I’m happy to present you a new gallery, a dedicated gallery for my pictures of the European Alps!
Because I’ve been on a one week roadtrip through the Swiss, French and Italian Alps I also want to present you new pictures which appear in the Alps gallery:
Some months ago I browsed my Iceland picutre folder and finished three more pictures which I uploaded only on social media so far. If you like my work make sure to follow me on social media, I update content more often over there. Please find the respective links in the “About” section.
Some weeks ago I received new prints. It’s a good mix of colourful landscapes and abstract modern architecture prints. I had the idea to create a little abstract b/w square gallery at home, hence the many squares. For that I might have to clean one of the walls first, they are already full of prints, so I might sell some of them later.
The prints on the first image are (top left to right): 2x HD metal alu-dibond, 1x canvas print
The second image shows a print on fabric and the third image shows normal alu-dibon prints.
I placed a recent buy (CD album INTERVALS – The Shape of Colour) next to my prints for size comparison 😉
Thank you WhiteWall for providing such high quality prints, I really love those HD metal alu-dibond prints!
Remember the post Finally a new tripod from approx. 3 years ago?
Finally my Sirui M-3204X (nowadays N-3204X) tripod has shown some wear and it was about time to get it repaired. Nothing actually broke, only the half shells – which are part of the sliding mechanism – in the upper segment were worn out and sliding out the segment was really hard or not possible at all. Sometimes the sement even came off, like shown in the picture on the right.
Actually I wanted to get it repaired already earlier but never was sure whether I would get it b
ack in time for planned photography trips. After I returned from the Faroe Islands a bit more than a week ago I knew that I can spare the tripod for a while because no other photography trips were planned.
What can I say, I sent the tripod in for service and received it back within 4 days only! Fully repaired and covered by the warranty (which is 6 years) coming with a nice letter stating what has been exchanged and repaired. Wow, when I received it back I couldn’t believe that it took not even a week. I’m impressed Sirui! This makes me confident to keep recommending Sirui tripods to other people. The price / value ratio is amazing!
This was mainly meant for documentation purpose for myself, if anybody reads this and finds it helpful let me know, I’d be happy to hear about it 😉
On daytrips (e.g. hiking, visiting cities) I’m already using my trustworthy Lowepro 400AW, it’s big and sturdy enough for rough treatment. Recently there have been very exciting offerings by f-stop and MindShift (by Think Tank) which use a very similar concept of accessing your backpack from the back side while it is in front of yourself and not on the ground. I might look into those sometime later, however this blog post is dedicated to my approach for long distance trips or hikes with overnight stays.
I previously just combined what I had at my disposal, a cheap 70L trekking backpack by Aspensport and an Olympus E-System shoulder bag. I never even tried to fit my camera equipment directly into my trekking backpack, like putting it into a dedicated compartment with clothes for padding, I always liked the idea of having an ICU (internal camera unit) where I can arrange my camera gear properly, it’ll stay in place and it’s perfectly protected from outer impacts. So in this case I just used the shoulder bag as an ICU while keeping the shoulder strap attached, because I want to be able to just pull it out of the backpack and use the comfortable access to my equipment from the top while it hangs in front of me.
Recently both trekking backpack and camera shoulder bag became almost unusable because of some serious wear, I even stitched together seams which already disintegrated. Well, this was the motivation to look for new equipment for the job and hence this blog post, it was mainly meant for documentation purpose for myself 😉
I considered the following requirements:
Unfortunately I didn’t do much research on the trekking backpacks. I have known the fabulous f-stop mountain series (e.g. Sukha and Shinn) for quite a while now, but there is on thing which kept me from buying one: availability. Here in Germany a friend of mine had to wait almost 2 months to get one after ordering. Their ICU concept is very nice, however not flexible enough (yet) for me, I want an ICU which can be used as a proper shoulder bag too. This means I want to able to conveniently pull out and put back my camera while standing. I think by offering shoulder straps for their ICUs f-stop might be already on the way to offer something which would be perfect for me, I’m curious and will stay tuned with what they come up with in the future!
During my recent research the Deuter Aircontact Pro 70+15 was one of my first finds and immediately became my first choice, it ticked off all of those requirements, received good reviews and also I trust the good reputation of Deuter among alpinists and mountaineers as a very experienced company with high-quality equipment.
Now this was the main part of my research. There are so many shoulder bags on the market, it was really difficult to get a good overview in a short amount of time. For comparison:
And here are the new shoulder bags I considered:
I previously selected the Lowepro Adventura 170 bag as the go-to shoulder bag, but once it arrived I noticed that I highly underestimated the depth / height of the bag, which was ridiculous for my needs, hence I sent it back.
Now I ordered the AmazonBasics DSLR bag (medium) bag because it is very close to my old one in terms of size and at the same time it is very inexpensive compared to the ThinkTank shoulder bag, which I also liked.
I guess I’ll keep updating this post and maybe I’ll post a picture later of how I arrange my gear in those bags.