What photo gear does a photographer shooting the Iditarod take along on the race? One thing is for certain. At colder temperatures and with little to no assistance while shooting, EVERY image takes longer and is more of an ordeal to get. It’s not like a summer event where one can quickly change to a different lens or run over and get a different angle. Dealing with layers of clothing, cold fingers and working with gloves on all the time makes shooting just that much more difficult and S-L-O-W.
Over the years I’ve varied what gear I take a LOT ! There’s years where I want to be a minimalist with just a couple bodies and a few lenses and one strobe. Other years I want to experiment and/or go the extra mile and work on making some more elaborate image set ups —like remote cameras, multiple flash and/or specialized lenses. This year I brought more lenses than I normally would.
This year I took:
2- Canon one DX mark II bodies
1- Canon 5D Mark III body
Canon lenses: 16-35mm f2.8 24-105mm f4. 24mm f1.4 70-200mm f 2.8 100-400mm f4/5.6
2 canon 580 flashes.
This year for the first time I brought an 85 mm 1.2.
For this year’s Iditarod I took along a new backpack to hold all that gear. It is a “Mindshift” Moose Peterson MP-1 V2.0 bag. One of the biggest ones they make. I used this bag because I was able to carry all of my gear in one bag with this. Of course it made the bag very heavy, but I like having a bag, when necessary, to put all my gear in ONE place to travel with it. So, I was thankful that Mindshift gave me this bag to try out. I could quickly tell that I would like the exterior, water resistant fabric, and sure enough it did not disappoint when I had the bag on the back of a snow-machine and it got covered with snow. Mindshift makes a number of good products as does their sister company; ThinkTank. If your in the need of a bag or filter case etc. Check them out. You can get FREE gear and FREE shipping if you use these links to shop with them online:
http://www.mindshiftgear.com?rfsn=507780.a01562
https://www.thinktankphoto.com/pages/workshop?rfsn=507772.f9b338
Below is an image of the bag on the back of a snowmachine I rented in Ruby to go out on the trail. I ran off the trail, across the Yukon River a ways in order to get to this vantage point in order to make the image here. The image of the sno-go was shot with a 24mm lens and the image of the musher was shot with a Canon 1Dx Mark II body with a 70-200 mm f2.8 lens at 165mm. You can see how much the telephoto affect has on compressing the foreground and background. Getting that far away and using the telephoto makes for a more dramatic photo.
