Geek Gear

This section is dedicated to all my geek friends.

My grandfather bought me a Canon AE-1 Program camera when I was in high school and I've been shooting with Canon SLR cameras ever since. I hardly ever use point-n-shoot cameras except on climbing trips when weight and volume have to be kept at an absolute minimum. Since this was going to be a hotel to hotel trip, I decided to take a digital SLR and four lenses in order to get high quality photos. If this were a trekking or climbing trip, I would've considered taking one lens only, but I would still have taken an SLR camera. Is it worth the effort to lug all the equipment along? It all depends on how much you care about image quality. If you only take snap-shots and never print pictures bigger than 4" X 6", or you don't care about depth of field, or low-light photography, then the answer is absolutely not. Many times on this trip, I wished someone else could carry my bag for me. But when I got home and looked at the pictures I took, I knew it was all worth the effort.

I was lucky that all my equipment performed as expected without a glitch.

Canon D60 digital SLR camera: Absolutely loved the camera. It performed flawlessly and far exceeded my expectations. I didn't bother taking the 3-years old Nikon Coolpix 885 digital camera that I haven't touched since I bought the D60. The shutter lag on the 885 drove me nuts.

Canon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 lens: This is the lens I kept on my camera most of the time. I've had this lens for over seven years, never had any problems. It's light, small and focuses fast. When stopped down to f/5.6 or slower, it rivals most L lenses. I bought it new for about $400. You can pick one up nowadays for less than $300. 24-85mm is the perfect range on a film body, but is a bit too long on a D60 due to the 1.6 multiplier.

Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens: It's the sharpest and fastest lens I have and I used it mostly for museum shots and indoor portrait shots. Check out this picture. The light was so dim in the house, I couldn't have gotten the shot with any other lens.

Canon 70-200mm f/4 lens: This is my zoom lens for candid portraits. It's sharp when wide open, focuses super fast, and handles very well. It's much lighter than the f/2.8 version, thus perfect for traveling. I bought an 1.4 extender to go with it after I got back from the trip, and I'm glad to report that there is no visible image degradation and the focus is reasonably fast at the minimum aperture of f/5.6.

Sigma 17-35mm f/2.8-4.0 lens: Because of the 1.6 multiplier on the D60, I need a lens to cover the wide end. Canon makes a 16-35mm f/2.8 lens for $1400, way over my budget. The Sigma lens is a decent replacement at 1/4 of the price. The first copy I got was really soft at all apertures, so I exchanged it for another one which fortunately was pretty good. I've read many mixed reviews on this lens and felt lucky that I got a good copy second time around. About one month later, the auto-focus all of a sudden stopped working. I sent the lens to Sigma Service Center and got it back all fixed within three weeks. I can't recommend this lens because of all the problems I encountered. Sigma has a good service center, but they really need to work on their quality control. Canon just came out with the new 17-40mm f/4 lens recently for a little bit more money. I've heard good reviews about it.

Ridata 512MB Compact Flash Cards: I have three of these and am very happy with the speed and the performance. You can order them from http://www.powerinnumbers.com.au

BP-511 Batteries: I ordered two extra ones from http://www.batterybarn.com/

Lenmar Mach 1 Charger: compact and charges fast.

Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3: Never used it on the trip, but a cool gadget none the less.

Lowepro Photo Runner Waist Pack: Carries the D60, the 24-85mm lens, the 17-35mm lens, and the 50mm lens. The 70-200mm lens is carried in a Lowepro #2 lens case.

Fujitsu P2120 Laptop: I needed a way to store and backup my photos while on the road. One of the popular solutions is to get an Image Bank or X-Drive which is essentially a shell that houses a laptop hard drive that can transfer files from memory cards to the hard drive via the card slot, and from the hard drive to a computer via USB. The storage size is only limited by the size of the hard drive you choose to put in the shell. This solution is compact, flexible and cheap, but it doesn't backup files. If the hard drive fails, you would lose all the pictures from the trip. I scratched that idea and started to look for an ultra-compact laptop with a CDRW. After doing a bit of research on the internet, I decided on Fujitsu P2120 which I believe is the smallest laptop with an internal CD burner. Fujitsu laptops are not very popular in the US ( I don't know why), and they are hard to find in stores. I finally tracked down one company that sells them - Global Computers, based in San Jose, California. The laptop showed up promptly in my office in less than 48 hours and it even came with a free memory upgrade. Two days before my trip, I went down to its warehouse to pick up a car and airline charger. If you are looking for a Fujitsu laptop, go with Global Computers, a legitimate, honest company that provides excellent services at a very competitive price. I looked everywhere for a protective case for the laptop, but all the cases I saw in stores were too big for the P2120. Out of desperation, I bought a freezable lunch bag from Safeway for $7. It fit the laptop perfectly and disguised it well. No one would think I had a laptop in a purple lunch bag. :)
Posted by Linda on Oct 05, 2003 01:08 PM : 8 Syaaban 1424 Hijriah
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