How I Prep for a Travel Road Trip Shoot

At the end of this week I'm loading up the car and heading north to Paso Robles, where I'll be shooting a hotel and a handful of wineries before working my way down the California coast and eventually landing in Temecula for a press trip with the local tourism board. It's a good example of how my travel shoots tend to go: a mix of commercial work with specific deliverables, personal time to shoot for myself, and a structured press trip alongside wine writers and influencers. Three different contexts, three different modes of working.

Before any of it happens, there's a process I run through that makes all of it manageable. Here's how I prep.

The Research Phase

The first thing I do when a client sends over an itinerary is go straight to the source: the hotel's website, the winery's Instagram, tourism blogs, anywhere I can find images of the spaces I'll be shooting. I want to know what the rooms look like, how light falls in the dining room, what the barrel caves feel like before I walk into them. Itineraries in this industry usually don't come with much lead time, so building that visual library in pre-production matters.

The goal isn't to plan every shot. That's not realistic in location work and honestly not desirable. It's to arrive with enough context that when the schedule shifts on the fly (and it will), you can adapt without getting thrown. Most plans change on site as the trip progresses. The research gives you something to work from, not a script to follow.

For the commercial stops, the client or tourism board will have an itinerary of what they need covered. My job is to get lived-in, authentic images of those moments while using any down time to shoot details and find things that weren't on the expected shot list but make the final delivery richer.

For the personal sections in between, I use Google Maps, Instagram, and travel blogs to figure out what might be worth stopping for. But I try not to over-plan that part of the trip. I have a genuinely interesting career, and it would be a waste to spend the in-between stretches with my head in a shot list rather than actually seeing the places I'm passing through.

The Camera System

I run two bodies on road trips because no single camera covers everything I need.

The Fuji GFX 100S is my slower, more deliberate system. Medium format means the files are extraordinary (the detail and editing latitude are in a different class), but autofocus isn't its strength. I reach for it whenever I have time to set up and compose carefully: interiors, food, landscapes, wine pours. When I'm not in a rush, this is the camera I want in my hands.

The Canon R5 Mark II handles everything else. Faster movement, more reactive shooting, situations where I need fast AF and don't have time to slow down. On a trip like this that might mean a candid moment during a winery tour, an event setup at the press trip, or any time I need to move quickly and can't miss the moment.

The Lenses

The lens lineup is where it gets interesting. I use a Fringer EF-GFX PRO adapter to mount Canon EF glass on the GFX 100S, which opens up a much wider selection of lenses on the medium format body than Fuji's native lineup alone.

On top of that, I travel with a Mamiya 645 adapter that works on both cameras: stacked with the Fringer on the GFX, or combined with an RF-to-EF adapter on the Canon R5 II. This lets me run the same vintage Mamiya glass on whichever body I'm working with. The two Mamiya lenses I bring are the 80mm f/2.8 and the 55mm f/2.8. These are film-era medium format lenses, optically imperfect, and that's exactly why I use them. The character they produce, the slight aberrations and the way they render out-of-focus areas, adds something that modern clinically sharp lenses don't always have. If you want to find them for yourself, eBay and KEH Camera are the right places to look for this glass.

The Canon EF lenses I travel with are the 85mm f/1.8, the 50mm f/1.8 STM, and the 100mm f/2.8 Macro. The 85 is the workhorse for portraits, people, and mid-distance detail. The 50 is the walk-around lens when I want something light and fast. The 100 Macro earns its place on every food and beverage shoot for tight detail work on a wine glass, a dish, a label. It's indispensable.

The 360 Camera

The piece of kit that doesn't get enough attention in commercial travel work is the Insta360 X5 on an extended selfie stick. Drone regulations and the time it takes to set up and fly make traditional aerial coverage a real headache when you're moving between locations every day.

The Insta360 extended stick is designed so the pole disappears completely from the 360 frame. Raise it overhead on a tall monopod and the resulting shot looks like a clean elevated perspective with no equipment visible. It's not a drone, but it's fast, legal everywhere, and produces angles you genuinely can't get another way.

Lighting

For flash I keep it portable: a pair of Godox IT30 Pros triggered by a Godox X3. Small enough to sit on a mini tripod or be held by my partner, powerful enough to fill shadows or add a stop of light in a dark interior. Being able to move fast is the priority on location. A full lighting kit is a studio luxury. On the road you want units you can place in under two minutes and break down just as quickly.

The Bag System

Everything lives in a Pelican 1510 as home base. It stays organized, protected, and holds everything for the trip: every lens, battery, and card that isn't currently in use. For active shooting I pull what I need into a Lowepro ProTactic TLZ 75 Pro AW depending on where we are and what we're doing. The Pelican is the archive. The Lowepro is what I'm working out of.

The bags get disorganized during the day when you're switching between gear sets constantly. Which is why every night I reset the Pelican to neutral: everything back in its place, organized to a clean baseline before the next morning.

Storage and Backup

I offload cards to multiple Samsung T7 Shield 2TB drives whenever I get the chance during the day. The drives are kept in separate physical locations (one in the bag, one in the hotel room, one in the car). If something happens to one, the images exist somewhere else. On a commercial trip this isn't optional, and the habit of offloading throughout the day rather than waiting until the end has saved me more than once.

The Night Before and the Morning Of

The night before a shoot day everything goes on chargers, cards are offloaded and backed up, and I pull two or three selects from the day to look at before I sleep. Looking back at a few frames keeps me honest about where the work is going and what I want to do differently the next day.

Morning is batteries and cards loaded, sensors and lenses cleaned and checked. Then the Pelican gets reset to neutral and I pull out only what I need for the first item on the itinerary.

The whole system is built around one idea: spend as little mental energy as possible on logistics so you can spend more of it on the photography itself. The charging routine, the bag reset, the backup process all become automatic so that when something unexpected happens on location, your head is clear and you're ready for it. The food and beverage stops on a trip like this call for the same discipline: if you want to understand how those days come together on the restaurant and hotel side, restaurant photography for press covers what makes that work land.