Packing Light and Working On the Road

Times change, and sometimes that’s actually a good thing

For this travel-themed guest post we didn’t need to look far. We asked Lindy and Roy – who are part of our ProCamera support staff – to tell us more about their lives as digital nomads. Internally, we like to call the Dutch couple our “mobile support unit” since they are working from somewhere on the road most of the time. Let’s hear how to bridge the gap between mobile photography and a mobile workplace. 

Let me take you back in time: Eight years ago, we decided to travel to Peru. We went on a 4-day hike to Machu Picchu, only able to bring one daypack each.

One of our packs was filled to the brim with camera gear: camera bodies, lenses, flashes and batteries were dragged up and down the mountains. The other pack contained our clothes, toiletries and some snacks. I don’t think we’ll have to tell you carrying this amount of camera gear is no fun. It’s somewhat okay the first day, but your back and shoulders are getting more and more sensitive. After 21 kilometers (~13 miles) on day three my forearms were cramped from holding the heavy camera in my hands all day. Time to downgrade!

Luckily, you can find yourself a decent system camera these days weighing only a fraction of what we lugged around back then. Making better quality images, too. But aside from that, technology has now brought us an even more compact camera that never leaves our sides. And the quality of the images never ceases to amaze us. Our iPhones!

We’ll be the first to admit we like to be lazy every once in a while, which means we don’t always take our big camera with us. And while traveling, we often leave it at our hotel because bringing a dedicated camera is too big a risk. And of course when we don’t have our camera’s we run into the most amazing landscapes, sunsets and situations. Luckily, our iPhones are always with us and with ProCamera we get this great selection of pro camera features.

Picture this: the two daypacks we carried with us back then are the only bags we now bring on a round-the-world trip! Yes, we travel hand luggage only, for months on end. And yes, aside from our clothes, toiletries and other travel necessities we also bring a camera, lenses, a GoPro and a drone. Not bad huh?

During our travels, we never stay at a single location for an extended amount of time (unless we’re enjoying ourselves a bit too much). So we need to be able to quickly pack and unpack, but also easily grab what we need for a long hike or mountain bike ride. We had to downgrade a fair amount over the past years to enable ourselves to travel like this, and we kind of made bringing just what we need a goal of itself (though the contents seem to magically grow every time we need to repack).

Another thing we embrace nowadays is cloud services. Where we’d have to find a dubious internet cafe back in the days, have the contents of our memory card burned on a CD, send it home and wait for a confirmation that everything was received in good order we now use cloud services for backups. This workflow sure can be a bit of a hassle, too. Many places around the world still don’t provide fast WiFi or mobile network, and we really don’t want too lose our memories of that beautiful (way too early) sunrise, that endless walk to the world’s tallest palm trees or that bizarre bike ride to the refuge on top of the mountain.

We always try to sort out our favourite images as soon as possible, and immediately upload them to a could service (aside from iCloud backups on our iPhones). You’ll likely find us locked in our hotel room at the end of the day, editing images to prepare them for our dutch travel blog and social media, and uploading our favourites to make sure we always have a copy. As we were once taught: if you don’t have at least two versions of an image, you might as well have none at all. 

Now that global travel has been off the table for a while, we started working on another project we had our minds set on for quite a while: our very own self-built camper van. Since we’ve been home a lot we now have the time to build it completely to our taste.

We’ve been traveling around in camper vans in the past, and for us there’s nothing like waking up in the most beautiful places you wouldn’t normally go to, have breakfast and a great cup of coffee together and slowly start our day. What beats designing and building the tiny home that brings us this joy all ourselves?

We’re both sportive and adventurous so our van has to comply with quite some demands: It has to be comfortable, fit our clothes and personal belongings, photo equipment and two mountain bikes. All inside the van, as we hate to come back from a long hike hoping everything we hung on the van’s back it still there.

Current events also turned out to create the perfect time to browse through our old photos. Let us tell you: this brings great travel inspiration for the future!