5 Things Every Landscape Photographer Should Have In Their Bag

This months is a really quick tip. not so much about technique as about contingency.

Landscape Photography often involves travelling long distances on foot to find the best views and compositions. As such we all have to make choices about what gear we carry with us, too much can restrict our ability to reach the locations we want so carrying 'non essential' items doesn't make much sense.

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However, here are 5 items that are always in my camera bag, even if I don't think I will need them. All of these items are small, so they don't take up a lot of space, lightweight, so they don't put too much strain on your back or legs, and most of them are not too expensive so don't cause pain in the bank balance.

Spare batteries

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I carry spare batteries for my DSLR and my video camera wherever I go. There's nothing worse than seeing the shot of a lifetime in front of you and not having the power left in your battery to be sure of getting it. On most shoots I don't get anywhere near needing to change batteries but sometimes, if, I've been out for a while or it's a multi day shoot, using live view a lot and shooting lots of video, the battery can start to get a bit low. Knowing I can swap my batteries gives me the security I need to keep on working and not limit what I do.

Spare memory cards

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Like batteries I never normally get close to using the full capacity of the cards in my DSLR camera unless it's a multi day shoot with no opportunity to clear them down between days (my video camera is another story). Having said that, you never know what you are going to encounter and I may end up taking a lot more shots than I anticipated. Also, although it's not a common occurrence, sometimes cards can fail. Having spare cards available to pop in the camera at a moments notice means I don't have to worry about these things and I can concentrate on getting my images. As a side note, my camera has two cards slots and I have it set up so that every image is written to both cards. That way, if one of the cards does fail, I still have the images on the other card.

A cable release

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To keep images sharp I want to avoid camera shake caused by pressing the shutter button. Normally I can get away with using the self timer mode but, for long exposure or for shots when I need precision timing (like trying to catch waves breaking), a cable release means I can still get the shot and not have to touch the camera. 

Cleaning supplies

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A set of microfibre cloths, a blower and some cleaning spray is always in my bag. The big outdoors can be dirty, or wet, or both. Dust or dirt on the lens or water drops from rain or spray, can ruin an image so I like to know I can clean my lenses, or filters, in the field to make sure that I can get a clean image.

A Circular Polarising filter

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Even if I wan't carrying any other filters I would still want my polariser with me. It can be invaluable for certain types of images involving water or wet surfaces.

I'm actually not going to go into the benefits of these filters in any detail here. Instead I'm going to point you in the direction of my latest video where I talk about all of the different types of filters that I use. The Circular Polariser is the first filter I cover in this video but hopefully you'll find the rest interesting as well.

I hope you enjoyed this one. It's short but I think it's an important topic.

I'll be back at the start of December with my normally 'Life and Landscape Photography post

I'll see you then