Indie Travel - Gear

The right gear can make or break your trip. What is your favorite/must-have gear item? 


I am not now and probably never will be a gear-head. My interest in gizmos is in what they can do for me as a tool, not in the details. My camera is a complex and rather heavy Canon D40, and I know enough about it to take good pictures. Beyond that I don't care. It can have 11M pixel photos, (I think it does) or only 9 and I doubt I'd know the difference or care. It has a number of wonderful features like focusing and light metering on several points or only one, depending on how you set it up. It lets me focus or it'll do it for me. Most of the time, with my fading eyesight, I'm happy to let the camera do the work, I'll focus on composition. 


I have another Canon, a small light weight one that takes great pictures, and videos, but at the moment it can't read the disk, so it's out of commission. I sure hope the problem is with the disc and not with the camera. The problem with the little one is there is no eyepiece. The shots must be composed looking at a rather reflective screen on the back of the camera. I don't have much control over exposure, or composition, so must rely on messing with the photo when I get it downloaded to the computer. But it's light, back-packs well, and if it fell into a creek, I might cry but it wouldn't set me back financially. 


Because photos are about color, composition and subject matter. All the other stuff is fluff.  And I'm so grateful to be living in a time of digital photos and laptop computers, because I can follow all my passions with just those two items. I love to take pictures, I love to write. I love to post stuff for other people to read and look at, so that's all I need in the world to make me happy, a good camera, and a good computer. 


My laptop is a MacBookPro. 'Nuff said. It's perfect and has none of the ridiculous problems that other laptops offer. At Brenda's house, I plugged my Mac into her printer, printed out some stuff, and then unplugged it. I didn't have to install, reboot, diddle with a setting, or curse at anybody. A tool that works. That's all I ever ask. I don't need to know the techno-weinie details, and in fact find them pretty boring. Though I know most of my geek friends would cringe if they knew that. I guess they can cringe-away now, the jig is up.