A Beginner’s Guide to Photography Hiking

One of the many questions I get asked is ” whats the best kit to take when hiking for photography?” or ” what’s the best lens to take for photography hiking?” and while these are easy questions to answer the bigger picture is often missed out on.

There are three rules to photography hiking that I always follow, plus a few more of course but these are my most important ones. Hopefully you will find them useful as I do.

Pre-planning is everything, working out where you are going, how long for, the weather and topology as well as any wildlife threat that could be lurking around (think snakes and ticks not just the big obvious stuff)

Always have an offline copy of your maps, if you are going to relay on your mobile phone (I strongly recommend if you don’t think smashed screen here) download all the maps you can and take a compass as backup.

I do recommend being a Garmin InReach or a GPSMAP 64csx style device that will not only last a long time battery wise but will help you get to where you need to go as well as displaying all the map data and trails needed.

While maps and such can help you get to and from where you need to go, the one thing it doesn’t tell you is the state of the trails. Check with various websites like “All Trails” and / or National (nps.gov) / State Park Authority websites which contains enough information to get best guess possible to the conditions when you get there.

Remember these sites are not always 100% accurate but having a good idea is better than not having any at all.

Nothing is worse than hitting the trails and working out that your kit is broken or missing parts.

Take some spares for your tripod like plates for the ball head if you are using one, these seem to break on me more than most as well as backup SD cards if you use them.

Get your camera cleaned before hand by a professional company such as Photo Tech, they will help remove those nasty spots from the sensor that you ended up with after changing your lens in the middle of a wheat field.

Telling someone where you are going is super IMPORTANT

We could talk about kit too, think about how you want to travel and how it impacts your current physical condition and the trail ahead. If you are only walking maybe 0.5 miles down a trail then it’s not a huge issue if you need to walk back to the trail-head to pick up another lens from your car. However if you’re out of shape for whatever reason then you might find that a tough call.

I like to pack for the work ahead, for nature and wildlife I will take one long lens and a macro, with little else in-between. If I know there will be some landscapes I don’t mind throwing in a Ultra Wide Zoom as well but I have been known just to head out with two lenses; a 70-400mm Super Zoom or long zoom of some sort and an Ultra Wide Zoom of some type / Macro. If you do not have a long lens and say a 200mm you can switch your camera to APS-C mode which will crop your image to around 1.5x at the cost of megapixel count. A super light tripod might not be to everyone’s liking but I find anything over 4.5lbs to be way too heavy for me to carry around.

The environment and weather will have a huge impact on how much I will take with me but then again I’m not about to compete in any iron-man challenges anytime soon either. If you are super fit then the more you can carry.

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