Wow the past few days have been very interesting - a number of highs and an equal number of lows. I arrived in thee French Alpine resort of of Meribel on Saturday afternoon. The first hurdle being to pack for the job - working abroad and more specifically travelling when working abroad can be quite problematic when hauling a lot of photo equipment. Because I'll be doing quite a bit of traveling this year I invested in a Peli Case 1510. These puppies can be taken as carry on luggage but are also rugged as hell, water proof, chemical proof, pretty much bomb proof. I modded mine with some velcro straps so that my laptop could sit inside the lid (see below) Of course reading my airlines carry on restrictions made me panic at the last minute as it appeared the peli case wouldn't fit (bugger) so I loaded it up prepared to check it in i.e. keeping the most important stuff in my carry on back pack. Of course when I got to the airport I discovered that actually the carry on size was different to that advertised on the airlines website and it would fit afterall. Which was just as well because when I went to check it in I was 10kg over my limit and thus they wanted to charge me an extra £60! A quick reshuffle later and all my heavy camera equipment etc was in the peli case and being carried/wheeled on board (no weight limits applying for carry on with this airline apparently). Round one to me.
However shortly after arriving in France my laptop died - stuck in an endless loop of restarts. Which left me pretty screwed for the job...stroke of luck landed me with a borrowed laptop with its own copy of photoshop, and in the meantime I relied on my ipod touch for browsing the internet through its suprisingly good WiFi...but then that died too (well the backlight died). So rounds two and three definately didn't go my way. With another job straight after this one I will have about a day in London to go and buy a new laptop and try to replace the ipod which is in no way ideal.
Today I was shooting boarders and skiiers doing jumps in a driving blizzard - clear plastic bags and a miracle stopped by pocket wizzards and 580s from getting fried. So round four went to me. Still, snowboarding with camera equipment is pain in the ass (quite literally at times) and to do it I've had to use the Dakine Mission Photo pack (see above) which is pretty good and pretty rigid but annoyingly the 5D has to lose its battery grip because the bag isn't deep enough. Hopefully I'll do more thorough review of the Dakine and peli case when things return to normal and I'm back in the UK.
2 comments:
greg you skibum, you pack more gear than i even own. the alps look sick .
Yea I packed for every eventuality...except for packing a spare laptop! Don't look like a true snow-bum at the mo because I'm not quite rocking a G-tan yet...
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