Twelve Kilograms

The airline limit is seven kilograms and nobody meets it. The real target is what you can carry on foot for six hours at altitude without resenting it, which for most people is around twelve.

Two bodies, always. Not for redundancy in the marketing sense but because changing a lens in blowing sand, snow or rain is how sensors die. One long, one wide, both mounted, both on the same battery system.

The long lens is the argument. A 600 f/4 is the correct tool and it is four kilograms before you have added anything else. A 500 f/5.6 or a 200–600 zoom costs you a stop and roughly half the weight, and the stop matters less every year as sensors improve. I have carried both for years. The zoom comes back with more keepers on trips involving walking; the prime comes back with better single images from a hide.

Wide is undervalued. Most photographers own six hundred millimetres of reach and twenty-four of context, and their portfolios show it — a wall of tight portraits and no sense of place. Some of the strongest wildlife images are made at thirty-five millimetres with the animal occupying four percent of the frame.

Every item you carry is a small tax on your attention. Most gear fails that test.

What actually gets dropped, in order: the tripod on anything involving distance walking, replaced by a beanbag or the vehicle sill. The second flash. The laptop, replaced by a tablet and two card readers. Filters other than a polariser. Every 'just in case' lens, all of which I have carried across continents unused.

What never gets dropped: more cards than you think you need, batteries kept warm against the body in cold, a rain cover that actually fits the lens you own, gaffer tape, and lens cloths in quantities that seem absurd until the first humid morning.

The final item is not equipment. It is time in the schedule to do nothing — a spare day at each location that is not allocated to a target. Almost every image I care about was taken on a day that was, on paper, a buffer.