hiking with expensive gear

Lounge
9

One buys gear to use it, what is the point of putting it in a (safety) glass case and using it as a decorative mantle piece :wink:.

I understand that good gear can be expensive (i have my share), but if the possibility of not being able to replace it when it breaks comes to mind: Have you considered putting up (vacation/temporary/total) insurance? Not sure how it works in your neck of the woods, but in the Netherlands this kind of gear is seen as luxury items and thus not covered by normal insurance. You might want to look into that.

There are other reasons why you might not want to take specific gear with you: Weight being the obvious one. I do not have a drivers license and have to carry all my stuff. I do take it all on photo specific hikes (be it one day or a longer period of time), but I have to admit that all that weight isn’t always comfortable: Up-side is that you pause more often and can look around :slight_smile:

In general: Don’t be afraid to take your gear outside and use it.

Anyway: Just my 2c, as always.

2 Likes
10

thanks guys for the feedback! I will definitely have a look at insurances

11

As others have said - usually I’ve got my gear in a padded backpack, so if the gear gets damaged, I’m likely to get severely damaged too.

I do have the ability to also clip the camera to my backpack’s straps - it’s a bit more risky, so I generally only do it when I’m on easier hikes. Although I will say, a Leki trekking pole makes a huge difference between feeling like you’re going to fall and being confident with terrain that would normally be really nerve-wracking. I have a (now discontinued) Leki Sierra FS which doubles as a monopod. (Not a particularly good monopod, because the qualities of a good monopod make a bad trekking pole and vice versa - specifically good poles have shock absorbers and also flex, which leads to wobble/bounce when using as a monopod.)

1 Like
12

I will use walking/hiking poles so that my balance is better and awkward sections are easier to navigate.

1 Like
13

I think hiking poles are the most unhandy things for photographers since we need our hands for the camera. You usually need to put the poles on the ground or somewhere else while you shoot.

14

I always use poles. They let you share the load between arms and legs, helping heat dissipation and eases the impact on ankles and knees.

When they come back in stock I’ll buy a tent that uses trekking poles for support.

As far as carrying gear, my favorite thing right now is the Think Tank Tripod Suspension Kit.

PXL_20201004_185512214
PXL_20201004_1855122143024×4032 1.63 MB

4 Likes
15

Be prepared with the accoutrements that aren’t necessarily related to photography but to hiking. Depending who you are, this might be second nature but it is very easy to forget or disregard your safety because it can feel like a burden.

– Items to protect you against the elements.
– Snacks and fluids to keep you hydrated, energized and focused.
– First aid and survival kits. Medication. Whistle.
– Plan and give the plan for someone to check in on you.
– Devices such as cell phone, mirror or flare; GPS, altimeter or compass.
– Minimalist chair or mat so you could sit or lie down and rest.
– Repellent for bugs and perhaps larger animals or evil humans.

– Keep fit in body and mind. If anything comes up or you need to build up muscle and endurance, etc., you can always postpone.

7 Likes
16

That’s partly why I only use a single pole (and in fact I think Leki realizes this because the Sierra FS was always sold as only a single pole and not in pairs!) - the stability/confidence benefits of a single pole vs. none are far more than double vs single, and single-pole leaves one of your hands completely free. It’s pretty rare that I need to completely drop a single pole, vs. just let it hang by the wriststrap. The only cases where I need to completely drop my pole - hey I’m busting out the tripod anyway and putting down the pole is nothing compared to setting up the tripod.

For a while I did a bit of 360 photography, and the pole plus one of the “360-friendly” selfie sticks let me put the camera WAY up in the air. I’ll try to dig up some examples later this week (I’ve got a friend visiting for a while, so far less free time.)

As to @afre s comments - yup, your other hiking equipment is quite important. For a long time, there was a major disconnect between hiking equipment and photo equipment. Specifically - photo backpacks had HORRIBLE suspensions and were a recipe for sore shoulders or back problems on a longer hike. This has improved over the years, although my go-to is still a trusty Kelty Redwing (sadly discontinued, likely a contributing factor to photobackpacker retiring - Photobackpacker is Retiring - even without PB’s modifications the Redwing is/was a great photo backpack.)

Think Tank is one of the few companies with photography products truly suitable for hiking, I haven’t used any of their backpacks, but I’ve used a lot of their accessories with my Redwing. There was another company that was great for straps and buckles and such, I forget their name at the moment.

Edit: OH YEAH - Kinesis! - https://kgear.eogear.com/

1 Like
17

Part of this is researching the location’s conditions.

– Weather patterns and hazards during or as a result of previous systems.
– Are connected trails open and unblocked? Maintained or not? Challenge levels can change, with that the kind of equipment you would want to pack and bring. Check with the park authorities or locals for advice.
– Safety advisories (of all kinds), seasonal or situational conditions (e.g. during hunting season, be aware of hunters and their bullets.)
– Regional fees, rules and policies. E.g. operating a drone, which is all the rage nowadays. :stuck_out_tongue: These can change over time even if you have been there before.
– What are your photographic goals? Bring what you need and go at a time that best suits the subjects.

2 Likes
18

That’s a good list, particularly the safety considerations. My kid and his friend went elk hunting earlier this week, right when we had a rather unseasonable temperature drop to about 0F overnight. They awoke to frozen water jugs and depressurized propane bottles, no way to make water for simple drinking, and had to evacuate. I’m glad they were astute enough to realize the implications. They’re back out there now, in more amenable temperatures…

As I and my cohorts age, I’m reading more news about older folk passing away in the woods, there for various outdoors endeavors and just encountering “the big one” (the ultimate heart attack, for those not familiar with US television :laughing:). I used to just go out there with abandon, but would never consider it now for that reason. Can’t set things up for my wife to have to come out and winch me out of some ravine…

1 Like
19

this has not much to do with the original question but since someone mentioned it: actually I spend a lot of time with planning my trips, studying hiking guides etc. I like researching the best places for landscape and nature photography.
I think hiking/navigation apps and openstreetmap are also useful for this. I use bergfex.at and OsmAnd.
I am curious how the second lockdown will affect my photography. I am now not able to travel to places that are not so close since I must return to my place by 8 pm (and I cannot leave before 6 am). I think the landscapes within a 100-km-radius are a bit boring, and November and December are not the most photogenic months. So I am now forced to discover places that are close. Maybe there are some nice landscapes despite my preconceptions.

20

That someone hopes you weren’t offended. Just felt like the thread would be complete with the detour. I rarely ever do any trips but now that I am free to do things on my own I may start doing more, even if the weather and sights aren’t so good.

1 Like
21

Actually there are some really interesting landscapes that I didn’t know exist in Vienna. I discovered those by starting the rundumadum-Wanderweg, I didn’t do the whole thing, but most parts have plenty of photo opportunities I was especially intrigued by Etappe 4.

https://www.wien.gv.at/umwelt/wald/freizeit/wandern/rundumadum/

1 Like
22

Look for shapes, lines, and textures; they’re everywhere!!!

3 Likes
23

I usually have no trouble bringing full frame cameras on a hike, unless it is rainy. Someday I’d like to buy a good CHDK-able Canon point and shoot for situations like work or rain where bringing my camera gear would be dicey. I used to have a CHDK running Canon point and shoot that worked great when I was in early highschool, until it took one too many falls (a problem that I definitely don’t have for my expensive gear, in part owing to the fact that it doesn’t fit in pockets).

Edit: oh crap, I just revived an old thread zombie style.

1 Like
24

Thanks to burst stacking, it’s pretty impressive what mobile phones can achieve right now. I think for half of my last vacation trip I didn’t bother to pull my Sony out of my backpack, and just used my Pixel 4.

I’m really hoping Google takes inspiration from Apple and reverses their stance of crippling DNG output for maximum compatibility.

25

The Pixels shoot DNGs containing stacked and aligned frames, and have been for years. That’s miles ahead of actual raws, which are useless from a tiny, noisy, low-DR smartphone sensor. It is, frankly, one of the major selling points of Pixel phones.

Apple only started doing that this year, calling it “ProRaw”, and touting it as a giant innovation, and only in their highest-end phones.

Could you explain in what way this is “crippled”?

26

If I understand correctly, the phone records a lot of frames and combines them to a single frame. That means the n-frame data is reduced to 1-frame data, which means of a loss of data. Having the n frames seperately would allow to process them later using better algorithms. That’s the reason I like the pixel-shift approach of Pentax and Sony much more then the approach of other manufacturers, which save onle the final combined frame. Of course that’s just an analogy, but with Pentax and Sony pixel-shift files I can correct artifacts caused by moving parts in the scene easily in post, while I can’t do that with pre-combined shots.

27

Google has multiple multiframe algorithms. The legacy algorithm is the one described in https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/hdrplusdata.org/en//hdrplus.pdf - of which an opensource algorithm exists. Google’s newer phones do NOT use this pipeline for most shooting modes.

Instead, they use the newer multiframe superresolution algorithm, described in Handheld Multi-Frame Super-Resolution

MFSR inherently includes the demosaicing operation, and hence generates what one would call “Linear DNG” just like Apple does.

HOWEVER: When saving out DNGs, Google does not use MFSR - they use the legacy tiled align-and-merge algorithm. They claim that they are using MFSR and then re-mosaicing the output (which alone is a pretty poor thing to do) - but claim can easily be seen to be bunk when the DNG that is saved is cropped aggressively and vastly inferior to the JPEG (which went through the MFSR pipeline) in resolution. Being re-mosaiced at higher resolution would be at least acceptable.

The TL;DR is that if you use any amount of digital zoom at all, the DNGs saved by a Pixel (At least my Pixel 4 XL) are vastly inferior to the JPEGs in resolution.

(Also, unlike @heckflosse, I’m fine with the tradeoff of the phone saving the output of the multiframe combining operation, since it is hardware accelerated and saves a huge amount of intermediary data before I can dump images from my phone to a computer. Also no one has done a FOSS reimplementation of MFSR yet - someone kinda sorta tried, but never made significant progress. However, as stated above, Google’s DNGs have image quality consistent with being generated by the old tiled align-and-merge algorithm and then cropped, not the new MFSR algorithm.)

2 Likes
28

Once I would have thought that the best for hiking would be to pack light and not use any expensive lenses. But I had an experience that changed my thinking.

I had a job to film downhill bike race and the organizers brought me to the top of the mountain to film the jumping ramps which were supposed to be a little down the trail, they told me.

As I was trying to find that ramp, I hiked all the way down to the end zone of the race track and there it was, right at the finish line. I carried so much equipment down the mountain on foot and the ramp was accessible via car all along :angry: :joy: To say that I felt like a shave tail louie would be an understatement.

So I basically carried: 1 DJI Inspire 1, DJI Mavic 2 Pro, 80D, 2x GH5, Sigma 18-35, Canon 24-70L, Canon 16-35L, Canon 70-200 L, Canon 50 L, 85L and a bunch of other glass. 3 GoPros, two manfrotto video tripods with large fluid heads, some Aputure lights, a few flashes and a lot of accessories, hoods, follow focus, and cameras were all in cages etc.

The point is, I was somewhat tired when I got down, but I couldn’t believe I actually brought all that equipment down. Nothing was broken and I even made some shots along the way.
So now I have no problem going with an entire photography kit on a hike because it’s still not a lot of equipment compared to what I had to carry that day.

And if it breaks, it breaks. It’s expensive but it’s still just a tool. And tools might break when you work. It’s unfortunate but it happens.

And I guarantee you, you have more chance of breaking the lens shooting a concert than when hiking.