Traveling Light
 

The current trend with the newer HDSLR crowd is to deck-out your camera with every accessory known to man. Matte Box, follow focus, giant cages, chrome exhaust tips.
Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with adding these accessories, if they fit your shooting style/workflow.

This thread however, will concentrate on one of the GH1's best abilities as a shooting tool.
Its ability to travel light!
The GH1 is an extremely small lightweight camera that is incredibly portable.
So it makes sense to put together a stripped down super portable setup that can be used when needed for run & guns, nature hikes and the like.

To start, if you are using multiple lenses with or without a matte box, it makes sense to match the hard front of each lens to one standard size. By doing this all of your lenses will fit your matte box donut hole perfectly, so you will never have to change out the rear donut on your matte box again.
The other benefit is that one size screw-on filter can be used for all of your lenses. Of course this is a general statement, as some wide lenses will not accommodate filters, or will need thin filters as to not vignette.
The easiest way to have matching size hard fronts on all of your lenses, is to use inexpensive step-up rings. There are a number of them available on ebay that will run you anywhere from $3 to $6 each. The first thing to do is pick your hard front size.
For example, I use 80mm for my lenses as that is the size of the donut hole on the back of my matte box. To achieve this, I use a 77mm step which has an 80mm outer diameter.
So if your lens has a 58mm filter thread, you would use a 58mm to 77mm step-up ring.
If your lens has 67mm filter threads you would use a 67mm to 77mm step-up ring, and so on. A 77mm screw-on filter set will now fit all of your lenses, as well as save you from buying multiple size filters.
Again, I used an 80mm outer hard front as an example, you will want to pick the size that best fits your needs.

In this lightweight kit, we will need some form of light control.

A 77mm Singh-Ray Vari-ND makes sense, but I would not rule out multiple ND filters if you have the space in the kit.
A 77mm polarizer also makes sense for the kit.
2 or 3 different 77mm rubber lens hoods, one for wide angles, and a couple 3 stage retractables.

Batteries are light for the GH1.
You could comfortably add 3 or 4 or more extra.
And as tiny as SDHC cards are get as much storage space as you can afford, they take up minimal space.

Well after a little weekend test I have come to the conclusion that traveling light is harder than you think. After assembling what I thought was a lightweight kit, "compared to what I usually use" This was even too much. A little Micro Trekker loaded with a handful of Zeiss primes start to get heavy after a while. And even a set of light carbon fiber sticks suddenly gets heavy once you add a head.

So it looks like pairing everything down to a couple of zooms and an ultra-light head may be the next step.

david-

thanks for this interesting thread.

in your "lite" kit, u did not mention audio acquisition.

is double system audio part of your shooting style?

if so, care to share?

tia

be well

rob

Hey Rob, sorry I got a little side-tracked with bigger projects lately, working on outfitting a Sprinter Van.
But for light weight sound on the go I have a H4N.