I’m documenting this Door County trip as much for my own purposes as anything. We’ll for sure be planning another trip there for the fall colours, so I wanna make sure I remember everything about this first trip, what worked, what didn’t, part of that is getting the camera bag right, here is what I took:

• Gitzo Tripod + RRS BH55 head
• Canon 5D mark II
• Canon 35 f1.4 L
• Canon 24 f3.5 TS/E L II
• Canon 17-40 f4 L
• Canon 24-70 f2.8 L
• Canon 70-200 f4 IS L
• LensBaby Composer
• 1.4 Teleconverter
• Canon D500 Closeup Filter
• Filters (ND 10stop, ND 3stop, Circular Polarizer 82 & 105mm, ND Grads)

I used all lenses except the LensBaby. I used the 17-40 about 80% of the time, the TS/E about 15% and the rest split between the 24-70, 70-200 & 35. I think I would have used the TS/E about 60% of the time had my adapters arrived for the Lee Filter holder. As it is my Circular Polarizer doesn’t fit that great on the Cokin 4×4 filter holder, and I didn’t fancy dropping my 105mm Circular Polarizer anywhere, but especially not in the water, which we were close to for much of Saturday, hopefully by the time I next visit Door County, my 82mm adapter for the Lee Filter holder will have arrived, allowing me to use the Circular Polarizer, ND Grad and 10 stop all together, or in any combination there of.

That said, the 17-40 is an amazing lens, excellent landscape photographers lens, not that fast, but when you’re mainly shooting at f11 and above, f2.8 versus f4 doesn’t make much of a difference. I did find myself wanting a little a little wider sometimes than 17mm, had my filters on the TS/E been more operational, that would have solved that problem via a 3shot panorama stitch; still, love the 17-40, it hardly left my camera.

The Circular Polarizer was a must for this trip at least, highly effective in cutting the reflections on the water and on the woodland foliage.

Batteries were a constant pain point for me. I only have 2 for the mkII, I use liveview 100% for landscape photography now to adjust manual focus, so it was eating batteries. Still I am sure when I bought the camera I shot in minus 20f conditions all day on one battery, with a short lunch time recharge and live view. Luckily the hotel wasn’t that far, so between each location I’d drop a battery off for charging and pickup a freshly charged battery. That almost caught me short on Saturday evening when we arrived at our sunset location, I found I had only 24% battery life left, so I had to hastily drive back to the hotel to swap batteries.

I had enough memory cards, using three 8Gb cards over the day and a half’s worth of shooting, about 750 images in total.

On the whole, I think I got the bag right, there were a couple of wild bird photo ops which the 400L would have been useful for, thats about it.