There's a particular kind of regret that only photographers know. It doesn't hit at home — at home, your kit feels complete. It hits on day three of the big trip: the once-in-years trip, the Iceland trip, the safari, the month in Japan. It's the moment the last battery dies an hour before golden light, or the memory card fills at the exact wrong temple, or the camera takes a knock in an overhead bin and the autofocus is never quite the same. And in that moment, every photographer thinks the same thing: this would have cost me almost nothing to prevent.
The list below is crowdsourced from that exact feeling. Ask travelling photographers what they wish they'd bought before the first big trip — not the lenses, not the bodies, but the unglamorous supporting cast — and the same eleven answers come back with remarkable consistency. Consider this the checklist your future self would email you if they could. 📸
1. More batteries than seems reasonable
The universal number-one answer. At home, one spare battery is plenty — you're never far from a socket. On a trip, everything conspires against you: cold mornings that halve capacity, long days with no charging window, video eating power, and the golden-hour session that starts exactly when the display turns red. Mirrorless bodies in particular are hungry, and "two spares" is the point where most travelling photographers finally relax.
Two upgrades that pay for themselves immediately: a dual USB-C charger, so batteries refill from a power bank in the car or on a train instead of only at wall sockets — and a strict personal system for separating full from empty (arrow stickers, a two-compartment pouch, anything). One more thing worth knowing before the airport: spare lithium batteries must travel in your cabin bag, never checked — our guide to items you cannot bring on a plane has the details.
2. Memory cards — and a plan for them
Cards are cheap right up until the moment you need one in a village with no camera shop. Shooting RAW on a modern high-resolution body, a card that lasts a month at home fills in three enthusiastic travel days. The regret isn't just capacity — it's having every card from the trip riding in the same camera bag, one theft away from losing everything.
The travelling photographer's card doctrine: more cards of moderate size rather than one giant one (a failed 1 TB card is a catastrophe; a failed 128 GB card is a bad afternoon), a proper card wallet, filled cards stored separately from the camera bag, and cards never erased until the photos exist in two other places — which brings us directly to number three.
3. A real backup solution
Nobody regrets buying a rugged travel SSD. Plenty of people regret not buying one — usually while filing a police report about a stolen bag containing a camera and every photo from the trip. The photos are the only genuinely irreplaceable thing you're carrying: the camera is insured, the trip mostly isn't repeatable.
A workable road routine takes ten minutes an evening: copy cards to a compact SSD (rugged, tiny, and shockproof models cost less than a single day of the trip), keep the SSD physically separate from the camera bag, and — where bandwidth allows — push selects to the cloud overnight. Two copies in two places, always. It's the least photogenic purchase on this list and the one with the highest chance of someday saving the entire trip.
4. The filters that don't exist in post
Most filter effects can be simulated in software now. Two can't. A circular polariser physically removes reflections — from water, wet foliage, glass — and no slider recreates the fish visible through an alpine lake's surface or a rainforest without glare. And a solid ND filter is what makes silky waterfalls and emptied city squares possible at midday. Photographers who skip these buy them after the first trip, having met the exact shots that needed them.
Buy decent glass (a cheap filter on an expensive lens is a strange economy), get them for your most-used lens diameter with step-up rings for the rest, and practise before departure — a polariser has a learning curve best climbed at home, not at the waterfall.
5. The tripod you'll actually carry
Everyone owns a tripod. The regret is owning the wrong one for travel: the sturdy studio legs that weigh 3 kg and therefore stay at the hotel every single evening — precisely when blue hour, night markets and star fields happen. The best travel tripod is defined by one metric: whether it's with you at 9 pm.
That means genuinely compact and light (carbon if the budget allows), tall enough rather than tall, and stable enough for your heaviest lens with the centre column down. Yes, a serious travel tripod costs real money. It also unlocks the entire half of photography that happens after sunset — which, on most trips, contains the best shots.
6. A sensor and lens cleaning kit
Change lenses on a beach in Portugal or a dusty track in Andalusia and you'll meet the travel photographer's constant companion: the sensor spot. At home it's a minor annoyance fixed by the local service. On the road it's a grey blob on three thousand frames of sky, plus evenings of cloning it out forever.
The kit weighs 200 grams: a rocket blower (never canned air — propellant on a sensor is a service-visit-level mistake), a lens pen and microfibre cloths, and — for the confident — a few sensor swabs in the correct size. Add the habit of changing lenses with the body facing down, sheltered from wind, and most spots never happen at all.
7. Weather protection for shooting, not hiding
The best conditions for photographs are the worst conditions for cameras — storms, spray, fog, snowfall. "Weather-sealed" bodies handle drizzle, but the photographers who come home with the dramatic frames are the ones equipped to keep shooting when everyone else packs up: a simple rain cover (or the humble zip-bag-and-rubber-band field version), an absorbent towel in the bag, and a handful of silica gel sachets to fight the condensation that forms every time cold gear enters a warm room. Tropical humidity, incidentally, is a slow lens killer — fungus loves damp glass in a closed bag — and silica gel is the cheapest fungicide ever invented.
8. Proper transport — the purchase everyone makes second
Here's the pattern repair counters see constantly: the first big trip happens with a padded shoulder bag doing double duty as flight luggage, boot storage and hiking pack. The second big trip happens with a hard case — because in between, something got crushed in an overhead compartment, soaked in a boat transfer, or slowly vibrated out of alignment on gravel roads. Soft bags are superb for the day's shooting kit. They are not transport protection for a system worth thousands of euros.
A watertight hard case with cut foam or adjustable dividers changes the trip's logistics entirely: gear checked into a hold or strapped to a roof rack without anxiety, everything visible and inventoried at a glance (the fastest way to discover a lens went missing while it's still findable), dust and humidity locked out overnight, and the case itself doubling as a dry seat, a step and a lens-changing table in the field. Photographers rarely regret the case they bought — they regret the trip they took before buying it. If it has to fly as cabin baggage, check dimensions against your airline first — our guide to cabin luggage dimensions and their five traps covers the pitfalls.
Hard cases photographers take on trip number two
9. Insurance that actually covers the gear
The purchase that feels most optional until it's the only thing that matters. Standard travel insurance typically caps valuables at a level that wouldn't replace one good lens, let alone a system — and many policies quietly exclude professional equipment or theft from vehicles, which is exactly how camera gear tends to disappear. Reading the fine print costs nothing; discovering it after the smashed car window costs everything.
Before the trip: check what your existing policies genuinely cover, price a dedicated gear policy or a rider if the numbers don't reach your kit's value, and spend fifteen minutes photographing serial numbers, receipts and the kit itself. That folder — stored in the cloud — is what turns a claim from an argument into a formality.
10. A carrying system that survives day five
The factory neck strap is an instrument of slow torture, and every photographer discovers this at the same moment: day three or four of a walking-heavy trip, when the neck ache becomes the dominant memory of a beautiful city. A camera that hurts to carry gets left behind — and the best camera, as the saying goes, is the one you have with you.
The fix is embarrassingly cheap relative to what's hanging from it: a sliding sling strap, a chest harness for hiking, or a belt clip system — whatever matches how you actually move. Comfortable carry doesn't just spare your spine; it measurably increases how many photographs get taken, because the camera stays in hand instead of in the bag.
11. A power strategy for the whole circus
The modern photo kit is a small electronics department: camera batteries, a drone, a phone running apps and maps, sometimes a laptop, headlamp, tracker tags. The regret here is arriving with one wall charger and one socket adapter, then spending every evening running charging triage — or rationing shots on a battery that couldn't be topped up in the airport, the bus, the tent.
The travelling setup that ends the problem: a multi-port USB-C GaN charger (one socket charges everything overnight), a serious power bank — ideally one that can feed the laptop too — short cables for the daypack and long ones for the hostel wall, and plug adapters for every region on the itinerary, bought at home for pennies rather than at the airport for the price of lunch. Electricity is the one consumable your whole kit runs on; treat it like a first-class citizen of the packing list.
The pattern in the regrets
Read back through the eleven and notice: the combined cost of everything on this list is a fraction of one camera body — yet each item protects, extends or rescues the shots the entire trip was for. Batteries and cards keep you shooting; backups and insurance make disasters survivable; filters, tripod and weather kit unlock the frames that make the trip worth photographing; the case, the strap and the chargers keep the whole system alive and on your shoulder for weeks at a time.
The photographers on their fifth big trip carry all eleven, and not one of them arrived at that kit list by foresight. They arrived by regret — one missed sunset, one dead battery, one cracked filter at a time. The whole point of a list like this is to let you skip that particular tuition and spend the trip collecting photographs instead of lessons. 🌅
