Michele on the Road: on Travel, Photography and Life

Choosing the right lenses to bring along when leaving for a trip is no easy feat.
You need to decide wether you want to have all your gear with you and be prepared to shoot in any conditions, or if you’d rather travel light and be prepared to sacrifice some shots for the sake of lightness.

With my departure date coming along — end of October — the time is coming for me to decide on the gear I’m going to bring with me.

This time I’d like to travel light, so I’m going to go with one body and no more than two lenses.
The problem lays in which lenses I’m going to take.

I’ve been pondering about getting a Nikon 18-200 and the reason is obvious: it would allow me to travel as light as possible without sacrificing versatility, but with what drawbacks?
Mainly, distortion at the widest side and some fall off. That said, distortion is easily corrected using Photoshop and as far as I could gather by reading reviews this lens is very sharp, which makes it even more interesting.

However, even though it’s got VR to improve performances in low-light situations, at f/3.5-5.6 it’s not a fast lens, because even though one should be able to shoot as low as 1/6th of a second, there’s no way you can snap a photo of a badly lit in-motion subject.
This issue could be mitigated by taking a 35mm f/1.8: tiny and fast.

The alternative would be to take an 18-70 and a 70-200, but at what cost considering I only want to take one body? I’d have to stop, take out the lens, change it and then take the photo, which in my situation would probably mean losing the photo most of the times as I tend to shoot a lot of candid portraits.
Also, changing your lens outside, especially if in a dusty situation, is gambling with your sensor: sooner or later — and I’d bet on sooner –, your sensor is going to get dirty and having the best lens in the world is not going to help if you’ve got a dirty sensor.

All that said, I was thinking about something even more extreme: going with a single lens, the aforementioned Nikon 35mm f/1.8. Why you ask? Because it would force me to really think about framing, perspective and composition.
When you have a lens like the 18-200 is easy to get lazy and start shooting everything you see, without thinking much about how it’s going to turn out.
However, even though it would definitely be a nice experiment, I’d rather not be there and damn me because I didn’t take a more versatile lens with me, so I guess I’ll keep this for another trip, maybe to somewhere I can re-visit more often — actually, most of the photos I took in London were shot with a Contax RTS with my all-time favorite lens: the Zeiss 50mm f/1.8.

The best solution would be to take two bodies, one for the 18-70 and the other for the 70-200, but I really don’t want to take two bodies and the reason is very simple: I don’t like going around towns looking as if I’m getting ready to photograph the Super Bowl, because it’s difficult to blend yourself with the crowd if you’re carrying a lot of photographic gear with you.

So I think in the end I’m going to go with the 18-200 and 35 combo.
I’ll probably have to sacrifice something in term of quality, but nothing that can’t be corrected in post-production.
In the end what’s important is not to bring home pixel-perfect photos; what’s important is to take photos that really capture the essence of the places you’ve visited and it’s difficult to focus on that when you’re too busy deciding which lens you should use for each shot.

What do you think? what’s your favourite lens? what gear do you bring with you when traveling?