvs but they kind of look the same and so the truck will charge those two batteries while you're traveling and of course this up this cable also serves as the brake lights for the back of the camper so that people can see what you're doing on the road when they're driving behind you oh my god i can barely breathe so i love what's this interesting looking pipe all about that that one is where the all those poops come out yeah what do you do with it you twist it yep plug your nose and run like hell so how often do we empty the sewage pipe the black water uh like every four days or so well it all depends on the fresh water when we run out of that we empty everything yeah so this is the fun part of the sunny dump weirdly i enjoy this i don't know why amanda's yet to give this a try you know yeah you're so good at it so are you sure you don't want to try it no you're good this is your proof pine so to make it less awful you connect a water hose up to this adapter so that it's constantly flushing water through the sewage pipe as it goes down the tube which makes it way less gross and then you attach this to the to the sewage outlet on the camper it's really it's quite good that's where all the pool comes out put this guy on like that make sure it's tight because you don't want a little brown surprise hitting you in the face and then get this connected to this water then you get your food pipe put it in the stencil my top tip is to make sure the sewage pipe is firmly placed and weighted down when put in the drain make sure it's coming through the pipe yeah that's great and then in here there's two levers that you pull one for the grey water one for the pool water and there you go it's really not that bad it's not quite the ordeal that you might expect it to be just bring some nose plugs if you have a strong gag reflex right so the compartments on this side of the truck these are those two batteries that i was talking about i'd love to give you a good look at them but i think the draw is knackered so i have to try and get that fixed but basically there are two looks like vehicle batteries but like i explained before i'm told they're specific for recreational vehicles two of those and those get charged by the truck every time that we drive which is kind of cool if i had solar panels it would be really nice then we'd have an extra source of power but that's all we've got for now most of the time it does pretty good this is just access to some plumbing so not really much to see there this is the hot water tank plumbing and monitor and i think vent as well so it vents hot air out of there there we go and this little compartment here it's just storage so you put whatever you want in there but we put the the camp stove and the pipes for when we refill the water you know propane tanks a few tools just the basic stuff use whatever you want there used to be a magnet on there so it would hold it but i have to use the hard castle magnet and do it like that it's really annoying so just just one more thing to add to the fix list sorry so one of the reasons why the whole truck and camper option made sense to us apart from the fact that amanda already had this really sweet truck is that if you add up the cost of a decent truck and a decent camper they come to about half of what you would pay for something like a converted mercedes sprinter maybe a bit less for something like a dodge ram or a ford transit this truck has really capable 4x4 and winter tires and some sprinters do come with 4x4 but if you're looking at something like a ford transit you'd have to get that added on that's a conversion that you'd have to do and the cost just goes up so in terms of what you get for the money that you spend the whole truck and camper combo here in north america anyway definitely made a lot of sense to us what do you like about it well just on this trip alone things got really smelly so i kind of like that it's separate so all our smelly boots and gear were just in the back seat i will confess it is significantly ripe in here right now i mean just my appropriate footwear alone is enough to make your eyes water that's right i'm sure that some of the higher end fans do have all of that stuff and maybe even better but for anything close to this sort of price range it just doesn't even compare i mean i can plug my laptop straight into this and work from the cab of the truck and of course we've got the back seats too so if we wanted to we could have guests in here not want to so the furnace let's show them how we switch the furnace on voila magic just like that can you hear that yeah basically that heat comes from those propane tanks and it's almost instant like if it's really cold which it does get cold in here because even though this is a four season camper there's only so much insulation you can put in these things so if it's freezing cold outside and we've been gone all day we get back in it's bloody cold you know put that thing on within two minutes you'd have to peel off your layers you're way too hot i i ca i actually can't bear i actually pretend to be sleeping in the morning but i've been up for hours until you get up and crank it i knew it thanks so as we mentioned with the water we don't drink what comes out of the taps because we don't trust it you know it's kind of nasty whereas we'll refill this i don't know 19 liters so we refill this 19 litre tank which is perfectly shaped to fit in this sink so when we're traveling it just sits in here there you go that's the full thing it never ever falls out and we do go on some sketchy roads sometimes so we just plunk that on the countertops got a little faucet you can refill your water we trust that before we would trust drinking that you may have tuned in just for a van tour but i hope you enjoyed the photography too and if you'd like to see more hit that subscribe button and don't forget to tickle my belt okay i'm gavin hardcastle and i'm amanda hart castle you're not hardcasting we're not married to you i haven't even proposed i'm amanda hardcastle thanks for choosing you're just not though like it hasn't happened yet thanks for watching you

Channel: fototripper

Views: 56,819

Keywords: landscape, photography, jackery 500, solar panel, campervan, truck camper, bigfoot, vanlife, van tour, tie downs, mt robson, canadian rockies, 100-400mm, telephoto, road trip, camping, camp site, off-grid, vlogger, 4k video, osmo, vantour, dinette, amanda, gavin hardcastle, cleatus, fototripper, sprinter, camper

Id: 9EyhrUcYNlw

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020