Trip to China; Traveling Lite™

zentrickster

This May I am going to China for the first time with my new wife :lust. To meet her family and have traditional Chinese wedding for her and her family... but I digress.

We will be spending four weeks in China, she owns a car there so we will be doing a lot of traveling (family is in Tianjin) We will do Beijing, Xi'an, and a bunch more locales.

I plan on bringing as little gear as possible
K7
17-70mm F4
50mm F1.4
Tripod
bunch of sd cards..

I also have a Sigma 70-300 F4.. should I man up and bring it all? or would any of you just bring one lens i.e. the 17-70? Am I forgetting anything? any must haves?

Also I want to geotag all the photos and post them on Flikr or Google Earth.. I have waded through a few thread regarding gps and geotagging, and my head hurts :scratch..

Does anyone have experience with this?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/635794-REG/ATP_Electronics_AFGPSMSB_DKUS01_GPS_Photo_Finder_Mini.html

Any insight or advice would be appreciated,

canonboy

zentrickster wrote:

Also I want to geotag all the photos and post them on Flikr or Google Earth.. I have waded through a few thread regarding gps and geotagging, and my head hurts ..

Does anyone have experience with this?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/635794-REG/ATP_Electronics_AFGPSMSB_DKUS01_GPS_Photo_Finder_Mini.html

Any insight or advice would be appreciated,

Congratulations on your wedding! Your trip to China should be really fun.

I, personally, don't have any experience with that particular geotagging device. I actually ended up buying a standalone GPS receiver for geotagging. I bought the Garmin Colorado 400t.

I like having a separate GPS receiver. It records a GPS tracklog of my entire trip. My Garmin also has a screen, showing my current location on a map. The menu options can tell me how strong a GPS signal I have and how many satellites my GPS receiver sees.

From there, I download the tracklog onto my laptop, and I use Lightroom + Jeffrey’s “GPS-Support” Geoencoding Plugin (link) to geotag all my photos.

michswiss

Congrats on your marriage! I'd leave the 70-300 and the tripod behind. The 50mm is essential as there are so many instances where having the extra stops makes the shot possible. I'm not familiar with the K7, but if it's a crop-body I would also suggest getting a fast 28mm or 35mm prime as well. I've travelled with a tripod a couple of times and never used it. The only time it's been helpful is if I had a very specific objective in mind that required it such as long exposure landscapes. Most of the time it's dead weight.

You'll love China. It's a photographer's dream.

Zerodog

For I tripod you might try a gorilla pod focus. It isn't super light but it is smaller than a lot of tripods. It might be more useful than a small travel pod too. I picked one up and am very impressed with it. It is what I have been taking on vacations. You just need to be creative with using it. I mount my gitzo ball head from my regular tripod on it to get full use out of it. It will support my D300s with a 80-200AFS boat anchor on it no problem.

Art Scott

Too bad that Pentax and oly hasn't included the ability to geotag in camera with a device like THIS......since nikon is the only one doing this I would suggest one of the recommended software's that have been written about so many times here on dgrin...........hopefully you have a decent handheld GPS unit to extract the data from.


I have a giottos Tripod that goes where I go and also a mono pod that goes where I go......on this trip I would take the tripod or buy one when i arrived in China

I no nothing of how the K7 performs in low light / High ISO situations but with a tripod and shooting raw and a little noise reduction software you should be fine with the current line up of lenses....including the 70-300.............

I traveled the Czech Republic with a Nikon film camera and a sigma 28-2003.5-5.6 lens and shot in very low light with 100 iso film......all tturned out very good...but I used a tripod ALOT. :-}}