The short version
The camera matters less than the time you give a place. Almost everything in our galleries could have been made with a mid-range body and one or two lenses; what made the frames was the photographer being there at the right hour, often more than once.
Still, gear decides how much you’ll enjoy carrying it up a hill for the third morning in a row. A few things we’ve learned:
One body, two lenses
Tom travels with a full-frame mirrorless body, a 24–70 mm f/4 and a light 70–200 mm f/4. The long lens earns its place far more often than you’d think: mountains compress beautifully, and it’s the lens for details — a gull on a post, a lantern at the end of a torii tunnel. Clara carries a smaller APS-C body with a 23 mm and a 50 mm prime and refuses to be talked out of it.
Weather is the real enemy
Salt spray in Lofoten, fine sand in the Sahara, drizzle that never stops in Skye. A weather-sealed body helps, but a microfibre cloth in every pocket, a rain cover that actually fits and a habit of changing lenses with your back to the wind help more.
Tripod: yes, but small
A travel tripod under 1.5 kg is enough for blue hour and long exposures of water. We use ours for perhaps a fifth of our frames, and we’d still never leave it at home.
Filters
A circular polariser for water and wet foliage, and one 6-stop ND for waterfalls and moving cloud. That’s it. Graduated filters stay at home now — bracketing does the same job.
Batteries and backup
Cold drains batteries fast: in a Norwegian or Icelandic winter, keep spares in an inside pocket. We back up cards to a small SSD every evening, and keep the cards themselves until we’re home.
What we don’t carry
Drones (rules change from country to country, and they ruin quiet places for everyone else), gimbals, and more than one bag each.