When planning a trip, certain pieces of equipment just make life easier and safer. In the realms of nature and landscape photographer a torch becomes an essential item. Us landscape photographers arrive before sunrise or leave after sunset.
Often the walk back to the car or the accommodation may take awhile or so, so a torch is essential item. However one up or one better than the bog standard hand held torch are headlamps. Apart from being practical for all sorts of adventures such as night skiing, ski mountaineering, exploring a cave along the way. There is one extremely useful advantage of a light source stuck to you head, and that is ? When trying to focus a lens manually with Live View on the back camera. Now with the headlamp you just tilt your head and point the beam of light to the right part of the scene you want to focus on. It just makes working in low light situations so much easier. Plus you don’t need to worry about rushing back better it gets dark.
Choosing the right head lamp is the key to success.
You want a balance between powerful and yet light weight.
- The lamp should have two mode one with a straight beam of light and the other for lighting up the area immediately in front of you. So what you should look for is a lamp with a single powerful LED for the beam mode and 4 or so LED for the walking mode.
- The beam of light should reach at 50 metres or more. Somewhere close to 100 metres is
ideal. - The head band should have a band going across the top of your head, so the lamp doesn’t slip off too
easily. - Take standard ‘AA’ or ‘AAA’ battery and last at least 15 hours or more.
- Don’t buy a lamp which has cluster of 20 or more LEDs these are cheap and wont survive after the first few trips out in the wild.
- It’s also an ideal Christmas gift!
– You’ll need to spend about 50 to 70 Eur. for a suitable lamp for a photographer!
An excellent lamp which I use and can recommend is the Black Diamond Icon, solid robust and power enough for most photographer’s needs.
Buy one online :
http://www.ski-willy.at/shop/product_info.php?products_id=6743&refID=glyons
More Info from Black Diamond Site :
http://www.blackdiamondequipment.com/en-eur/shop/mountain/lighting/icon
