Photographers love gear, and many photographers love talking gear. The reason isn’t a mystery. What’s in our bag are the tools we use to pursue our passion, and they are an integral component of our ability to create the work we envision.
Of course, not all gear is “necessary.” If you have a camera, a lens and a medium, then you can make photographs. And if you can make photographs, then creativity is really the only additional speed bump on the road to photographs that are fulfilling to craft.
Still, many other pieces of gear ease the process in different ways, and that’s advantageous. It’s not because we’re lazy and need the process to be faster—it’s because easing some of the challenging aspects of photography frees up time and energy that can be better used on expanding that creativity.
In short, good gear solves problems.
Between the five of us here at National Parks at Night, we’ve found a lot of gear to solve a lot of night photography problems. Every now and then we write a blog post when something disruptive comes along, such as the Nikon Z 6, or the Luxli Viola, or the Phottix Aion. But we haven’t had a space for sharing the nearly endless stream of other products we experience and adopt into our kits and workflows.
Until now!
Today we are announcing the National Parks at Night Gear Blog.
This blog will feature short posts about tools that solve night photography problems. We’ll post not on a predetermined schedule as we do with our main blog (where you are reading this), but rather whenever some cool product piques our interest. That might be once per month, or could be several times in a week.
We’re starting today, with reviews on five pieces of gear, a few of which we’ve loved for a while and a few of which we’ve discovered recently:
the Coast HP7R flashlight
the Focus on Stars focusing tool
the Gitzo GIGT2545T Traveler Series 2 tripod
the Ledlenser P6R Work flashlight
the PhotoPills app
You can find them all on our:
Over the next few months we’ll give you tastes of other equipment we believe in: bags, lights, software, lenses and whatever. We’ll let you know on our social media channels every time we post something new. Then once we’ve shown you enough of what this will all be about, we’ll give you a way to opt in to subscribe to these posts too.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the beginning of this practically endless exploration of the gear we love to work with.
