A Journey of a Thousand Miles

Photographically speaking the trip had it’s ups and downs. The gear I was using for the most part  held up brilliantly. I am very pleased with the quality of images from the new 50D. Though I was shocked at how big the files really are out of this camera and how much memory was needed to compensate. I took with me nearly (correction from previous posts where I said 20GB) nearly 40GB of memory and shot nearly all of this.

I also took 4 batteries with me. Usually this is more than enough by a factor of two. Four batteries will usually last me minimum of four days of shooting between charges and while I have never been in a situation that put me longer than four days between charges, this trip was nearly a challenge to this. However, not because charges were not available but because they are so expensive that one stops to think twice about charging batteries at the end of the day. Charges are so expensive in fact that a single battery charge in the mountains, will buy an aftermarket battery back home. Done differently I would have taken two extra batteries (a total of six) with me. I would rather pay the money and have an extra battery in my bag than have to pay $10 for a single battery charge.

One of the other pieces of gear that I experienced problems with on the trip was the  Foto File Traveler AW T-1 camera bag that I had been using for a number of years prior to the trip. To be honest I didn’t really know what I was getting into in the way of gear I would be having to carry personally. I found out the first day that the porters were far fitter than our group and had a tendency to be either way behind (talking with friends and family) or way ahead. This meant that I had to carry all of the gear that I wanted to use in the day myself.  This meant that I was carrying two camera bodies, five lenses, filters, batteries memory cards and other bits and bobs of camera gear. I also had to carry a jacket two liters of water and other things that I would need during the day. I had many of these strapped to the outside of the bag because the bag simply did not have enough room to accommodate everything. Long story short the bag failed. One of the shoulder straps began to rip off at the seam half way through the trip, and at the bottom three quarters of the way through. Thankfully the bag made it to the end of the trip in tack, only on the last day once we were back in Kathmandu did the strap finally break fully. I was not a problem but it could have potentially been a big problem, had it happened at the start of the trip, carrying that much gear on one shoulder would have been a nightmare. Not to mention putting twice the load on the other remaining strap.

The bag also failed to stand up to half a day of medium heavy snow. The in pack rain cover was quickly soaked through. Thankfully I had a dry bag with me which I placed over the bag to keep the snows from soaking through the pack. However the straps as such that they absorb water and send it dripping down into the top of the pack. My gear got a thorough soaking that day, thankfully the gear stood up to the soaking far better than the pack did.

So I guess I will be in search of a new pack in the next few months. I am not in too much of a hurry because I don’t have travel planed that will require more gear than the Lowepro Inverse AW100 that I am using for short day and weekend shooting. I have been hearing a lot of good things about Thinktank and Lowepro bags lately but I still have not completely discounted Fotofile. Their bags have shown a lot of improvement in the few years since I had purchased this bag. The quality and craftsmanship has gone way up, so they are not off the list just yet.

Monkey before the eyes at Monkey Temple, Kathmandu