7 hours ago
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Overpacking your camera bag feels like preparation, but it often turns an incredible trip into an exhausting one. Getting the balance right between what you carry and what you leave home changes how much of the trip you actually experience.
A multi-week Europe trip with a wedding shoot, a climbing plan, and a hut-to-hut hike became a lesson in what too much gear does to you, as Mark Bergreen explains while walking through ten travel photography mistakes and how to sidestep them. Each person carried a checked bag, a carry-on full of gear, and a personal item, and dragging all of it through airports, train stations, and cobblestone streets drained the trip. The real weight, Bergreen points out, is decision fatigue. When you carry three lenses and two bodies, you spend the day debating which one to use instead of watching for the moment in front of you. His preferred setup runs closer to one body, maybe a spare, two lenses, extra batteries, and cards.
Several of the mistakes deal with protecting gear you can't easily replace mid-trip. Bergreen never checks cameras, lenses, hard drives, or batteries, since airlines lose, crush, and drop luggage, and a compact kit makes that rule easy to follow. Boarding group matters more than it sounds, because the flight attendant announcing there's no overhead space left is every traveler's nightmare when the carry-on holds thousands of dollars of equipment. He also flags Southwest Airlines' change that removes overhead bin access for the last boarding groups. Insurance gets a mention too, along with a warning to check whether your policy actually covers the countries you're visiting.
The backup section is where the video gets specific. Bergreen never formats cards while traveling, imports to his laptop daily, and copies to two SSD drives, leaning on the Samsung T7 for speed and durability. He keeps one hard copy on him at all times and stashes additional copies wherever he's staying. The whole approach follows the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two types of media, one kept offsite. For power, he recommends researching international outlets ahead of time, carrying a compact multi-port adapter, and packing a power bank of at least 10,000 mAh so a hotel's single outlet never leaves you swapping batteries at 3 a.m.
The 3-2-1 rule Bergreen leans on didn't come from photography at all. It grew out of IT and disaster recovery, where losing data means losing a business, and it has quietly become the standard advice across every field that depends on files staying intact. Applying it to a two-week trip is the same logic scaled down: assume any single copy can fail, and never let all your copies sit in one place or on one kind of device. That's why keeping a card in your pocket while an SSD stays at the hotel isn't paranoia. A pickpocket, a dropped drive, or a corrupted card only wipes out one link in the chain. Photographers tend to obsess over which drive is fastest, but the durability and separation of copies protects the work far more than raw transfer speed. Build the habit on trips and it carries straight into how you handle files at home.
The last mistake is the one gear can't fix. Chasing every sunrise, sunset, and star shot can pull you so far into documenting a place that you stop being there, and Bergreen argues no photo is worth an injury, lost gear, or a trip that stops feeling like a trip. Some of his best travel memories came from setting the camera down and paying attention, and those moments often sharpened his instinct for when to pick it back up. He also saves a genuinely useful gate-check trick for the end, one that has to do with what's legally allowed in checked baggage.
Watch the full breakdown in the video above to catch Bergreen's gate-check tip and the rest of the ten mistakes.
English (US) ·