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If you have gone through our various travel destinations and itineraries, you no doubt have noticed that we enjoy hiking. It’s both a great way to spend some fun time outdoors and provides a great opportunity to get different -and often exceptional- vantage points for landscape photography. For the hiking photographer enthusiasts out there, here’s some of the gear and equipment we love to have with us when out hiking.
Photography backpacks
We already covered our favourite cameras and lenses in the Camera Gear & Photography section. If you want to be taking lots of pictures during your hikes, it’s usually a good idea to get your hands on a specialized photography backpack that comes with dedicated spaces to hold and protect your gear.
There are several important qualities you want in your hiking photography backpack. You want to be durable, functional, and of high quality, of course. But more specifically, we recommend looking for the following qualities:
- Ease of access. You don’t want to have to dig out your camera from the bottom of the packback everytime.
- Anti-theft mechanims. This might seem contrary to the first point, but there are packbacks that are specifically designed to be easily accesible to you, but difficult for others to get in.
- Rain protection cover. Though you can buy this seperately if your preferred backpack doesn’t come with one.
- Customizable. Ideally, you want to be able to configure the internal layout of the bag based on what you want to carry with you.
Over the years, based on these priorities we’ve come across three models that we really like (and a third (Careell DSLR pack back) that was sadly discontinued).
This bag actually comes in 3 sizes (the 200AW, 300AW, and 400AW). The signature flipside design provides increased security through body-side points of entry. Combined with the waist straps, the flipside design allows full access to your gear without setting the bag down.
2. The Lowepro Flipside Trek Series
The flipside’s cousin is specifically geared towards hikers by combining camera-specific compartments with open space areas non-photography-related items.
This is our most recent purchase and we haven’t regretted it a single second. It combines a side discreet pocket for ease of camera access while making all the rest of your gear (e.g. other lenses, laptop) inaccessible to potential pick-pockets.
Other things to pack
Memory cards. You can never have too many memory cards. What if one gets damaged? What if you took more pictures than you anticipated? We also generally suggest getting several smaller-capacity cards instead of just one large capacity card, just in case the worse happens.
Memory card case. This helps manage and protect all those above-mentioned cards.
A backup camera battery. Although not “necessary”, it can be very useful and reduces the need to recharge your battery every day. When one is empty, just pop in the fully charged one.
Tripod. Tripods are very useful with image stability, especially in low-light conditions. If you don’t want to lug around some of the larger tripods, consider the very practical and flexible GorillaPod.
Hiking outerwear
We won’t go into a ton of detail here, other than to highlight two of our favourite brands for outwear, both of which provide stylish and durable clothing for the outdoor enthusiast. Merrell offers a wide array of hiking shoes and boots, and we both owned several pairs over the years. Columbia offers a lot more than shoes, and we own several rain jackets, windbreakers, vests, and gloves.
Hiking Apps
The AllTrails app is perhaps the most well-known of the best navigation apps on the market and is definitely one of the best available. It comes with a good interface and provides you with road, satellite and topographic maps to choose from. The app also provides you with a brief description of hiking trails along with reviews, photos, and trail details shared by fellow hikers. Although the app is free, there is also a paid pro version that allows you to download your maps to your phone before heading out, so that if cell service is poor you can still see your GPS location on the map.
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