It’s a generally held truism that portrait photography requires a short telephoto lens to get the best results. We even tend to refer to 85mm lenses as ‘portrait lenses’ and the 50mm as a ‘poor man’s portrait lens on APS-C cameras (coming out to a 75mm focal length equivalent on a Full Frame camera). I strongly suspect that the travel photography out of covers like the National Geographic in the 80s, along with the Time/Life magazines is part of the reason we generally reach for the short telephoto when we photograph people.

Going on a photographic workshop can be exhausting. You’re up early, you’re out late, you’re constantly exercising the creative muscles in your head in crafting compositions and thinking about exposure. It’s no wonder that at the end of any such trip it’s really easy to put the camera down and not think about photography for a bit. Unfortunately the mindset often sets in before you’ve even left the photography location.

 Before any major workshop we usually send out a suggested equipment list. The emphasis here is on the word ‘suggested’. One can always bring more or less on a workshop. Indeed, there are professional travel photographers who travel only with a Fujifilm X100t, an iPhone and backup hard drive. Being geared more towards landscape photography we tend to pack a little more into our camera bags. The kit below is the equipment that Emil would take with him to Madagascar, Iceland or Namibia for landscape photography (an important addition is a Macro lens which is not pictured here).