Fall 2025 Road Trip; Wrap Up And How Well Did My Photo Gear Work For Me?

The end of the road. Not another mile in them.  Cool Springs, Arizona. (click to enlarge)

This is a wrap up of my recent, fall 2025, road trip I took with two of my lifelong friends.  I will also comment on how well the gear I chose for this adventure served me and if I should have made different decisions.  If you are interested, you can read my other posts about the road trip as well as see some of the photos I made here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

At this point I’ll reiterate that this was not a photography trip.  This was a memory making trip in which the camaraderie, life long friendship, shared experience as well as the opportunity to discover new things was the main objective.  My gear choices were based upon that premise as well as what we may encounter along the way.  That said, if a photographic opportunity presented itself, I certainly took advantage of it.  If this would have been primarily a photography trip, I would have made a few different choices.

ROAD TRIP SUMMARY

My two friends picked me up at my home in southeastern Virginia and we started our adventure.  Three guys in their mid-70s, unsupervised by our wives, just out to explore America, see and learn new things and have fun.  We’ve done this before but we’re getting a bit older now and these kinds of trips are tiring.  This is probably the last multi-week road trip we will take.  Oh!  We laughed a lot!  That’s good for the soul.

We had decided to loosely follow Route 66 west but after that, we hadn’t decided which route we would take east.  Route 66 is always a pleasure as it seems no matter how many times I’ve driven it, there are always new things to see.  After reaching California we decided to drive north to Washington State and pick up U.S. Route 2, known as The High Line east.  We followed that highway as far east as Michigan.  From there, we headed south and east and back to my house in Virginia.

Our trip was exactly one month, over 7000 miles and we visited 22 states.  My one friend volunteered to use his vehicle, a 2024 Mazda CX-50.  It was tight with a month’s worth of luggage, backpacks, camera bags, a small cooler, snacks and the three of us, but I will say, that smallish SUV performed well and was a pleasure to drive.  I’ve driven my larger SUV as well as my former minivan on similar road trips and I missed the extra room.  But we did okay.  We rotated driving every three days.  The two days break from driving was nice.  Since there were three of us, we always rented two hotel rooms.  Two shared a room and whoever drove that day got a room by himself.  Another nice perk.

THE PEOPLE WE MET

I wanted to say something about the numerous people we met along our way.  Everyone we met, to the person, was delightful.  Each was engaging, friendly, helpful and just a joy to meet.  I’m talking about dozens and dozens of people.  Not just a few.  If you are from somewhere other than the United States you may get your impression about how Americans are and act from news reports.  They couldn’t be more wrong.  Over and over again, on numerous road trips across this country, everyone I’ve encountered has been nice.  Noithing like the news media would have you believe—that we are filled with hate, controversy or division.  Not the ‘real’ Americans, the average Americans that are all across this country. That’s what I found repeatedly year after year.  

Lesson learned (again and again): Don’t form opinions from what you see on television or read in publications.  Discover for yourself and then form your opinions.  ‘Nuf said.

HOW MY PHOTO GEAR SERVED ME

For this trip, this is the gear I decided to take:

Fujifilm X100VI

Fujifilm 28mm wide angle adapter lens for the X00VI

Fujifilm 50mm tele adapter lens for the X00VI

OM-3

OM 8-25mm f/4 PRO lens

Olympus 12-100mm f/4 PRO lens

OM 40-150mm f/4 PRO lens

49mm & 72mm Polarizing filters with appropriate step-down rings to fit all lenses

3 spare SDXC memory cards

Camera and lens cleaning materials

iPhone 14 Pro Max (which I always carry anyway)

That was it.  No tripod and no neutral density filters were needed.  Why did I choose the X100VI and the OM-3?  In short, I’ve fallen in love with using the X100VI.  In many ways it is freeing to not have to make lens choices and that removes burden of having too many choices. Too many choices can degrade the experience—the paradox of choice.  Also, the X100VI is small, lightweight and when over my shoulder, it is almost like it isn’t there!  Did I happen to mention the 40mp sensor, image processor and 23mm f/2 lens make a great combination to create excellent images.  The 35mm full frame focal length field of view also fits nicely with my vision.  So there’s that as well.  But what about the OM and all those lenses?  

To me the OM-3 is a ‘do everything’ camera and provides so much versatility that I want for nothing when I’m carrying that camera.  For this trip it served primarily a) as a backup camera system and b), the camera to use when I found myself needing focal lengths far different from 35mm.  The AF is fast and accurate and, in my experience, never missed.  Not once.  The lenses are top quality.  The 20mp sensor renders fine detail and is more than sufficient to make large prints.  The technical quality of the images it can produce is excellent (the aesthetic quality is up to me).  Some people don’t like the OM-3 because of its retro shape.  I added a small grip which also includes an Arca Swiss-type flange on the bottom.  The grip works perfectly for me and the camera remains smaller than the OM-1 Mark II.  This was kind of a “shake down” trip for the OM-3 since I hadn’t used it a lot.  I found I really enjoy using the OM-3.  It has the same innards as its big brother, the OM-1 Mark II, and has two additional features I’ve found convenient—the single push of a button to get to all of its computational photography features as well as the dial on the front (à la the Pen F) which allows me to dial in picture styles such as various black & white modes with just a click of that dial.  In my first post about this road trip you can read about how I went about choosing those two cameras.  Find it here.  Oh!  Also because of the extraordinary in-body-image-stabilation (IBIS) and built-in neutral density filtration features, I had no reason to take a tripod, ND filters nor graduated ND filters.  That jives nicely with my philosophy og going smaller, lighter but maintaining excellence.

Did I make the right choices?  I would say yes and no.  On one hand, yes because I derived great satisfaction from using both cameras, they did everything I needed them to do perfectly and, as a bonus, I captured some portfolio worthy photographs.  But in reality, with only a couple of exceptions where I needed a lens much wider than 24mm (FF equiv.) I could have taken only the OM-3 and the 12-100mm f/4 lens.  That camera with that lens could have handled 95% or more of the subjects I photographed.  The quality of the images that combination produces is exceptional, IMHO.  

On the other hand, I never travel with just one camera ‘just in case.’  Never once did I worry or even think about the fact that both the X100VI and the OM-3 have only one memory card slot.  It was never a thought that crossed my mind.  I think we obsess too much about having redundancy and backup abilities.  Sometimes rightfully so, but most of the time not having two card slots is a moot point.  In my opinion, taking two cameras is not.

We photographers always seem to overpack as we don’t know what opportunities will appear before us and we want to ensure we are prepared for just about anything.  I think it has to do, again, as it is with many other things, FOMO—fear of missing out.  We don’t want to take a chance in missing a great photo opportunity by not having enough. gear or the right kind of gear with us.  I know I overpack, repeatedly, and will most likely continue as I don’t want to take a chance on missing a portfolio-worthy image.  Lol.

In all, I made about 1500 exposures over the month.  Of those, more than 50% were made with the X100VI, over 30% with OM-3 and the rest with the iPhone 14 Pro Max.  The phone was mainly used for ‘record’ shots.  I like to call them “I was there” shots.  Nothing important but just a visual record.  I did make a few ‘serious’ photos with the phone, but I used my two cameras almost exclusively for those.  I used the Fujifilm X100VI wide Angle lens adapter for only one situation and used the OM 8-25mm f/4 lens for only one series of images.  I never had the need to use the 40-150mm f/4 lens on this trip.  

Why so many photos with my phone?  As I said, most are just record photos but while riding in the rear seat of my friend’s SUV through Glacier National Park I came down with a bad case of being “snap happy.”  Yes, a real malady.  I had the window down and just fired off more than a hundred ‘snaps’ as we drove the Going to the Sun Road.  Lesson learned.  Don’t do that in the future.  It turns out that I don’t think I will use any of them.  We’ll see.

I considered the X100VI as my primary camera.  The number of subjects I encountered and the number of images I made ‘fit’ within the 35mm focal length and is evident.  That said, there were times I chose the OM-3 over the X100VI because of something particular about an individual subject.  As we say, ‘The right tools for the right job.’  I have two film simulations set up on the X100VI: one for color and one for black and white.  I shot raw for color and raw + JPEG for the black and white compositions.  That worked perfectly.  The X100VI performed flawlessly.  Every image was in perfect focus and technically excellent.  In fact, using both cameras, I did not have a single photo that wasn’t sharply focused.  

SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT MY GEAR

The PGYTech Rope bag in which the OM gear resided did not work well for me.  I won’t use it for carrying my gear in the future.  It has no structure which makes it sort of collapse into itself.  The upshot is it is hard to get gear out and back in.  It basically take two hands.  One to hold the top open and the other to handle the camera/lens combination.  Also, it only has one zippered pocket inside and that is not sufficient for carrying anything but a minimal amount.  Finally, I didn’t care for the ‘rope’ shoulder strap.  It wasn’t comfortable.  It may work better for carrying a single camera and lens but with multiple lenses, not so much.

I’ve had a Bellroy 9L Venture Sling bag for a couple of years and primarily am carrying my X100VI in it.  The problem is that it has no internal structure—no padded dividers—just one main open compartment.  Attempting to solve that issue before I left, I attached some commercial grade self-stick hook & loop fastener material (Velcro®) to the sides of the main compartment but even with super glue added later the Velcro® wouldn’t stay stuck to the sides.  The reason for attaching Velcro® to the sides was to have a place for movable dividers to attach.  With what I carry I need three small ‘compartments’ in the main area of the bag.  Fundamentally, I think I’m trying to carry too much in the bag and that is why I’m having issues getting things out and back in.  I may have been better off buying Bellroy’s 10L Venture Sling Camera bag which has dividers but I was trying to keep things as compact as possible.  By the way, Bellroy makes good quality bags.  No complaints about quality. (Note: I retried gluing the Velcro® with a type of fabric glue and it seems to be holding.  We’ll see if it continues use to hold.)

Next time I don’t think I would bring the auxiliary lenses for the X100VI, especially if I bring along  another camera with a wide variety of available focal lengths.  I don’t think the redundancy is necessary and bringing the auxiliary lenses partially reduces the ‘freeing’ aspect of only having one lens choice.  by the way, they both are tack sharp with no distortion. 

MISCELLANEOUS COMMENTS

I decided not to bring my laptop computer with me.  On all previous trips lasting more than a week, I always brought my laptop containing my Lightroom Classic (LR) catalog on a secondary internal hard drive as well as an external hard disk drive (HDD) where my all of my image files are stored.  Each evening in the hotel my procedure has been to upload the day’s image files to LR Classic, keywording them, creating appropriate folders and placing the files in those folders.  I file by geographic location as I travel a lot.  At the same time as importing the image files to LR, a backup is saved to a small USB 2TB Samsung T7 SSD drive with the same folder nomenclature.  A second backup is saved to a (rather old0 Western Digital My Passport Wireless 1TB HDD that is both battery powered as well as can be plugged in.  It has internal electronics and a SD card reader built-in.  That overall system has always worked well.  Three copies of my image files provides plenty of redundancy.

But because this was not primarily a ‘photography’ trip and because of its anticipated month long length, I felt taking the laptop (also with my Wacom graphics tablet, cables, hub and charger) and external HDD would take up too much room in my suitcase.  So, instead, I took my iPad Pro 13” M4 with Apple’s Magic Keyboard attached and the latest version of Apple’s pencil.  I also took a small USB powered hub, Apple SD card reader and that 2TB Samsung T7 SSD drive for backup.  All this would also allow me to back up, edit, share and post images if I wanted to do so.  But it didn’t…

Using the iPad instead of the laptop didn’t work so well.  My fault.  I was unable to directly transfer image files from my camera’s memory card directly to the SSD drive.  It should have worked.  I had all of the pieces but it wouldn’t work.  It turns out the small hub I used didn’t provide the SSD drive enough power (from the iPad) to function when the card reader was also attached.  The drive worked plugged directly into my iPad but it wouldn’t work when plugged in through the USB powered hub and also with the memory card reader plugged in. I’ll take the blame for this oversight as I should have tested the system before I left.  I won’t make the same mistake again.  Also, I may have to obtain a powered hub and try again.  As an alternative I could have transferred all of my images to the iPad, then transferred them all to the SSD drive, then deleted them from the iPad.  I didn’t want the hassle.  Too many opportunities for something to go wrong.  I preferred a one-step process instead of two.  Again, my mistake for not testing a new system before implementing it.  Lesson learned.  Note:  I did back up my memory cards to that old trusty Western Digital My Passport Wireless HDD that is self-contained.  That always works well but it is getting old.  So, I did end up having two copies of my image files.

(NOTE:  I’ve now solved this issue.  I purchased a UGREEN 6-in-1 USB-C hub that has 100 watts of pass-through power.  I tested it and it works.  I paid about $14 US for it on Amazon.)

That should about do it for a summary and lessons learned.  If I have forgotten something I think is important, I’ll include the information in a future post.  If you have any questions or comments you can leave them below or go to my website and email me.  I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

All in all, a great road trip along a great route with two great friends—more like brothers than just friends.  I just wish our other fiend who wasn’t able to make it could have joined us.  

Oh!  A great choice of kit as well!  What more could I have asked for?  

I hope you have enjoyed coming along for the ride.

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

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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