Photography on tour

[biketrailerguy]

Remember, the best camera is the one you have on you. It's all about the moment and capturing it as best you see it, composition is the main thing and remembering what is it that you are actually photographing? There's lots of tricks to photography, but ultimately it boils down to you and how you compose the image and that applies whether you have a smartphone camera or a fancy pants DSLR with all of the bells and whistles.

Definitely the best is the one you've got - unless you've got more than one and you have to choose - and pick unwisely?
I've got little to add * to this thread re gear suggestions as I don't have the same requirements as you and I'm way out of date re kit specs anyway.
However, re comments about composition, my 'mantra' - nicked from a US 'people' photographer some years ago - was :
Light / Background / Composition / Pose.
Although my interest - in the past when waving 'proper' gear at subject matter - and a totally different genre, these words / advice resonated because of my approach at the time.
How they can be utilised by someone travelling, and not keen on stopping for longish periods I have no idea - all I know is that I've seen many photos of the same (famous) scenes / landscapes and the ones that always stand out are those with decent lighting.

* A neighbour has a DJI pocket of some sort and I've been pretty impressed by its capabilities - but suspect it's not robust enough for your purpose?

 

[HelenD123]

Thanks for all of this! I shall think and investigate!

I would very much like a GPS unit but I have a Yorkshire husband who can’t see the point of buying something when mh phone already does it! 😁

But he's OK with you buying a new camera when your phone also does that?!

I second the comment above though that re-routing while on tour using a GPS is difficult and I ended up mixing and matching between my phone and GPS.

 

[Cathryn]

But he's OK with you buying a new camera when your phone also does that?!

Ha....I think I may have portrayed him as mean! He's very nice, just very practical with money. Which I appreciate. Most of the time.

 

[All uphill]

A word of warning about "get a dedicated GPS". @Cathryn is going on tour and may be doing spontaneous changes of route and such like. A phone is generally handier for this. GPSs are best at following a set route, but a bit fiddly for on the fly routing.

If you DO go down this route:

Get one with bluetooth so you can easily load routes to it. An older unit on ebay may be a bargain, but it's no good if you need to hook it up to a PC with a cable to load a route.

Make 100% sure you're really familiar with it before you go. Being lost on tour is no place to learn how to use features of your GPS.

Be prepared to fall back to phone navigation for short term re-routes. On my last "tour" (such as it was) my friend who was in charge of navigation would switch to phone based Google maps with speaker prompts if we went off the main route. Then when we were back on track we'd revert to the route saved in his GPS.

Overall I still think a tough GPS on the bars is better than risking your precious phone on the bars. But there are caveats.

This is my thinking. I ride alone, mostly, and have started carrying two phones, one securely stowed in a Zipped pocket and the other one sim- free for navigation and re-routing on the bars.

This eases my worry about smashing my phone and losing navigation, communication and payment. I have all apps set up and tested on the sim free phone.

 

[HobbesOnTour]

Yeah, I had a Redmi for a short while. All those megapixels were combined with a cheap lens and cheap processor; it was disappointingly slow to initialise the camera app and to decide the exposure.

To be fair, I had a Redmi 8 before that was fine. In fact, once I realised the poor quality of the 10 I bought another 8 just for the photos.

As to the discussion about short range variations on the phone/gps, CycleTravel now has an app that makes life much easier. For what it's worth, I've plotted and changed routes on a daily basis on my phone and sent to my gps unit (Wahoo) both with a cable and over Bluetooth. Bluetooth is easier, to be sure, and the only times it was difficult was in rain or extreme sunshine.