FILM ON THE ROAD: FLAMING GORGE
November 14 2021
A few months after I really started getting into film my friends invited me on a spontaneous camping trip to Flaming Gorge. Flaming Gorge is a reservoir on the border of North-East Utah and Wyoming, it’s only 4 hours away from Salt Lake City so we were planning on driving there and just sleeping in our cars. I would be driving alone so I figured it would be a great time to bring as much photo gear as possible so that I could stop at every remotely interesting location along the way.
That was a photo that I took along the way to Flaming Gorge, I was pretty far away from the windmills so it was a time that the telephoto came in very handy.
I’ll share some more of my photos at the reservoir and from the drive there and back, but ultimately, you might be wondering, and what I learned from this trip is how to pack for a photo trip. My short answer is as little as possible without missing out on a shot, and I’ll get into this later.
Those are some pictures from along the way. They’re all just at random stops or rest stops along the highway.
And these are some pictures from the way back. They’re also from random stops along the highway.
And while I have you, to round out the trip I’ll share some photos that I took while I was there.
So now lets talk about gear, one of my guilty pleasures of photography. I said earlier that I overpacked and should have only packed the bear minimum that I needed for the photos I took. For this trip that means that I should have taken the FM2, 50mm, 100mm and X100T. I brought two extra lenses that just took up space in my bag, but more importantly took up space in my mind. Having these lenses meant that I would always be thinking how it would look through 28mm or 35mm.
The space in my car wasn’t a huge concern with the extra gear but the thought that went towards the unused gear was a concern. Just knowing that I had the additional focal lengths was enough to make my mind second guess my lens selection and question the alternatives every time I composed a shot with the 50. If I couldn’t use the other lenses because they weren’t with me, I would only have to think about one thing, finding the best shot with the gear on hand. Basically the idea of out of sight out of mind would apply and for this situation out of sight would be back in my room 4 hours away without any chance of being hot swapped on the FM2 only to be discarded when I realized I preferred the 50 from the start.
And at the end of the day it wouldn’t matter that the 35 or 28 weren’t with me because I didn’t even use them. The only thing they did the entire trip was sit in my car and make me second guess myself whenever I went to take a photo.
This was the ONLY picture that I took with the 35mm and it was of a scene that I had shot with the 50 too and the 50mm version turned out better anyway.
Basically, when I got back, I realized that I had no need for the 28mm or 35mm lenses and that I would have been better off without them. But this is impossible to predicted because you don’t know what you will take pictures of. And this goes against the other goal of a photographer which is to be prepared, to have the right gear when needed. These notions directly conflict so I think the only thing you can do is to prepare with as little gear as possible but choose which side you would prefer to err on: having too much gear and not using it or missing out on a few shots because you don’t have the right gear but not having to worry about that gear on every other shot.
As always thanks for reading and coming along for this little road trip that turned into more of a gear discussion... I really enjoy talking about gear... anyway until next time!