Rod’s Travel Kit

This is my travel kit. I like to travel light and unless I am on a specific photography trip, I prefer to carry a smaller lightweight setup that has the broadest possible coverage. My full frame system is too bulky for this scenario. In general I am a huge fan of full frame cameras as they tend to offer a brilliant dynamic range and significantly less noise than smaller sensor systems. But traveling light requires a trade off and I feel that APS/C mirrorless systems are an ideal compromise. Sony and Canon are the clear choices here because they both use a small diameter lens mount. Sony has the advantage of sharing that small mount with their larger full frame a7 bodies. Canon has a separate mount for the M series than their new R series full frame cameras. Nikon recently released an excellent APS/C mirrorless camera, The Z50 but it uses the lens mount from the full frame Z cameras and that means the lenses are going to be a bit bulky compared to Canon EOS M and Sony A6000 series. Canon released RF mount APS/c cameras in 2022 but both are larger than M series cameras. Rumors are afloat as of 12/2022 that a small RF mount camera with a similar form factor and size to M series cameras is on the way.  I have a blog post about travel kits here.

My travel kit looks like this with some recent changes:

• Canon EOS M5 body M6 Mark II w/ EVF DC02
• Samyang EF-M 8mm f/2.8 UMC Mk II fish-eye (MF)
• Canon EF-M 11-22mm f/4-5.6 IS
• Canon EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
• Canon EF-M 55-200mm f/4.5-6.3 IS
• Sigma EF-S DC 18-250mm OS HSM (with Canon EF-EF-M adapter)
• Canon EF-M 22mm f/2.0
• Canon EF-M 32mm f/1.4
• Canon Speedlite 90 EX
• Two memory cards
• 4 batteries
• Charger
• Mini tripod
• Selfie stick

Sometimes I will substitute a classic lens for the 32mm or 22mm Canon M lenses. Something like my Leica 50/1.5 or my Zeiss Biotar. I find the Samyang fish-eye an invaluable piece of kit for travel in cities.

The EOS M6 Mark II as well as the M3, M5, M6 all have a built in flash, but when you use that flash with an ultra wide lens the flash is partially blocked by the lens protrusion, so adding the 90 EX which is tiny but mounts up high enough on the hot shoe to avoid the blockage. It also has a bit more power.

There is a noticable size difference for Canon between the full frame mirrorless camera system and the APS/C system. Take a look at the comparison! EOS R with RF 35/1.8 versus EOS M5 with 22/2.0 (22mm is the full frame equivalent to 35mm)