I'm taking two lenses with me to Central America. I'll be bringing my 20mm 2.8 for landscape work, city scenes and architecture and my 50mm 1.8 for portraits. I'm also bringing my tiny little sb600 flash and two camera bodies. One will be my d700, for all the serious work I need to do when I'm on site at the project I'm working at and the other will be my "little boy" d90. This one I'll try to carry with me at all times. I'll also have an extremely small and lightweight tripod.
Here's what I'm not bringing. I'm not bringing my massive 70-200 2.8, my equally massive 24-105 or my Mamiya medium format. That also means no umbrellas, so softboxes, no sheets of 6x7 film and no huge and heavy gear bag. Everything I'm bringing will fit into my ingeniously (if I may say so myself) modified messenger bag. I'll be able to take it on buses and tuk tuks without having to bash others in the head with my bag, and it will most likely fit into carry on.
Other photographers might cry out that I'm losing a lot of potential by not carrying my full kit. I don't have any zoom potential and I have not covered the middle of the my focal range. Big deal. See my earlier post about architecture. You just have to find a way to tell the story in the a different way.
Look, the whole story with travel photography is about telling the story of the place you are going. That means interacting with it, not keeping it at the distance of a 200mm zoom. I'll need to get up close and personal, and thats the way I like it. I don't take pictures of people by sniping them with a zoom lens. Thats crap. Act like a thief and you will be treated like a thief. Instead of planning for every contingency I took the time to sit down before I left and thought about the sort of shots that I want and my client wants. I then thought about the best gear to get them, while keeping weight in mind.
You can go out and buy a whole bunch of expensive gear, but its the quality of the interaction that makes the photograph. Go ahead and shoot a million portraits with your expensive L series lenses, but if you are trying to use them in the wrong way, it's just going to be a waste of money. That's why you learn on the cheap stuff, not the expensive stuff, because it teaches you how to use them to the absolute limit of their ability, while thinking outside the box.
Showing up is 80 percent of success. Go with your lightest gear and no matter what the focal range you will find a way to make it work. I went to thailand with a shitty wide angle Tokina, made 100 percent of the shots I took with it and found a way to make them work. I could use my Mamiya to shoot sports, because it's a "better" quality camera than my d700. Guess what, I'm wasting my time. I could drag my 70-200 2.8 to Guatemala and it might prove useful in some situations, but for most of what I do it wouldn't. I'm happy with what I got.
Lenses like life. Make what you have work for you. Not the other way around.
