Rough Edit Notes

Recently in an interview I did with Thomas Roberts for indiespot.tv, he mentioned that I should actually try to do a post about packing your gear for traveling on an airline. Since tomorrow I fly out for a trip to Boston for a shoot with a full gear load, I figured this would be the perfect time. First aspect of airline travel is you’ll need to know the clients budget for you and your gear getting to the site. Most of the assignments I’ve done, the client isn’t very willing to pay over the regular airline fees. This basically restricts you to 2 carry on bags and 2 checked bags. This obviously is a very limited amount of space but if you pack it right, you can get a lot more gear to fit then you think you would. In the picture in this post you can see the following bags I have to take. 1. Tamrac Camera Bag/Laptop bag
2. Kata ENG Size bag with rollers
3. Mid sized luggage bag with 360 degree rollers
4. Manfrotto tripod bag

When deciding on your gear bags, make sure you take into account how your gonna have to carry them once you’ve reached the destination. I use the backpack and Kata bags as my carryon’s which house all the sensitive camera gear. Also make sure that you try to book on larger planes when you can. Take any “express” flight and your going to be stuck on a small Canada Air jet that basically has no overhead and barely any footspace. In those occasions be prepared to pull any sensitive camera equipment out of the second bag and put in the overhead bare. Not the most fun experience. And in the other luggage bag I take all my extra gear (slider, smaller tripod, etc) and my cloths. Then of course the larger tripod bag is checked as well. Both the Kata bag and the luggage bag have rollers making it easier for me to carry all the gear myself. Basically I have the backpack on my back with the large tripod slung over that, and then each roller bag in a hand. When picking your luggage bag, make sure you can fit a lot of gear and personal effects, but be very careful not to over stuff. Once you’ve gone over the 50 pound limit per checked bag, the airline will charge you $150+ to check the bag and that’s over the checked baggage cost to begin with. Not fun at all to find that out when you already pack everything to the limit. One other note would be to think creatively when you pack. Try to break all your gear down to as basic a level as possible. That will help to fit pieces into much smaller places. In these bags I’ve managed to fit:

Canon 7D
Battery Grip
Canon 20mm
Canon 85mm
Canon 50mm
Canon 16-35mm
Canon 70-200mm
Lens filters Batteries
Cards
15” laptop
2 external hard drives Card reader
Canon XH-A1 
Zoom H4n
Sennheiser Wireless Lav
2 shotgun mics
Redrock eyeSpy rig with weights
701HDV head and tripod
501HD head and tripod
Manfrotto monopod
Reflector
Micro Pro LED light
And personal effects And all this gear still comes in under the weight limits, but remember this is following the idea that your client doesn’t cover excess baggage fees. Main things to remember are:

1. Use all the space you can
2. Use efficient luggage, bags with wheels are much more useful then ones without.
3. Keep your weight distributed, don’t let any bag go over 50 pounds or it can cost you big time at the ticket counter.

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