I'm poised for next week's In Search of the Sufis of Gujarat Photo Expedition™, and have now readied/cleaned my cameras and lenses, reformatted all the CF cards, and recharged all batteries. I find this task to be one of the most tedious (but pleasurable at the same time) things I have to do before traveling on a photo expedition or assignment. It's a comfort kind of thing, a kind of reassuring thing to do, a ritual of sorts if you will, but it's still tedious...I don't know how else to describe it....and I don't know how all my stuff finally fit in my bags (not those in the above picture!).
On the other hand, one of the pre-departure tasks I don't mind doing at all is to review the itinerary I've developed, while trying to anticipate what may go wrong during the trip...my 10 years of leading photo-expeditions have prepared me for snafus, but each photo-expedition and itinerary can bring its own set of challenges.
I always look forward to a new photo-expedition, but this is also accompanied by a smidgen of anxiety. After all, I'll be meeting new photographers who've joined it, and while we've developed an online relationship with emails and links of mutual interest for the past months, a "face to face" is different. Neither of us knows what to really expect from each other.
As for those of you who are interested in gear-talk, here's the list:
Photo Equipment:
Canon 5D Mark II
Canon 7D (which replaces my trusty old friend the Canon 1D Mark II)
Canon 70-200mm f2.8
Canon 24-70mm f2.8
Canon 17-40mm f4.0
Canon 24mm f1.4
Canon 580EX II Strobe
Lumix GF1 with 20mm
Audio Equipment:
Marantz PMD620
ATR6250 Stereo Microphone
SONY Headphones
A F-3X Domke shoulder bag
13" MacBook Pro
2 Iomega hard drives (500mb and 1TB).
And my krama scarf. The most important item!
As I wrote a few times, I can't wait for the time when cameras such as the Lumix GF1 (the so-called EVIL cameras) perform as well as the current crop of digital SLRs...and reduce the enormous load factor that I'm obliged to carry on these trips.
I will try to post as much as I can...no problem from London of course, and perhaps none from Delhi except for availability of time. Once I'm in Gujarat though, it'll be silence from The Travel Photographer.