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The Gear Episode

So (claps) let's talk about gear. When people think of wildlife photography they immediately think of, oh, you need the biggest lens possible. And while that can be really fun and awesome, that's not affordable for everyone. So, I wanted to let you know that for the first few years, I started out, where is it? With the 24 to 70. This was my only lens for I think, two to three years. And you know, that forced me to kind of master this focal length. It's a great lens because, you know, you can zoom in, you can zoom out. It's great for hiking. It's just so versatile in most situations. So if this is like something that you have in your bag, you know, master this lens and it's great because sometimes you don't wanna always be completely zoomed in on wildlife. Sometimes it's good to zoom out and capture the whole scene that the animal is in. So yeah, love this lens. For video, I primarily stick with the 24 F1.4 prime. It is great for capturing those wide scenes and low light with the 1.4. Y...

eah, great video lens. It's kinda funny when I was first starting out, all my peers were telling me like, "Oh, you should, the next lens you should get should be a wide angle, you should go wider for your landscapes." And I remember telling my friends, I was like, "You know, I actually really wanna zoom in more. Like, I want to try a telephoto lens." And everyone was like, "You'll never use it. You'll buy it and then you'll have to sell it immediately." And that turned out to be the farthest thing from the truth, I'm obsessed with my 135 prime, 1.8. It is great. The bokeh is beautiful. The depth of field is amazing. I love that I can zoom in with the depth of field. I can blur out any distractions and it just kinda helps my eye to find that minimal scene that I'm looking for. So, favorite lens. My workhorse that probably never leaves my camera the majority of the time is the 100 to F4.5 to 6 Sony G Master lens. This lens is just so great for when wildlife is a bit further away. I love, love, love the compression. It's yeah, it's amazing. It's completely worth it. I guess my only thing would be is the aperture. You know, sometimes in low light 5. can not really do the job I need it to do. So if you ever wanna spend the big bucks, I don't currently own this lens, I'm just renting, but the 400 Prime 2.8 is insane. You know, this is amazing. You can do some great stuff, but it's really not practical. You know, it's definitely like a specialty lens that you would use, you know, on a safari or a situation where you know, you're gonna see wildlife, but maybe it's further away. I definitely could not go hiking with this lens. Whereas, if I knew I was going on a hike, I would probably just leave this one in my bag. Or if weight was really a concern I would just bring the 135. That being said, I do prefer prime lenses over zoom lenses just because I think there's something about them. I feel like they're slightly sharper, dreamier, but if I'm in a situation where there's a lot of physical activity, I'm on my feet all day, a lot of hiking, I will choose a zoom over that just so I can have the variation without having to bring all these different lenses. Also, I have my DJI Mavic Pro 2, droning, super fun. Yeah, I love droning. I would love to do it more and more as time goes on and get into different situations. Another thing that I've really loved with my drone is I have the Moment ND filters. It's so great when you know, you're droning in the middle of the day and the light is super harsh. These just like really help, especially for video and bringing the saturation and the colors back into the shot. I also have the Moment ND filters for my lenses as well. I think one thing that I've found over the years, if you can afford it, that is really helpful, is to have two bodies instead of one. I use the Sony A7R IV for photography mainly. I also love the Sony A7R III. I just love the, you know, big like megapixels resolution, I can crop in a lot if I need to. It's great for printing large, but I also recommend for people starting out that A7 III is amazing. That camera is so good in low light. It's super fast and it's affordable. For video, I have the new Sony A7S III, which is amazing as well. I think the reason why I recommend two bodies, well, one if you're doing photo and video, it's really frustrating when you're in the field to, you know, be taking photos and then switching over to video on one body and then redoing all your settings and it stalls things, as it takes a long time. You could miss something. So, you know, having one camera for photo and then put it down have your other body for video is great. Or if you're not doing video, I still recommend it. You know, two bodies with two different lenses on at two different focal lengths. I had a situation where I was on the boat in the north pole, in Svalbard and I, there was snow, there was wind and having to take this lens off (laughs) and change it to this lens on a moving boat was literally a nightmare. And then you have like snow and rain hitting your sensor and it was a hot mess. So, I just recommend having two lenses on two different bodies and you'll be good. I also wanted to mention, there are definitely some more advanced techniques for wildlife. Advanced gear, I should say, such as camera traps. There are those things you see on Nat Geo where the photographer can put their camera in a box, leave it on the ground, you know and then a tiger comes up and like plays with it and maybe your camera gets destroyed, maybe it doesn't. I'm not in that stage yet where I can do that. You need to have permits and things like that. So I'm not gonna really recommend that for this course. Also, you know, there are advanced techniques like, you wear all camo and you sit in a blind for a month waiting for this rare wolf to come out of a bush. I'm also not at that level yet just because that doesn't fit into my lifestyle and that's what I want to encourage you guys to do is you don't need to go crazy to find wildlife. You can find squirrels and birds in your backyard. You don't need to be in Africa where there are safaris. You can find wildlife anywhere and I'm just trying to show you how to do that. If you want to get to the level where you can, you know sit in a blind in a bush for months waiting for this rare animal, hell yes, go for it. For me personally, it just, is not working with my lifestyle with you know, having a family, having dogs, having a house. I can't really afford to go do that. So my gear is really set up for if you have the ability to take a trip or if you even can just go out for the weekend and go into nature and find wildlife like this is the best gear that works for me and hopefully it will work well for you. Let's talk camera bags. This is important to me because I have spent years looking for the perfect camera bag. I think as a woman, it's difficult to find one that fits our body shape and is comfortable. So after testing out many camera bags, I fell in love with Shimoda. They make sizes and shapes for men and sizes and shapes for women and for camera bags but also camera bags that can double as backpacking bags, which is great. They have the hip straps, shoulder straps, everything connects, it's really great. It's, yeah great, it fits all my gear. It comes in three different sizes, I think. So, check them out. On this bag I have a little Peak Design Clip for my camera. So, if I'm hiking and I'm getting tired of holding it I can just put it on right there and have quick access. I have these little Spudz microfibers in these little pockets. I love these. I put them on everything, 'cause I'm always wiping my lens and keeping everything clean. Wilderness whistle or rape whistle, I don't know. (laughs) Could work good against bears or if I, something bad happens, it's really loud. Let's open this up. So, I think this is the smallest size bag. It's great because it can fit into the overhead compartment on a plane. So I can, for the most part, bring all my gear with me and not put anything into checked luggage, which is terrifying. So yep, I don't know if you can see but it all fits really good. Oh, I forgot to mention for my memory cards, I have a little Pelican case. Super amazing, it's waterproof, I believe and fits all my cards really well. So there's that. Hard drives, backing up your work. It's one of the biggest things that stresses me out and I freak out about all the time. So I think you can buy something like this online but instead I just went to ACE hardware, I think, and bought one of these guys and you can cut out the little foams. I did this to fit my hard drives in because when we were living in the van, you know, there's a lot of shake being on the road the whole time, so I was very nervous about hard drives, you know, failing due to being shaken all the time. So I got this guy with all the nice foam to just keep everything safe. So for my backup drives, the backup for my backup, I use the LaCie drives. I have not had one fail me yet. I have had the Seagate drives. I had two fail me the same day and I lost years of photos and that's when I quickly learned my lesson of, buy the best hard drives, spend the money, so you don't have to cry about it later. So I love the LaCie ones. I haven't had anything fail yet. I'm OCD, so I have everything labeled. (laughing) Yeah, so those are my backups for my backups. My main backup I use are these SanDisk SSDs. They're super fast. They are really expensive. I think these go for like $250 on Amazon for 2 terabytes. I think the price will go down as technology develops and the longer these have been around the price will go down but I love these. You can drop them. They actually advertise that you can like put these on your key chain and like put them like on your belt loop. So they're really rugged. I don't need to worry about these ever failing. So that's why it's worth the price for me. So when I offload my memory cards, they go straight onto here and then from here, they get backed up onto there. So I have two backup sources. I also have a third backup source that I use called Backblaze. It's like an online cloud system. You pay like a member fee, a yearly member fee and then your files are constantly being backed up and it's unlimited. You can upload a zillion files. I have every photo I've ever taken backed up onto that system. So that's a great program to check out as well. Let's talk about our feet. So in Alaska we have this brand called XTRATUF and they're kind of the staple boot of Alaska. People joke here like, "Are you even Alaskan if you don't have a pair of XTRATUF's?" But they are great. They're designed for fishermen on fishing boats and you know, it can get very muddy here, very wet. So these are great. They can come in insulated, warm style, if you wish. When you visit Alaska, everyone's running these and it's for good reason, they are really functional. Then also, if it is icy, at all slippery or if I'm on a glacier, I have just my really quick and easy Yaktrax crampons, Microspikes as they call them. And these just go over my shoe really quickly and then keep me glued to the ice so I don't fall. (metal clinking) So that is my gear. I wanna stress again, that that is what works for me. I've done a lot of trial and error with gear and that's what I found is my preference. I wanna encourage you to find what works for you. Try everything different, different backpacks, different focal lengths, different camera bodies. Find what works for you and I will see you on the trail.