Traveling Simply; The Entirety Of My Photo Making, Editing And Posting Gear For A Recent Roadtrip

With the exception of the battery charger, this is the entirety of what I took for making, editing as 
well as writing blog posts illustrated with my images. I made this image in one of our hotel rooms.
iPhone 14 photo.  (click to enlarge)

The image above represents the entirety of what photography gear I took and used on a recent 10-day road trip.  With the exception of the battery charger, this is all I took for making my photographs, backing up and uploading my photographs, editing my photographs as well as writing a couple of blog posts and illustrating them with photographs.  

My wife and I decided to take an impromptu fall road trip to Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.  After all, it is the season of warm days, cool nights, foggy mornings and lots of nature’s color.  Also, fewer people travel this time of year.  What better time to take a road trip and make photographs?  We had a really nice, relaxing time with no particular agenda and no particular schedule.  No stress traveling is what I call it.

Wanting to travel light, compact and as nimble as I could while anticipating doing some hiking with my wife, initially I had decided I would take my Micro4/3 kit.  I would just grab the backpack in which it is all kept and put it in the car.  Additionally., I would pack my laptop, pen & tablet and external hard drive on which I keep all of my Lightroom images.  Then I thought, no, it is too much.  I started thinking how I could reduce the photo gear as well as the gear I use to support my photographic efforts.  So, I kept revising and reducing my kit until I finally decided on the following:

OM-1 Mark II camera body

Olympus 12-100mm f/4 Pro lens

OM 8-25mm f/4 lens

A second Olympus battery

72mm Circular Polarizing filter (both lenses use 72mm filters)

A microfiber lens cloth

Apple iPad Pro 13”

Apple Pencil for editing

Apple SD card reader (they make two different ones, one for USB-C & one for Lightning)

Western Digital My Passport Wireless Pro hard drive, 1TB

My plan would be to carry the camera gear in a small Belroy venture 9L sling bag.

I contemplated not taking the battery charger and just use the cable for internal charging then I thought it might be wise to have a backup method to charge batteries—just in case.

That kit gave me full frame fields of view from 16mm to 200mm and the ability to cut reflections in water, intensify nature's colors and increase contrast.

In retrospect, the Belroy bag, although very well made with waterproof zippers, etc., was a bit too small.  It was difficult to place and remove the camera with the 12-100mm lens attached when the 8-25mm lens was also in the main compartment.  I will keep the bag but I will look for a sling bag that is a little bigger to better fit this particular kit.  Any suggestions?

The OM-1 Mark II is quite a full featured and remarkable camera.  In fact, I will state that no other digital camera has the features it has and can do what it allows you to do.  Because of the truly remarkable features in the OM-1 Mark II, here are some things I knew I didn't need to take but have always taken in the past:

Tripod—with up to 8 stops of in-body-image stabilization (IBIS), I didn’t judge one would be needed for this trip.  In fact, it wasn't.

Neutral Density Filters—with up to 7 stops of electronic neutral density filters in the firmware, my anticipated need to blur water could easily be met.  In fact, it was.  I successfully used this feature several times.

Graduated Neutral Density Filters—with three levels of densities (1, 2 & 3 stops), three different gradations (soft, medium & hard) and the ability to completely maneuver the built in graduated ND filter by linearly moving it up, down, left and right as well as fully rotating it, bringing along GND filters was not necessary.

Longer Focal Length Lenses--even though the OM-1's sensor is 20mp, which might be considered low by some, the advent of artificial intelligence based software allows me to upscale an image file if I need to crop in extensively.  I've experimented and tested this many times with different types of images and I am completely satisfied with the results.  With the new version of Topaz Labs Gigapixel 8, the improvements they made will make upscaling even better.  Additionally, the camera also has a hand held high resolution feature that gives one a 50mp file as well as a tripod mounted high resolution file of 80mp.  So that is an option as well if heavy cropping is necessary.  But I don’t anticipate having to heavily crop any of my images.  Oh!  If you can use JPEGs in your work the camera allows you to apply a 2X digital crop and then it upscales the resulting file back to 20mp!  It works surprisingly well.

Laptop—with my 13” iPad Pro M4 and Apple Pencil, uploading and editing image files was easy and fast.  In fact, it was easier than doing it on my laptop at home.

Drawing Tablet & Pen—I don't use a mouse and haven't used one for more than a decade.  I use a medium sized graphics tablet and pen for all my editing work as well as for all other computer work where a mouse would be used.  Taking the iPad, I can eliminate taking this as well.

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External hard drive with all my Lightroom photos on it—when I do take my laptop, I also take along my large Western Digital 10TB external hard drive which contains all of my image files.  However, when using the iPad, I was able to upload the files, edit them in Lightroom Mobile and then they automatically sync with iCloud as an immediate backup but also when I returned home and opened Lightroom Classic on my desktop, they automatically imported into LR.  Nice!

Second Small Backup Hard Drive—I always backup my images in at least two places when traveling.  Using the iPad and iCloud as an automatic backup, I only needed to bring the WD drive mentioned above.  The second backup is in the cloud.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken only a Micro4/3 camera on a road trip.  I’ve made several road trips in the past with only Micro4/3 cameras and didn’t regret it.  I was very pleased with all my photos.  This trip would also serve the purpose of reinforcing for me Micro4/3 high quality and my complete satisfaction with the images I would produce, or tell me that it no longer can meet my needs and standards.  The answer is that I could not be more pleased with the images I made with the OM-1 Mark II.  The are highly detailed, sharp, have great color and the lenses I took produce sharp files and show no distortion nor chromatic aberration.  Twenty megapixels is plenty to make large prints (I’ve had 24” X 30” prints made that look terrific) so I don't feel I'm missing anything in that area.  I truly don’t believe you or I could see a difference if my images if they were made with a different camera with a larger sensor or other bigger, costlier lenses.

As I’ve said many times in the past, my goal continues to be ‘go small, go light, go less bulky but don’t give up image quality and convenience.’  This kit served that purpose well.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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