I’ve been participating in the Discovery Educator Network Summer Institute (affectionately called DENSI) since Saturday. Today, we took a field trip to Yellowstone National Park. This trip brought the number of things that DENSI has crossed off my bucket list to three:
- Visit Montana
- Visit Wyoming
- Visit Yellowstone National Park
It was a great trip, and if you do a search for #DENSI2012, you will find all kinds of pictures on Flickr, tweets on Twitter, and probably blog posts from other participants.
What I want to talk about today is gear. This institute is all about technology, so everyone always brings lots of it. I have been experimenting over the last year with scaling down, so the tech I brought with me fit into a small bag. In the spirit of my experiment, I thought a lot about what I wanted to take with me on the field trip.
As we loaded on to the buses, I saw lots of people with stuffed backpacks. I even saw some taking large tripods. I know that a place like Yellowstone definitely calls for tripods for some serious photography, and this post does not mean to say the people who took them are wrong. On the contrary, I would say that for them, it was definitely right. Do a search on Flickr for #DENSI2012 and you will see some incredible photos and I bet some of them were taken by the people who took their tripods.
I had carefully chosen the items I would take with me. Here is my photo, just before getting on the bus. I would like to suggest that my choice of gear was appropriate – for me. I do not have a nice camera, and as I said before, I am experimenting with traveling light. Take a look at the photo and tell me what I missed.
Did you guess what I forgot? Yes, I have a bright red forehead now, because I decided I didn’t need sunscreen. Oh well, the rest of my gear served me well. I got some decent pictures with my phone because of some tips we received from a professional photographer on the way to the park, I got some videos to add to the institute video collection, and I looked cool with my tripod hanging off my wallet, just like the guy in front of me in the line to get frozen yogurt looked cool with his gorilla tripod hanging out of his back pocket.
How about you? What would you take?
_0.png){kind=logo}
From My Shoes 
looks/sounds like you took just enough…other than sunscreen/bandana