Reply To: Traveling & luggage suggestion

[Imogen]

Hi Federico,

I just returned from a trip with several flights and a what I consider to be a lot of camera gear. My challenge wasn’t so much protection of all the gear as much as keeping the most valuable items with me rather than checking them in, while staying within weight restrictions.

I was limited to 7kg carry-on luggage and 20kg check-in. I had my full kit of dive gear with me also, so not a lot of room for clothes or anything else really.

My goal was to arrive at my destination with enough camera gear to work with in the even that my check-in bag went missing. Insurance on the luggage would not have covered all the camera gear in the event of loss.

I was fortunate to be travelling with my partner/dive buddy and my camera gear took up most of his carry-on allowance also!

I took the housing, camera, three lenses, one macro port and two dome ports along with 2 strobes and a video light. A 2kg laptop was in carry-on also.

All the batteries for this weigh around a kilo. These have to be in carry-on so they went into a vest which I wore and was never weighed 😉 This vest with many pockets really was a life-saver. I also had my viewfinder in one of the pockets.

I was able to divide the camera, lenses and ports/domes between our carry-on backpacks. The packs themselves are light and don’t provide a lot of protection, so we were super careful handling them whenever travelling and didn’t let them out of our sight.

My Nauticam housing fit in a separate handbag-style bag so it didn’t attract attention to be weighed. This was until the final return flight where they weighed everything. I spoke to the staff at the final checkin and they let me carry it on board in addition to the 7kg limit. phew!

The only camera items in my luggage were arms, clamps and battery chargers.

I hope this helps in some way. Flying with valuable underwater camera gear is new to me and it took a lot of figuring out and much weighing of separate items to get it right for this trip.

I’d be interested to hear experience of other people also.

cheers

Imogen