I am on my way to Japan (was, I’m back now) for a week to shoot a doc on actor James Arnold Taylor’s USO tour. More info to come, but in the mean time I thought some folks might enjoy the obligatory gear packing shot. I love it when other folks put them up.

I really wanted to pack as light as I could on this trip for two reasons:

1. I blew out my elbow carrying my baby and I couldn’t use my right hand to lift a pencil without wincing like a peanut butter executive in front of congress. Fortunately I haven’t used a pencil since 1994.
2. The schedule for this trip is PACKED tighter than a peanut butter executive’s getaway car after getting called to talk to congress. So’ I have to be able to move around, in and out, out and in of limmos and Hummers and helicopters and hovercraft fast. As you know, nothing slows a guy out of a hovercraft like an extra 70-200 f2.8, right? Who’s with me?
3. I’m lazy. I know. I said two reasons. I was too tired to fix it.

So, what did I bring? What? Look at the photo. If you click on it, you can see it really big. What? You want me to list it? Okay. Right after my nap.

AHHHH! Get the bugs of my ears! No! No! Not the chainsaw!!! Humf–

Oh, sorry. Well, that was a nice nap. Where was I? Oh yeah. The list.

Nano 001 stand with shoot through umbrella held together with a pair of bungees. Standard Strobist fair. If it ain’t broke. Don’t fix it. Then we’ve got a Canon 580 exII. Thanks to the built in pc jack I don’t need any special adapters to make it play nice with those two Pocket Wizards you see down below. What? Just a pair? How do you use just two PW’s to fire two strobes? Don’t you need one for the camera? You do if you haven’t cracked open your new 5DmII (just an ordinary 5D playing stand in for the mII that I’m taking the photo with – only the mII will be making the trip) and grafting the innards of a PW into the camera. Of course I have no idea if that’s even possible to do, so instead I put a PW on the 5DmII and use it to trigger the one plugged into the 580exII and then use the built in optical slave on the Sigma 5somethingorother that I only use in these sorts of situations. I’ve got two feet for the flashes in there, too. Super handy.

Well, that paragraph is a mess. Let’s try and do better with this one: There’s a little mini air blower. Kinda blows, but it’s small and better than spit splatter. There’s a pair of polarizer gels along with a set of color correcting gels and a couple rubber bands – my preferred method for keeping them on the flash.

I’ve got an Asus Eee 1002HA netbook computer running XP that’s got an internal 160 drive. Then there’s an external USB drive that’s got 250 gig (music, movies, oh and plenty of room to back up the 3 8 gig cf cards every night). That way I can use Lightroom 2 on the netbook to download the cards right from the camera (so I don’t have to also pack a card reader) and Lightroom will auto back it up to the external at the same time. Nice.

There are enough pre-charged rechargeable batteries to fill everything that needs it twice over. Then there’s the 8 bay charger (he’ll be riding over in the check in bag, NOT the camera bag – sorry Sally, his name is Sally). An extra camera battery and her boyfriend, the Canon charger. Sorry, apparently they are just friends. Awkward

There’s a DIY snoot, a DIY Loupdidupe, and flashlight with DIY light painting gel and glow in the dark monkey fist knot.

Backup travel mascot (couldn’t find the other one, argh!). Ziplock bag – Very handy! Ethernet cable for the hotel room. Flash clampy thingie. ND Filter, Polarizing filter, filter step up ring. Table top tripod. 8 gig Micro SDHC with USB thumb drive reader. 10 feet of trot line (you never know when you’ll need to tie something). Business cards (not shown). Tape Pen. Top secret prototype (partially hidden, but it’s there). Headphones. A Kensington car/airplane power transformer that I can use to plug in my netbook, but also charge batteries if I absolutely have to. Lens cloth. Lens pen. Oh, yeah, lenses, too: the 50 1.4 and the 24-105 L f4 IS. I have plenty of bright L primes, but they are heavy. So I brought my most versitile lens, the 24-105 (he’s a sharp SOB, too) and the lovely 50 for when I need to shoot in super low light and the f4 just won’t cut it. This is my usual travel light lens set up and I was going to shake it up for this trip but I chickened out. Grrr! There’s also an extension tube so I can shoot macro, or use the 50 to get tight portraits at less than an arm’s length.

I’ve stuffed all this junk into a Patagonia courier bag – the Half Mass, thanks to a custom padded insert that I move from non camera bag to non camera bag in search of the right one.

This is the longest post I’ve done in ages and probably the least useful. I suck.

Nice!

Not so fast Mr. Nice Guy. Maybe it would be more useful to see what you packed if you also show what you actually ended up using.

What I actually ended up using on the trip.

Click image to see a bigger version.

580 exII. 8 AA rechargeables (the one flash I used, I didn’t use very much, so it turns out 8 was enough even without the charger). Back up battery for 5dmII. 5dmII. Charger for back up 5dmII battery. Small flashlight (used to help set up in the dark places where the performer I was documenting was performing). 24-105 L and the 50 1.4 both got plenty of use. Mini tripod definitely came in handy to make sure I got some photos of myself on the trip and helped out with the low light shooting conditions. Rubber band and gels used to balance the existing light with the flash. Tape pen was used to seal up a plastic bag with my clothes that stank of smoke from the restaurant the night before. I don’t think the Tokyo folks quite have the handle on the whole no-smoking section thing. The people in the no-smoking section where we were would sit at the edge of the area and choke down death sticks, blowing the poison into our section. Yuck! Anyway. Macro extension tubes used to photograph all the yummy and beautiful food we ate. Air blower to clean the lenses and as a water pick to floss my teeth (okay, not really). Kensington car/airplane power transformer used to watch Tropic Thunder on my netbook during the flight over. Hilarious. The movie, not the transformer. The transformer lacked any sense of humor whatsoever. Netbook and it’s power and USB cables (you probably guessed that one already) used for entertainment and worked like a charm with Lightroom to download the 8-12 gigs worth of data I shot every day. External hard drive for simultaneous back ups as the cards were downloaded. All three 8 gig cards got used. Even though I backed them off every night and never shot more than 12 gigs in a day, one night I forgot to format a card that was ¼ empty so when I filled it up the next day I was too caught up in the moment and ended up using a second and then third card rather than risk losing anything. Does that make sense? I’m still jet lagged. I used the polarizing lens filter at night in my hotel room to shoot the view of Tokyo and kill the reflections of my room in the floor to ceiling window. And of course the back up travel mascot got used. There’s always time for that, even when there ain’t.

I would have loved to been able to take some fine art, sculpturally lit images and bust out the pocket wizards and umbrella, but the crazy schedule just didn’t allow for it. James ended up performing to over 1500 people in four days usually to just 30 people at a time with the largest audience being under 200. I’m not sure why they set it up that way, but it gives you an idea of how many shows he did and every other one was at a different location! Fun, but a killer schedule. And definitely no time for fancy set ups. At least, not for my slow ass brain.

So, now you know what I took and what I used and didn’t use. Want to know what I took that I wouldn’t take next time? Nothing. Every time is going to be different. I’d rather lug it and not use it than need it and not have it.

Hopefully I can shake off this jet lag and catch up on all the work that piled up while I was away so I can share some of the adventures from the trip with you next week. A little taste? Okay, the performer and I ended up staying in Tokyo for 3 extra days to explore the city.

Nice!

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