Our Gear

This is the stuff that we’d be hard pressed to live without. We carefully selected ALL the gear for our adventure and we’ve used AND abused it all. None of these companies sponsor us in any way – yet – and we’ll let you know if that changes…oh please change!

Our camping setup had to be beyond sturdy. Most people consider a few weeks a year to be heavy use. WE LIVE IN THESE RIGS! Our selection process was rigorous…and here’s what we came up with:

The Camper: Four Wheel Camper. This is our main home now! It’s our second camper from Four Wheel. For what we do it’s simply the best that there is. We had the first one for twenty years…and we used the crap out of it. We sold it two years ago to make way for our new one. It was sold on Craigslist, in less than an hour, and we got eighty percent of what we paid for it twenty years back. I’ll leave the specs to the experts at Four Wheel, but I’ll say this…we’ve been sleeping in ours EVERY night for five months without a SINGLE problem. If you’re thinking pop-up I’d say look no farther.

THE PERFECT COMBO

The Trailer: Bivouac Trailers We needed some extra cargo capacity and a way to get the kids up off the ground for sleeping purposes. I also thought it would be nice to have an outdoor galley…it’s just more fun to cook outside when the weather’s nice. And it all had to be able to handle some pretty rough terrain. The Bivouac trailer turned it all into one stop shopping for us. Everything we needed in one compact and tough little package. It’s also a great company run by great people!

The Tent: Tepui Tents . Bivouac includes these on their trailer but I’ve seen em out on trucks and jeeps and even on the occassional mini van, so I thought I’d include a brief review of the tent on it’s own. It’s been through some very crappy weather over the last several months and our boys kids have spent EVERY night in their Tepui tent. Snow, freezing rain, hail, VERY high winds, and deluges of rain. No leaks. No complaints. Needless to say they are very happy campers – pun intended – in their Tepui tent.

Cameras: I get a lot of questions about the pictures on the site. They’ve all been taken with either an Olympus OM-D EM-5 Mark II or an iphone 6+. After years of shlepping around giant cameras and even gianter lenses I wanted to minimilize my photography gear too. After seeing what greats like Dan Burkholder were turning out on small mirrorless bodies… I made the jump. And haven’t regretted it for an instant.

Glass: As I said above I sold my entire jumbo lens kit and I now own just two… and they’re very good for what we’re doing. The Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 and the super stealthy Olympus 17mm f1.8. They’re pretty short focal lengths and so I don’t have a lot of throw but I’ve learned to work around it, and the limited space demands that they place on our VERY limited storage capacity more than offset the occassional limitation.

My prediction is that software and photo development by extension will become predominantly “App” based and so I have ditched the laptop and have been using the built in WiFi to beam the images to my ipad and using various apps to develop them. It’s not quite as exact as photoshop or photomatix or… insert your fav here… but the gap is closing daily. And the fact that we’ve been freed from the wires and card readers and boot up times of computers is… I think… pretty gosh darn liberating.

I use HDR A LOT. And this gives the pictures a unique often more saturated tonal range. My goal isn’t to show you EXACTLY what I saw. It’s to try and make you feel Exactly what I felt. The more powerful the scenery… and we’ve been in some stirring places… the more work it takes to develop the shot. Think of them as more of an effort to share an experience that defies words than photo journalism and you might be able to grab the thread. If not… hey that’s why they make chocolate AND vanilla.