Travelling by air, or coach, means minimal luggage. The 'air.txt'
file looks directly at a couple of aircraft related topics, but,
in general, the problem is one of space.

You will be likely to want to carry more gear if you are going to
Florida than to Spain - I find there is MUCH more to photograph
in Florida, but you must still use common sense.

Lets look at Florida, both 21 and 14 nights.

My wife took her zoom compact with plenty of film and a spare
battery, which also fitted my SLR. She actually used 15 rolls of
24 exposure film in 3 weeks and 8 in 2 weeks.

The video camera was carried in a large make up purse, NOT it's
own bag - size and security. Plenty of tape and charging lead.
Over 9 hours of video was shot in 3 weeks and edited later. A tip
here - American 8 mm tapes, and I ASSUME 'VHS-C' tapes fit our
cameras - forget the PAL issue here, mechanically the cassettes
are the same. It may say 120 min. on the American tape, and you
will only actually get 90 min in a PAL camera.

The fact is that tapes, when I was there, were over 2/3 cheaper
than if bought in England !!! Colour still film was less cheap,
but still cheaper. Processing was VERY expensive in Florida.

The carrying of the video was shared.

For 'serious' stills I took a Canon EOS 600 body with 35/135 and
100/300 mm ultrasonic zooms and a 300TL flash - meant for a Canon
T90, but it works perfectly well on the EOS. Spare batteries and
a POLARISING FILTER, which was used a lot.

I took 15 rolls of colour slide - Fuji - and 20 rolls of black
and white. I used 12 slide films and 15 B&W. Films were sometimes
changed mid-roll - the Canon can be programmed to leave the film
leader out of the cassette, and an important part of kit, always
carried, was a black marker pen. This was used to write the
number of pictures taken on the leader of a film removed from the
camera.

On reloading that film, the lens cap is put on, the camera set to
manual and the autofocus switched off. The smallest aperture and
fastest shutter speed set and the shutter fired until the right
number shows on the counter. ONE extra exposure prevents any
danger of overlap and the controls are returned to normal.

With care, and a leader extractor, this can be done with a
compact by covering the lens with a cloth, but not the exposure
senor, when reloading.

All tripods, monopods, etc were left at home. Many people may not
need the 100/300 or equivalent - but I am keen on natural history
and then, in a place like Florida, such a lens is very useful.