One Camera, Two Lenses, and an iPad: The Minimal Travel Challenge

There’s something about traveling as minimally as possible that I absolutely love. Having less on your shoulders as you explore is a relieving experience, and I am speaking from a literal standpoint. It’s bad enough already with all the things you would want to take with, but even worse when you’re a photographer. All the camera bodies you could bring, all the lenses to capture the right images, the tools to edit said pictures - all of that adds up and can hinder your day to day adventures. It’s hard for me to not have at least three lenses ready to go, to capture any given scenario, but what’s intriguing to me is limiting what you bring to force you, the photographer, to capture with what you have. I think back to my trip to Aruba where I brought my Fujifilm X-T3 and kit lens, but also brought my Canon t5i, 60mm Macro, 70-300mm, 24mm, and 50mm lens. Ask me how my back was after bringing all that through customs (I also got stopped each way because of how much gear I had)! I then also think about another trip I took to Universal Studios and only brought two smaller lenses with my X-T3 and found that to be a really unique experience. I still had my big MacBook with me though, so now I want to condense a bit more.

New York, August 2024. We’re ditching the MacBook for the first time, and switching it out with the new 11inch iPad Pro model. I’ve used an iPad Pro model a few years ago and thought editing on it did well enough, at least for some fun photos here and there but I want to dive in and see if I could use it while traveling, and keep my MacBook for client shoots/set shoots. It’s bigger, heavier, but I won’t be walking around with it as much and an iPad is significantly lighter. No matter which model it is. I will be using a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop for iPad, which have gotten way better now than they were a few years ago. Along with that I have an adapter to be able to read SD cards, and transfer that data over to an SSD for safekeeping. The goal is to only bring two SD Cards, One Coast Express (for any video), and the SSD for storage. All of that will be navigated through the files app on the device, which is a bit of a different layout than it is on Mac.

Now, along with that I am bringing my Fujifilm X-H2s with the XF16-55mm lens. This focal length will get me most things that I’ll need when exploring the city. A friend also challenged me to bring the XF35mm f/1.4 as well, because of its compact size. Ideally, I’d like to acquire the 27mm f/2.8 for an even more compact lens, but the 35 is what I have a small enough. Technically, I wouldn’t need to bring the 35, it’s just in case I want to capture some nice out of focus backgrounds that the 16-55 cannot capture.

After gathering all these together - as much as I would like to put my smaller sling bag to use, I don’t believe it will fit inside it. This leaves me to use my normal camera backpack, which is fine with me. Placing my camera, lenses, external batteries (for the camera, phone, iPad, etc) and the iPad Pro inside, it was significantly lighter than having to carry it with my MacBook instead. I am curious to see how this will work out for me this time around while traveling, as I used to have so much gear with me at all times so that way I was always ready. However, my back definitely did not appreciate that one bit.

So far, as I prep this blog post, I edited each of the images on my iPad and I really enjoyed the process. Everything was done purely in Lightroom, and exported to a folder I created in the Files App on the device. The organization for this device will work, and I’m happy with the results so far. I’m excited to test this out on my first trip to New York, time to capture some photos!