What's In My Camera Bag For TRAVELLING In 2019!

What's up everybody my name is Alex Cheung and today we're taking a look at what's in my backpack when I travel to China. So as you guys know I've been traveling to China a couple times now just to visit Mao Mao's family and as well as going to a couple cities in China just to get to know the motherland a little bit better. And of course the gear head inside of me can never go on trips without having any sort of camera gear beside me, on me, with me, whatever I need to bring camera gear. A lot of you guys over on the weekend AMAs on my Instagram stories have been asking me about what sort of gear you should use so I thought today it'll be fun to show you guys what kind of gear I use. Traveling to a new country is always super fun but sometimes it can also be a little bit nerve-wracking especially when it comes to what sort of camera gear you should bring with you. It's important to bring all the right gear without having to overpack and killing our backs as we're on a hike or when you're going from the airport to the hotel. And everything that I talk about today will be linked down below. Alright so diving into the gear I'm going to first start with some of this smaller stuff and then I'll move on to the bigger stuff and the good stuff like the camera and the lenses. So first let's go over the backpack that I use. I'm using currently the Lowepro Protactic 450 AW. You need something big and sturdy to hold all of your gear and this is the one that I like to use. This is an insanely useful backpack just because of how deep this backpack is and how customizable all of the different compartments are. It's got a nice amount of padding in the back and the hard shell on top protects the gear inside from being damaged if something were to hit it. It's got tons of webbing and a lot of hooks right here so that you can hook on carabiners and attach a bunch of other stuff to it. The amount of stuff that you can put inside here is amazing and I love how easy it is to customize everything inside. Hard drives. You So I like to bring my Samsung T5 solid state drive. This one is 500 gigs and I use it to store all of my footage all of my photos and edit off of this one since it's really fast. And I also have a 5 terabyte hard drive that I use to backup all my projects on just in case something bad happens to this drive I can have a redundancy or a duplicate of all of my footage on a separate drive. Another super important thing to have with you when you're traveling to foreign countries are outlet adapters. These ones come in super handy whenever I'm in China and I need to charge all of my devices. These ones I found at a local convenience store here in China but I'll link a couple of similar ones so that you can find them on Amazon. I always like to keep at least one of these power banks and this one is one that I bought five years ago from a company called OnePlus which makes phones. It's always so handy to have one of these around just in case my phone dies at the end of the day and then I can use one of these to recharge my phone really quickly. Now this particular one is a 10,000 milliamp hour one that charges my phone from zero to 100 about three times over and so obviously when you're on the go this is something that is really useful to have in your backpack. I also love this four port USB wall outlet charger. It's super convenient to just have one device to plug in all of my cables and charge all of my devices all at once. This is the Pelican SD card case that I use to carry all of my SD cards, my mini SD cards, and my micro SD cards for my camera, my drone, and my audio recorders. It's waterproof, dustproof, and it can't be crushed so it's super safe to store all of your precious media inside this little box and inside it can hold up to 12 SD cards, 6 micro SD cards, and 6 mini SD cards. So this is the pouch that I use to carry all of my ND filters for my camera lenses and that's how it looks right here. I carry three different ND filters with me at all times when I'm shooting so that I have an ND filter for all of my lenses. And this is a separate pouch for the new prism lens effects chromatic flare filter. That's what it looks like. I love using this little filter for photos and videos recently. Ever since I got it I've been using it non-stop and it's really become part of my everyday kit. And I also have a 82 to 77 millimeter step down ring that allows me to mount it on some of my larger lenses. And I also have some ND filters for my drone so that when I'm shooting outside I can have everything evenly exposed during the daytime. And speaking of drone I use the DJI Mavic Air and it shoots up to 4k at 30 frames per second and 1080p up to 120 frames per second. It's nice to have a little drone like this because it doesn't take up too much space and it produces some excellent results when it comes to video and photos. And of course you can't fly the drone without its little controller and I just throw this inside the backpack in its own little compartment. Batteries. Something that you can't have enough of especially when you have two cameras that use the same exact battery. I have six of these little batteries and I split them three and three between my two cameras and we usually burn through two of them per camera on a full day of shooting. Which is why I always bring two dual slot battery chargers. These things are super handy because they charge via USB and you can put two of them at a time. So at the end of the day I just put all four dead batteries onto these two dual slot chargers and I'm ready to go for the next day. I also have four of these drone batteries because the Mavic Air eats through these things like it is nothing. These four batteries only last me about 30 to 45 minutes of straight flying which isn't really a lot of time. Therefore when I'm flying with the drone I have to be very precise on what I want to shoot and how long it can take for each shot. And you can't charge these batteries without the proprietary DJI battery charger which is why I bring this all the time when I'm shooting with my drone. All right next we have audio equipment. Now audio is something that a lot of people will sort of gloss over and don't put enough time into thinking about their audio. But it is extremely important that you capture and use good sounding audio for your videos. Capturing the sounds of what you're shooting on location is always much better than finding sound effects from a music library and then putting it into your videos in post-production. So for audio one of the things that I'm using is the Rode Video Mic and this one is the one that I've been using for about 10 years now. I've used this ever since I've started my filmmaking career so this thing lasts for a long time and it still works perfectly fine. And this just mounts right on top of my camera and I plug it in on the side and so therefore I can capture some audio as I'm shooting and record some ambient sounds. The other piece of audio equipment that I bring with me all the time is the Tascam DR-05 which is this guy right here that I'm using to film with. This is a great little recorder to plug my Rode Mic in and use it to capture some ambient sounds as I'm shooting and it records better sound quality than the built-in preamp on my camera. And so that's why I like to have this little Tascam with me whenever I go out and shoot. It's so small and compact I just throw it into my backpack and just sort of forget about it until I need to use it. MacBook Pro. So this guy right here is the 2015 MacBook Pro that I bought in 2016. So it's been three years since I've been using this one and it's worked perfectly fine even until now. I use this to edit all my videos using Premiere Pro and for photos I use Lightroom and Photoshop. What I absolutely love about these older MacBooks is the fact that it has all of these ports. Look at all these ports on the side. On these newer MacBook Pros you have to have dongles for everything. Like everything needs to be dongled and that just makes it super annoying to have to attach another thing to your setup and it kind of clogs everything down. So it's nice that everything is still built in on these older MacBook Pros. This thing. I'm pretty sure everybody in the filmmaking world or just anybody in general has seen or used one of these things. Now if you don't know what this thing is, it is the Joby Gorillapod and everybody who is a vlogger or anybody on doing YouTube stuff or anyone who is traveling has at least come across something like this before. It's definitely something that people love to hate or hate to love. You're supposed to be able to set this up as a tripod so that it can stand on its own if you're doing something like time lapses or if you just need to do a quick talking head. But a lot of people have complained and said that these things aren't really stable at all. Sometimes their cameras will just tip over and fall and mine certainly has lost some of its sturdiness over time. However I mainly use this as a way to get steadier footage. When I have the camera attached on top it allows me to have a second point of contact with my entire setup. Now instead of just having one point of contact with me having both hands on my camera, I can now have something at the bottom to hold as well as having my other hand on top holding my camera. This way I have more points of contact and that makes it naturally easier to get smoother handheld footage. And now ladies and gentlemen the part that you've been waiting for, cameras and lenses. And I'll begin by starting with the cameras first. I have both the Canon EOS R which I'm filming on right now and the Canon 5D Mark IV which is that guy right there. And these two cameras I bought to film weddings and commercials and therefore these are the ones that I bring with me when I travel. Both of these guys have a 30 megapixel sensor and it has dual pixel autofocus and it shoots 1080p up to 60 frames per second for that slow motion footage. And that's pretty much what I need out of a camera when I'm traveling. I don't really ask for much, no IBIS, no dual card slots, nothing like that, nothing fancy like that. On the EOS R I have the RF to EF mount adapter because I don't have any RF lenses and all of my lenses are EF mount. And since it's made by Canon themselves they've made sure that the EF lenses smoothly adapts to the RF mount. And through my experience I haven't had any problems with autofocus or changing the aperture when I'm using these EF lenses. And most of the time I'm shooting with the EOS R and MiaoMiao is shooting with the 5D Mark IV just so that we can maximize all the shots that we can get throughout the day so that we have more footage, we have redundancies, and we have wide shots and close-ups of the same scene. And last but not least let's go over the lenses. See these ones? Since I'm on the go a lot I don't really like to use any prime lenses because switching lenses usually slows me down. With zoom lenses you can easily change focal lengths by turning the zoom ring. However that's not to say that you can't get great shots using prime lenses it just doesn't fit my travel workflow. So up first we have the Canon 16-35mm f2.8 and this is a fantastic wide-angled lens for those landscapes or sometimes even portraits on the 35mm end. I really enjoy using this lens it's fantastic but sometimes I wish that it covered a bit more focal lengths which is why my favorite lens to bring when I'm traveling is the Tamron 24-70mm and this is my favorite lens because it is so versatile it can cover anything from wide shots to close-up shots on the 70mm end and it's great for landscapes, it's great for portraits, it's great for b-roll shots, and the Tamron lens has image stabilization which means I can get steadier shots without having to use anything like a tripod or even a gimbal. I honestly never go anywhere without the 24-70mm and that's in my backpack all the time whenever I'm going out to shoot. I always pick this over the 16-35mm pretty much every single time. And last we have the Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 which is a telephoto zoom lens that is perfect for those close-up shots. I do find myself using this lens more and more often nowadays just because of how beautifully it compresses the background and the foreground together. It just makes your subjects really pop out of the image and stands out and isolates your subject to give it that nice shallow depth of field and that really cinematic vibe. But one of the biggest trade-offs with this lens is just the sheer weight of it. You definitely feel the weight of it if it's in your backpack and you're carrying it on your back or if you're holding it or if you're having it strapped around your neck and it definitely is a real forearm workout when you're using it but at this point I've just you know sort of dealt with it because of just how beautiful the images come out from this lens. So that's it for this video this was a definitely a longer one so if you have any other questions please leave a comment down below and I'll try my best to get to them. And again everything that I talked about today will be linked down below. If you like this video please hit that like button, make sure to subscribe, hit that bell to get notified of every video that I post. My name is Alex Chung and I'll see you later. Bye!