What's In My Camera Bag For Our Northern Light Trip

We took a 3-week trip to Denmark and Norway last fall. Compared to all the previous trips, I brought the most equipment this time: 2 mirrorless cameras, 5 lenses, 1 drone, 2 tripods, and a number of filters.

The following are the statistics of my usage of each camera equipment (not including photos or videos taken from smartphones), as well as the situations I used each piece of camera equipment, for your reference.

Photo & Video Statistics By Camera

I’ve taken a total of 10960 photos and 264 videos in this trip.

Canon EOS R5

• photos: 7994, 73%

• videos: 61, 23%

ISO100, 15mm, f/10, 1/30”, Canon R5 + RF15-35mm f2.8 + NiSi 1-5 stop variable ND filter + tripod

---

Photo note: This was the most iconic scene for Lofoten Islands. You can probably find many photos taken at the same spot. For photos like this where I knew my composition was going to be similar to many existing photos, I had to differentiate mine by wider angles. It wasn’t an easy shot given I had limited space on a narrow bridge and couldn’t even set up a tripod, this was my best effort, at least for this trip.

---

Sony A7IV

• photos: 2942, 27%

• videos: 148, 56%

Northern Lights In Full Moon
ISO800, 24mm, f/1.6, 3.2”, Sony A7IV + Sony 24mm f1.4 + tripod

I found myself gravitating toward Canon R5 because of my preference to use zoom lenses during travel. It’s just so much easier to adjust composition with a zoom lens. All my Canon RF lenses are zoom lenses and all my Sony lenses are prime lenses.

However, I used Sony A7IV a lot more for videos, because I didn’t use a gimbal. Sony A7IV paired with all my Sony prime lenses are just a lot easier to handle in terms of weight and size. My Canon R5 plus RF zoom lenses are just bulkier and heavier. When I did use Canon R5 for videos, the camera was typically on a tripod.

DJI mini 2

• photos: 24 (% negligible)

• videos: 55, 21%

  I seldom use my drone to take photos, and only flew my drone twice in the entire trip, as it was raining almost everyday.

Photo & Video Statistics By Lens

Northern Lights In Bright Moonlight
ISO2000, 15mm, f2.8, 5”, Canon R5 + RF15-35mm f2.8 + tripod

Canon RF15-35mm f2.8

• photos: 3264, 30%

• videos: 61, 23%

I finally sold my Canon EF16-35mm f2.8 that I had owned for 13 years before this trip. This was the last Canon EF lens I sold. It marked my complete Canon EF to RF lens migration, and the retirement of my Sigma MC-11 lens adapter, as all my lenses can be mounted directly on my mirrorless camera bodies.

The main reason for this wide angle lens upgrade before the trip was obvious: I wanted to photograph landscape and northern lights in the Arctic Circle. Just for northern lights timelapse, I already used this lens for more than 1600 photos.

Undoubtedly, this new wide-angle lens was my favorite and most used lens for this trip.

ISO160, 58mm, f2.8, 1/320”, Canon R5+RF24-70mm f2.8

Canon RF24-70mm f2.8

• photos: 2567, 23%

• videos: zero

  This zoom lens has always been my preferred lens whenever I had a situation to bring only one lens. Although it was not my favorite for either landscape or portrait, its versatility was unbeatable so I had a ton of use from this lens.

ISO400, 24mm, f6.3, 150”, Canon R5 + RF24-70mm, f2.8 + Lee big stopper filter + tripod

Canon RF70-200mm f2.8

ISO250, 135mm, f/3.2, 1/500”, Canon R5 + RF70-200mm f2.8

• photos: 2163, 20%

• videos: zero

  This has always been my favorite outdoor portrait lens. Different from our Banff & Jasper national park road trip to the Canadian Rockies last summer, our Scandinavian trip was not in peak season. We have seldom seen any crowd, except in Tivoli in Copenhagen on our last day. Therefore, I had a ton of use from this lens without random tourists walking into my frames as happened often on our Banff trip. I usually don’t do big head closeups for travel photos. Even when I use telephoto lens, I mostly combine people subject with landscape background.

Sony 24mm f1.4

ISO160, 24mm, f1.4, 1/250”, Sony A7IV + Sony 24mm f1.4 + NiSi 1-5 stop variable ND filter

• photos: 1972, 18%

• videos: 31, 12%

  I used both Canon R5 + RF15-35mm and Sony A7IV + 24mm simultaneously for northern lights timelapse photography on multiple occasions. This was my typical practice for landscape photography in the past.

  Occasionally, I also used this wide angle prime lens for indoor scenarios, such as restaurants, for this trip.

Sony 35mm f1.4

• photos: 970, 9%

• videos: 117, 44%

  I mostly used this lens for low light indoor scenarios, such as restaurants, and Polaria in our first stop to the Arctic Circle. As my zoom lens 24-70mm overlaps with 35mm, I seldom used this lens outdoors unless it was in low light environment.

ISO2000, 35mm, f1.4, 1/250”, Sony A7IV + Sony 35mm f1.4

Filters

The major filters I used for this trip (and these days in general) include two NiSi 1-5 stop variable ND filters. The one with 67mm diameter can be used on both my Sony 24mm f1.4 and 35mm f1.4 prime lenses. The one with 82mm diameter can be used on both my Canon RF24-70mm and RF15-35mm lenses. These 2 Nisi filters by default were always mounted on my lenses and I seldom took them off.

The Lee 10-stop Big Stopper has been with me for over 10 years, and still gets used very often, typically for long exposure in landscape photography.

Although my Lee graduated ND filters (Graduate 0.3 ND Soft, 0.6 ND Soft, 0.9 ND Soft) were always in my camera bag no matter where we traveled to for the past 10 years, I used them less and less these days, definitely a lot less than my DSLR days.

Both my Canon R5 and Sony A7IV have pretty wide dynamic range, and can capture scenes in very high contrast scenarios. I shoot in RAW 100%, so instead of mounting these filters during photo shoot, which takes extra time, I find it much easier and less time consuming to edit high contrast photos in Adobe Lightroom (see how I edit my travel photos using my Lifescape AI Lightroom Presets). Of course the bottom line is you have to get the correct exposure in RAW.

---

In case you don’t understand all the terms I mentioned about camera equipment, feel free to check out my Mirrorless Camera Ultimate Buying Guide, it will give you much more details about how to smartly invest in camera equipment as well as the important features in nowadays mirrorless cameras.

If you’d like to learn how I take travel photos, consider to take my Document Happiness Photography Course, where you can follow my video tutorials on how to take quality photos in different types of light scenarios, as well as detailed tips on camera settings, exposure, focus, composition to post processing. Even you might be more interested in landscape photography, this course will help you set the foundations to operate your camera effectively and efficiently.

---

I stopped using clear UV filters a few years ago as I started including all my camera gear in our insurance policy. I did break some filters in the past but never scratched any lens surface. So using UV filters really didn't seem to be necessary.

---

You May Also Love…