- Small Gear for Big Opportunities
- A Tiny Tradeoff
- Choosing the Right Gear When You Travel
- On to the Next Big Thing: A Cross-Country Bicycle Tour!
- Sweet Relief
On to the Next Big Thing: A Cross-Country Bicycle Tour!
Now that my husband and I have gotten comfortable traveling with only minimal photo gear, we're already taking on a new photographic adventureand it's a doozy! This time, it's a cross-country bicycle trip spanning more than 3,100 miles from California to Florida. But this isn't just a regular bike trip (if you can call any cross-country bike ride "regular").
To make the experience especially fun, we've decided to stop in eight cities along our route to offer free classes for anyone who wants to join us. (The trip begins Oct. 17, 2011. Check out the details on the [UN]tour websitewe'd love to meet you!)
It's one thing to leave your big rig at home for two weeks while you ride camels in the desert. It's quite another to leave it behind on a two-month photographic teaching tour! But since we're literally carrying everything with us on our bikes for 3,100 miles (uphill and over mountains, no less), we're already enjoying the idea of leaving the big guns at home and making the most of our S95 again.
Our trip has a few additional photo gear challenges:
- Electricity. Because we'll be camping in unpredictable locations with unreliable access to electricity, keeping our camera batteriesand phone batteries!charged is tricky. To help, we'll bring along a foldable solar panel. We're crossing our fingers that it works as well in reality as it does in theory.
- Since our tour is being published online with blog posts as we go, we need a way to post photos captured with the S95 to our websitewithout a recognized WiFi network or access to a laptop. The solution? An Eye-Fi Mobile X2 SD memory card. This tiny piece of memory card wizardry has an option for a "direct connection," making it possible to transfer images wirelessly from our camera to our mobile device (it works with both iOS and Android), which we then will use to post to our website via Flickr. Don't you love when technology is awesome like that?!