Everytime a trip is over and I’m back home unpacking or rather leaving a mess of stuff all over my room, copying and backing up the thousands of images captured and other stuff, I tend to look at what I’ve brought and how much of it I used (or didn’t use).
This time round, I brought my EOS-20D (no backup), EF16-35mm lens and EF70-200mm lens. I also brought my 550EX flash unit along. For storage, I have my Nixvue with 60Gb disk. I didn’t shoot that much so disk space wasn’t an issue. In terms of photo equipment, generally, I walked around all day with just a single camera and single lens. My EF16-35mm saw primary service, 99% of the time. The EF16-35 with the 1.6 crop factor roughly gives me a 25-56mm lens which is useful for most cases but was a bit short at times.
Granted, in many places it was too cold and difficult to change lenses and you could say that I got lazy and should have changed lenses when I should. Actually I felt that perhaps my EF28-135IS lens would have performed better in this case and would have served as a better walk-around lens. Then again, this trip wasn’t like most trips so it’s hard to say what works and what didn’t. The only thing I felt didn’t work was the tripod. Other than group shots which was not frequent, the tripod was probably the least used piece of equipment on the trip. Mostly, I’d just change the ISO on camera and worked. With the superb low-noise performance, I could shoot at ISO1600 without visible noise, even at 12×18 print sizes. Maybe it was cold, but try to find a camera that does ISO 1600 this clean and I’ll buy you a beer, a Harbin beer that is!
