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Bali Photo~Expedition™: Two Weeks To Go!

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I've started to think about gear packing for the forthcoming Bali: Island of Odalan Photo~Expedition™, which is to start on August 1.

A brief stop-over in London, then it's a grueling 16 hours aggregate flight time from Heathrow to Bangkok, and onwards to Denpasar to reach it on July 28. This will give me a couple of days for a personal project, and to meet the rest of the participants.

I am tempted to ditch my preferred combination of the Domke shoulder bag and a non-name messenger bag in favor of my older Lowepro backpack. The reason? I want to take my old workhorse of a camera: the Canon 1D Mark II along with the 5D Mark II, as well as my Panasonic GF1. Also included are my whole panoply of lenses; the 70-200 2.8 IS, the 28-70 2.8. the 17-40 4.0 and the 24 1.4, a ATR6250 Stereo Condenser mic and my Marantz audio recorder, and a couple of hard drives to keep my Macbook Pro 13" company.

And if the winds blow in the right way, I may even get a Holga to photograph some of the odalan ceremonies, emulating my friend John Stanmeyer's Island of Spirits.

That's a lot of gear, and I can't fit all that in the Domke-Messenger bag combo I often use. My shoulders will complain, my back will be sore....but I have to have that amount of gear with me. When will I have the guts to rely solely on the Panasonic GF1 with a couple of lightweight lenses? Probably when my shoulders cave in...that's when.

So over the coming week, I will try out various packing permutations to determine which one I'll use. Only then will I decide what to pack in terms of clothes...and if I don't the time for that, ah well...Bali is sarong-country!