What's In My Bag? Africa Edition

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here i just got back from africa and i'm actually coming to you from my back porch i was going to do this video in africa but kind of ran out of time but i have left everything in my bag as it was in africa so you can see exactly what i take to africa when i go on a shoot now before we get into the bag though i want to talk about the places that i was shooting i was in botswana and i was along the chobe river shooting from boats along the chobi and anchovy national park from vehicles as well as the okavango delta and the gear i'm going to show you here will also apply if you're going to places like the serengeti however africa is a really big place and i can't promise that the gear that i'm showing you is going to work in every place in africa africa is huge but for the places that i went and the typical places people go in africa this is a pretty good kit so let's start off with what's in the bag i'm going to go through all the stuff the accessories and the cameras lenses and then i want to follow up at the end and talk about maybe some alternatives if you you know don't have the finances to spend a used car price in camera gear so let's start with the bag itself let me show you this is my guru gear bag this is the one i take everywhere this is the 30 liter it works really well it's got double sides i love how everything lays out it's relatively lightweight it's very very packable i have a 600 millimeter in here with a hood on it which is really cool so this works really well and it fits into like every overhead bin i've ever encountered even on the small regional plains so this works really really well so that's the bag now let's talk about what's inside of it okay so i'm going to start tearing into the bag here and the first thing i want to mention though before i get too deep into that bag is that i travel very very light in africa we're often on these small prop planes and there's always these very restrictive weight restrictions in place so i only take the absolute bare minimum so there's not a lot of accessories which is what we're going to start with and i just try to keep this as minimalist as possible so let's take a look so in the first flap here again not much here i have we'll start with these these little sensor cleaning swabs i have these right here and these are just your basic sensor cleaner swabs africa is very dusty sometimes the sensors get some stubborn dust on them i always have a bunch of these actually used some of them only have two left i always have these along with some sensor cleaning fluid with me now the sensor cleaning fluid does not go in this bag however because airlines are very restrictive about liquids and that's why i always put that in the check luggage so that's not here right now but always take something to clean your sensor i also have this rocket blower right here essential if you're going to africa again very dusty make sure that you have one of these rocket blowers with you so that you can blow dust off a sensor and off of lenses before you clean them sometimes your lenses are going to get dusty you don't want to start wiping a dusty lens you want to get as much of that off as possible with a rocket blower first and then clean it [Applause] all right next let's take a look at some other accessories i have tucked away here next i have a set of body and lens caps right here and this is because i always lose body and lens caps and there's nothing worse than having an exposed sensor on one of these mirrorless cameras and not having a body cap for it and i'm not real happy about losing back lens caps either so i always make sure i have a spare set of these with me next we have a couple of things in this pouch the first one are just these memory cards these are just old sd cards i always have old sd cards with me they work in both of my cameras that i have in here and the reason i keep them with me these aren't again anything super special but i like to have them as emergency backup normally the way i work when i'm in the field i'll shoot my images then i'll come back and i'll back everything up then i'll reformat those cards once everything is backed up and verified however if i have a memory card go bad or i need extra space in the field i like to have something i can grab and stick in the camera i have probably more of them here than i need but they're pretty light [Applause] i also keep some imodium with me because you know when you travel gotta have that kind of stuff with you almost through the accessories here now on this side i have one of my two terabyte samsung t5 drives they're now a t7 drive they're making which is even faster twice as fast as it's really nice i have one of those now too but i have three of these that i take with me and this is where my backups go one backup when i'm traveling back home goes in this bag here in the guru gear bag one goes in my laptop bag and one is in a zip pocket on my person when i'm actually like at the hotel or wherever i'm staying i still always keep one on my person i usually have one in my camera bag and then i have another one like in my luggage someplace so i try to keep this stuff as separate as possible i also have some zeiss lens wipes with me i used quite a few of these in africa because again did i mention it was dusty i think i did so i always have these little zeiss lens wipes these are very handy to have along but again please blow the lens off before you use them and i also have these handy little i'll show you here on this video these off wipes right here these are very very handy to have along just in case you have some mosquitoes you don't have to have a big spray bottle there's no gel or anything or liquid that you have to worry about when you're traveling through you know airports and stuff so these are really handy i have a bunch of these in there anytime we saw mosquitoes which honestly on this trip was like almost never yeah i could just grab one of these and wipe it on and keep them away and finally we have one more little set of pouches here the first has an extra battery in it this is just one extra battery that i have with me the reason i only have one extra battery like why do you want to only have one battery is because both the cameras i'm using have a battery pack that has two batteries i have a total of five batteries with me now i'm pretty confident i could have done this trip with just like three batteries if i one spare and one battery in each camera and it actually would have been enough i would have had enough charging capability for that but i always like to take extra just in case and with five batteries i'm good for probably the way i shoot and my battery based on my battery consumption i'm probably good for at least three days maybe four days with those five batteries so that was pretty good and finally on this side i just have an extra little lens cap for one of the lenses that's currently hooked up to a body so that was just as storage there hey guys i was putting a video together and there's a couple of little minor things i want to make notes on this is the first one and as i was putting the camera bag back together i noticed that i neglected to tell you about a very critical accessory it's very simple though it's just this little wash rag i always keep a small little wash rag in the bag very handy for wiping off dust off of like lens barrels and camera bodies or even water sometimes like when we're in the boat we get splashed a little bit and i can wipe that stuff down with this i wouldn't use this on my front elements of course but on the barrels on the bodies and stuff it works really well so let's take a look at camera bodies next for this trip i have the sony a1 right here that's the one i was using on this trip i was shooting sony this time you never know what i'm going to shoot i shoot nikon canon and sony this particular trip i went sony and i had the a1 this is my primary body i would usually hook this up to the 600 millimeter you're about to see and as you can see it has that battery grip and as i mentioned two batteries in there so lots of lots of power there matter of fact i never once ended up going through both these batteries during one of our morning or afternoon shoots the most i ever did was maybe get through one battery and start on the second one so the battery life here was really good the other camera which is currently hooked up to a lens we'll talk about in a moment is the sony a9 mark ii this is my backup secondary body and when you go to africa i highly recommend you have two bodies with you you never know if something's gonna happen to your first body and you're gonna need to rely on that one and even if something doesn't happen your first body it's really nice to be able to just grab the second camera without swapping lenses around otherwise you end up missing shots so those are the bodies they both worked out really really well on this trip the a1 was absolutely outstanding i am going to do a review on that that's one of the reasons it was with me on this trip because i am working on that review but really did a really nice job now as far as lenses go let's i'm going to just set this down for a second and we're going to start from the lowest focal length to the longest so the first one here is the sony 242 105 great little lens i don't use it very much though in africa i don't use a lot of stuff that goes into this 24 millimeter to 105 range this is my least used focal length and if i had to leave one lens behind it would be this one i used it maybe two or three times i mean it was great when i needed it very handy to have when i needed it but for the most part this one stayed in the bag and will i take it again yeah because i did use it once or twice but for the most part not like probably my top lens to recommend if you did have to leave something at home due to weight or space this would be the one next we have the 100 to 400 now this one turned out to be pretty useful to have when you have something that's large a close range or you have something big like a giraffe or an elephant and you want to get that animal in the environment around it this lens works really well when you're closer range that zoom is super handy you don't want to be in a situation where you're shooting a prime and you need something maybe 50 millimeters shorter and you just can't get to it so i really like having especially on the shorter end that 100 to 400 range i really prefer a zoom over a prime this lens itself is nice and lightweight it's small you can see it's a push-pull type of thing that you know extends out it's an external zoom and you know that's not maybe ideal people worry about dust i haven't had any problems with it but the nice thing about it is that it's so small and it's so lightweight it works really well and for africa i think this is an absolutely phenomenal lens to have in your bag highly recommend something in this focal range and this worked out really well i probably use this lens maybe 15 to 20 percent of the time but it's definitely a lens i would have along now there is one other piece in there and these are that's these binoculars i forgot to mention these earlier these are just my little binoculars i take along these are swarovskis these are absolutely excellent these are this is a cl 8x25 and they're surprisingly sharp they're very very clear and it's really handy and they're super small very packable they don't really weigh anything this is a great set of binoculars for africa and if you are i realize you're going there to take photos but honestly a pair of binoculars is definitely something nice to have along just when you want to observe some wildlife okay finally we come to the big guns 600 millimeter f4 this is the 600 millimeter sony f4 and absolutely phenomenal lens this was my workhorse as usual when i'm doing wildlife photography this lens is always my workhorse and it performed flawlessly everything in this kit performed flawlessly on the entire trip but so many times people when they go to africa they get advice like hey you're going to be very close to animals you don't really need big glass but the truth is having something in the 600 millimeter range is incredibly handy especially if you're dealing with smaller birds and things like that there's a lot of times i not only had the 600 i had a 2x converter on this and we'll talk about the teleconverters here in just a second but the 600 millimeter lens to me i say this is probably this is probably 75 to 80 of my photos was with this particular lens in addition to that i also have my teleconverters i have my little buddy pouch i've talked about this in other videos it allows me to put these teleconverters in without their caps it does not scratch them i've been using this for several years and still have not seen a single scratch on the teleconverter but anyhow i have the 1 4 in here and the 2x and both of them work really really well with the 600 sony and i found them absolutely invaluable and one of the things that people don't think about when you're dealing with you know big focal lengths in africa some of the stuff you could do that's really special i think is when you are close to an animal is to really get close there were times i had lions that were probably no more than 20 feet from the vehicle i had 1200 millimeter on just shooting eyes and faces and things like that it's a lot of fun to do so you know this versatility of focal length is really really nice to have and by the way one other thing i really like about the sony 600 is that it actually fits in this guru gear bag one of the problems i've had with the nikon lens is that the hood sticks out a little bit more when you have it reversed on there and it does not fit in some camera bags including this one the sony is a little bit lower profile and fits really really well but that's pretty much it for what's in my camera bag for africa what i took to botswana but i also want to talk about some alternatives here because because there's a lot of people that just can't justify spending the kind of money that you're seeing right here to go to africa or to go to any place and you don't actually have to have this kind of stuff my wife was shooting a canon r5 and a 100 to 500 and she got some absolutely beautiful photos had a great time with it very little problem getting the shots that she wanted with that outfit so that's one alternative there something like a super zoom like that works really well we had people with us that were shooting 200 to 500 nikons we had people shooting the 200 to 600 sony all of that worked really really well the biggest thing i think if i'm going to make a recommendation for africa isn't so much to get hung up on oh my gosh i need a 600 f4 and a professional camera but is to have a nice range of focal lengths especially in that 200 millimeter to 600 millimeter range you want that as covered as you can get it as long as you have that covered you're going to be pretty happy with your africa trip you're going to be able to cover most things i also like to be able to add a teleconverter as needed because sometimes stuff is a little farther away or you're dealing with a really tiny bird or things like that but i think the biggest takeaway here shouldn't be that you need thousands of dollars a year to go have fun in africa but rather you need focal length versatility and again if you're in that 200 millimeter to 600 millimeter range and you maybe have a teleconverter or something mixed in there to get you a little bit longer as needed you're going to be really happy with your results all right this is note number two and this isn't so much about what's in my camera bag is what's in my laptop bag because i think that information might be valuable to you so i just want to go over that very quickly very briefly so obviously there's a laptop i use a 15 inch macbook pro i also have the charger for that laptop in there and i also have two chargers with me for my batteries in this case they're sony chargers and i always try to keep those in my carry-ons but if i only have room for one i make sure i have at least one in there i always make room for at least one in my carry-ons and i'll put the other one in my checked baggage if i have to but i do that in case something happens to the one in the check bags because i don't want to take a chance on getting there and have no charger at all so i always take two chargers with me i also have two memory card readers with me a lot of times people don't think of that but i told you how i worked before i count on being able to offload my images and if i can't offload those images it kind of messes up my workflow so i take two memory card readers just in case one of them goes bad i also have three backup drives with me as i mentioned before i have a video that talks about my backup strategy i usually have two to three of those with me on a big africa trip i definitely had three with me on this trip so that's just a few of the things that are in my laptop bag that i think are probably useful to think about when you're packing okay so that pretty much wraps this up i hope you found it helpful i hope if you're traveling to africa this has given you a little bit of insight and once again thank you so much for watching if you enjoy wildlife photography you might want to check out my new book too it's the birds and flight photography book i just published it's called secrets 2 stunning burden flight photography it is absolutely loaded with everything you've ever wanted to know about burden flight photography it's going to take you from knowing nothing about bird and flight photography to being an expert in burden flight photography in no time at all so make sure you check that out i'm sure you're gonna love it also make sure you sign up for my free email newsletter at my site so you never miss a video an article a workshop opportunity or any other cool stuff that i'm doing and as always please remember to like subscribe and get notified thank you so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 23,291

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, what's in my bag, africa photography gear, photo gear for africa, safari camera gear, camera gear for africa, lenses for africa, cameras for africa, camera bag for africa, safari photo gear, safari lenses, safari cameras, africa wildlife photography, best camera gear for africa, best photo gear for africa, best camera for africa, best lenses for africa

Id: jJIfYsgPD1g

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021