Back at the start of May you might recall I wrote a short piece about the equipment I would pack for a trip I was planning to make. Unfortunately, (for me at least) the trip is now over and I’m back in the UK. Whilst I have been trying to write and reply using a mobile phone, I have fallen a little behind. Hopefully things will get back to normal this week.Over the next few weeks I expect to be sharing quite a few examples of photos from my trip as well as share some of the photography related “learnings” I experienced whilst shooting for the duration of the trip.
My trip involved a lot of driving, perhaps too much if I’m honest but I did see some great sights. I started in Seattle for 3 days before driving to Olympic National park where I stayed at Crescent Lake and also Lake Quinault. From there it was down to Canon Beach for a few days. This was followed by a stopover at Coos Bay on the way to Crater Lake. After Crater Lake it was on to Mount Hood followed by Portland then Mount Rainier before heading back to Seattle. A total of 18 days and 2,000 miles later I have just short of 5,000 new images to work through.
As for equipment, the majority of the time (probably 80%) I found myself using the Olympus EM5. This accounted for almost 4,500 of the images shot. The remainder were taken with the Sony A7r which I carried as a backup camera but also because I wanted some very high resolution shots of certain scenes. I should mention that I had upgraded my firmware on the Olympus EM5 a little while back from version 1.1 to 2.2 and the camera has started to play up a little since then. As there is no way back from a firmware update I thought it best to have two cameras for the trip.
In terms of other stats from the trip, I only used the 12-40mm and 45-150mm lenses with the EM5 and the majority of the time it was the 12-40. I did take a fisheye which I used for a couple of shots and the 9-18mm lens wasn’t used once. It was a similar story with the Sony. All the shots were taken with the 24-70mm lens and 16-35mm was never used.
I experienced 1 memory card failure which was with the EM5. This was after trying to shoot a video of the sea and has happened to me before where I have been mixing video and still images on the same card. This is probably coincidence but there may also be a lesson in there.
The company who arranged everything for me was The American Road Trip Company. They did a fantastic job and provided excellent service. If anyone is planning anything similar I can highly recommend them.
The Lightweight Photographer 