From the ground up…
One of the best ways to get fit all over as quickly as possible is to chuck a camera bag with a hefty lens or two and a laptop onto your back and go wandering around mountainous-ish areas. Keep the camera and another hefty lens in your hand, alternating with it around your shoulder or neck depending on the heft level you’re feeling at any given time.
Add a trusty tripod to the mix, you know, the one you take everywhere but also haven’t used in some time. It’s pretty handy for climbing up the many steep stairs slapped onto the foothills of said mountains and will help to steady your step when your feet slip and roll on the loose stones. It’s also absolutely necessary for steadying your camera when pointed towards those mountain vista’s if you’re wanting a clear, sharp image.
Be stubborn about your load, don’t leave it in the car to tempt thieves, and don’t take up kind offers to carry it for you. I can promise you after a week or so your mum or dad bod will be well on its way back to good. You’ll get the most benefit if you haven’t carried that load around for a while.
I can tell you that my drones are a much lighter load to carry… and I use them for completely different image capturing.
Im usually looking down at the surface of the earth, finding abstract and interesting shapes, colours and textures. It was refreshing to be looking up rather than down. It was also a bit of a challenge, given I hadn’t used my dslr in quite a while. I knew I was going to capture the scenes in front of my eyes better with a dslr far better than I could with a drone. It’s a very different type of scene and a different type of image that Im looking for than one I would naturally shoot with a drone, or if Im lucky, harnessed into the back of a plane with the door off.
One camera body, two hefty, and one as light as air. One drone that flew only once. One carbon fibre tripod. One iPhone, one GoPro. My tools for exploring areas of New Zealand I’d not been to before.
I had expected that my littlest drone, Freely who snuck into my suitcase, wouldn’t get to fly very much on this trip. The areas we had planned to visit would likely have a lot of air traffic buzzing about and legal or not, Im not one to send my drone up into that kind of mix at any time.
So it was a very different kind of shooting on this trip. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that my dslr skills were a little rusty and that I was a bit out of shape.
Fast forward several thousand images, many wanderings and many winding roads, and Im in much better shape than I was, my dslr skills are all coming back, and it’s safe to say I’m already in the early stages of planning another trip back. A trip where I can take my time and meander along, absorbing and capturing the incredible vistas that are New Zealand’s South Island.
Next time I’ll book the heli-hike and charter a plane once or twice to get the kind of aerials Im itching to shoot in that region.
The trip has also left me wondering if maybe its time to really start thinking about moving to a mirrorless camera, lighter for sure than my hefty Nikon, (yes of course he has a name - he’s Big Nik).
Big Nik won’t be staying in the camera bag as much anymore, he’ll be out and about and getting a lot more use than he has up till recently, getting ready perhaps for that next trip back.
