Our Entire Gear list

We are going to share one of the most common misconceptions when it comes to travel photography and content creation. This is our entire gear list.

“You need expensive equipment to create quality content.” FALSE

Truthfully, good content is 10% gear and 90% knowledge. If we aren’t proof of that… I’m not sure what is. When we began our trip, we travelled around with our iPhones as our primary camera. It wasn’t until Christmas of 2019, that we decided to finally pull the plug and purchase a high quality professional Sony Camera.  

In this blog, we will share with you what we personally took on our travels, along with our suggested bare minimum of what we believe you will need to get started. We will also talk about our new additions and the equipment we use today to capture our photos!

Our Entire Gear list

What We Took On Our Trip

As mentioned before, we were not initially financially invested in our photography. For starters, we were budget travellers. We preferred to use the money we would have spent on a camera on an extra month of travels. Additionally, we are huge savers and realists. We didn’t want to invest our money into something that we were unsure would provide us with monetary benefit in the end. Lastly, we were cautious. We knew we would be doing long travels via bus, and in many third world countries, where the likelihood of theft or damage was high. 

It was all these reasons that led us to invest what we did into our equipment and gear. In our opinion, this is the bare minimum you will need to be successful.

iPhone 8 Plus (or any newer model phone)

Each of us carried our iPhones with us. The model we used was the iPhone 8 Plus. We took 90% of our photos with our iPhones, which is always a massive shock to everyone. The iPhone was our main tool for capturing photos, hence the entire purpose of this course!

MacBook Pro 2017

You will need a computer to upload and edit your images on. The MacBook Pro was perfect for us as it was light enough, yet durable when we needed it.

Tripod Velbon CX-888 BLACK

For all the couples and solo travellers out there, the tripod will become your third wheel and best friend. We purchased a mid-tier tripod because we knew we would be putting it in water and other muddy locations. Tripods are generally something you will need to replace, so there is no sense in spending too much on one. Generally, a mid-tier tripod will cost between $50-100 USD. 

DJI OSMOS Gimbal

We got this as a Christmas gift and it’s mainly used to shoot videos on your iPhone. We used it for that, and we also used it to hold up our phones on the tripod! It was our alternative to a phone stand. NOTE, we have the DJI Osmos 2 and the Osmos 3 is available as of writing.

Our Entire Gear list

LACIE Hard Drive

You want to make sure you always have a hard drive with you when you travel. Every couple of weeks you can offload the images from your laptop, onto your hard drive. This is a great way to ensure you don’t lose any of your valuable content and memories!

Battery Pack

This was our lifesaver on the road! With the right cables, it can charge your phone, laptop and batteries. The Anker battery pack powercore 26800 mAh will always be our favourite because it is the largest battery pack you can fly with and its durability is unmatched.

Nikon D3100

I was given this old model Nikon as a gift when I was 14. The camera is very old and although we brought it with us travelling, we still took 90% of our pictures with our phones. It didn’t get much use.

Go-Pro hero 4 black

In the beginning, we took our go-pro with us. However, it was also an older model and once we realized we were not taking much video content, we decided to send it home halfway through our travels to make more space. 

That’s all folks! That is legitimately all we took with us on the road for our first 9 months. As you can see, it is the bare minimum. No flashy camera, no fancy lenses, not even a drone. This is really all you need to get yourself started.

NOTE*: The last and final thing we invested our money into, which is worth a mention, is the editing software, Lightroom! Although it is not technically categorized as ‘gear’ we do believe that this made a HUGE difference in the quality of our images. We will discuss more about adobe Lightroom further in the book, but for the sake of this section, we wanted to include it.

Our Entire Gear list

OUR NEW GEAR LIST – ADDITIONAL ITEMS

This Christmas we were fortunate enough to receive a new camera from George’s parents. This new camera and lens were exactly what we needed in order to improve our photography skills and image quality. For us, we knew this was a good investment and ultimately something we needed if we wanted to continue to blog.  

Sony A7RIII

We choose to get the Sony a7riii camera. This is a very popular camera among travel bloggers and one that has gotten great reviews. We had our eye on it for almost a year and we were super excited to finally get one of our own. The size of the camera is great, it’s bulky enough to the point that it doesn’t feel flimsy, but also small enough that it can easily be packed and carried on long trips.

Lens

We also picked up a 24-105 lens. As our first lens, it is versatile and overall one of the best beginning lens’ on the market. Lens’ have the ability to really enhance your photos and so we plan on investing our money into new ones over the years. 

That is our entire gear list as of today. As we mentioned we plan to add more lenses as time goes by to help us improve our photography. We are also hoping to finally get our hands on a drone eventually so that we can capture some amazing shots from the sky!

We hope this blog post inspired you and proved to you that you can start blogging with very few items and still be successful. At the end of the day, sometimes if you want to follow your passions and pursue your dreams you need to invest a little into it!

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