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.
The gear that I had at the time was a black Nikon FM2, Nikkor 50mm f1.8, Nikkor 35mm f2.8, Nikon Series E 28mm f2.8, Nikon Series E 100mm f2.8 and my Fuji X100T with the built in 23mm lens. I pretty much exclusively used the 50mm though. I definitely over packed for this trip. This was my first ‘photography’ road trip and I didn’t really know what I wanted so it was probably good that I brought everything just in case, but in reality the 28mm and 35mm were only on my camera long enough for me to realize they weren’t the right focal length and then switch back to the 50mm. I did use the 100mm occasionally when I was parked far away or wanted to compress the scene, but even if I didn’t bring that one and only had the FM2 with the 50mm and the X100T I would have only missed out on maybe 2 photos from the whole trip.
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.