People ask us all the time how we produce so much travel content while actually being on the road — driving across Norway, doing a 72-hour Singapore layover, or chasing the midnight sun near our home in Rovaniemi. The honest answer is that we’ve built a very simple system, and we stick to it even when we’re tired, when it’s raining sideways in the Faroe Islands, or when we’ve been awake since 3 am for a flight.

This post is everything behind that system: the gear we use, how we plan shots before we arrive, how we handle editing on the move, and the mindset shifts that made the biggest difference after 21 countries of trial and error.

Our actual gear list — what we carry for travel content creation

We’ve gone through the full arc of over-packing and under-packing. Here’s what’s in the bag right now, after stripping it down to what we actually use every single trip.

The camera kit

• Canon EOS R6 Mark II: our main camera. We chose it for its low-light performance — essential for aurora photography in Rovaniemi and for golden-hour coastal shots in Norway. The in-body stabilisation also means we can shoot handheld in low light without a tripod most of the time.
• Canon 24-70mm f/2.8: the one lens we’d keep if we could only keep one. Versatile enough for landscapes, portraits of each other in front of fjords, and tight cafe interior shots.
• iPhone 15 Pro: shoots more of our actual published content than the DSLR. Fast, always in a pocket, and the computational photography handles Nordic weather surprisingly well.
• GorillaPod flexible tripod: fits in the top of a day bag. We use it for still shots when there’s no ledge or rock, and for aurora time-lapses set up on the car roof.
• Portable LED panel (Aputure MC): for travel content in dark Lapland winters or cramped accommodation. It runs on USB-C and fits in a jacket pocket.

The rest of the pack

• DJI Osmo Pocket 3: for walking footage and vlog-style content. We don’t travel with a full gimbal anymore — the Pocket’s built-in stabilisation handles 95% of what we need.
• Power bank (20,000 mAh): phones and cameras die faster in Lapland cold. This keeps everything running on a full shooting day.
• 1TB SSD: we offload cards every evening. We lost three months of Iceland footage to a failed SD card in 2023 — never again.

How we plan shots before we arrive at a location

Showing up and hoping for magic works sometimes, but it’s not a content strategy. We spend 20-30 minutes per destination doing what we call a “shot brief” — usually on the drive there.

Our pre-arrival planning process

• Search Pinterest and Instagram for the destination and season. We’re not looking to copy — we’re looking for the visual vocabulary of the place. What do people respond to? What’s overshot that we can skip?
• Check sunrise and sunset times. In Lapland this is obvious (you need to track the midnight sun window carefully), but it matters everywhere. We use PhotoPills or simply check local time for golden hour.
• Identify one “hero” location per day. One shot we commit to getting properly — with the DSLR, correct exposure, time spent. Everything else is bonus.
• Check weather for light, not just for rain. Overcast in the Faroe Islands gave us the most dramatic moody shots of our trip. Full sun in Santorini washed everything out at midday. We now check cloud cover as creatively as we check it for aurora.
• Write three caption drafts before the trip. We note down three angles — one factual, one personal story, one question to the audience — and then see which fits the images we actually come back with.

The six types of shots we always capture at every destination

Having a repeatable shot list means we don’t freeze up on location and we don’t get back to the car and realise we missed the obvious thing. These six categories cover nearly every content format we publish.

Editing on the road: our mobile Lightroom workflow

We do not edit on location. We shoot, we move, and we edit during transit — on a bus to the airport, on the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm, in the accommodation once the kids are asleep. Editing at the scene pulls you out of the experience and creates pressure to be “done” when you should be looking around.

• We import to Lightroom Mobile via a card reader and the iPhone. Takes about 2 minutes per memory card. Everything goes into a dated album labelled with the location.
• We use one master preset — a muted-cool Nordic look we built and tweak slightly per destination. Warm mids for Lapland summer, slightly more teal for Norway, lifted shadows for overcast Faroe Islands. We never start from zero.
• We cull aggressively on the first pass. One star equals keep, two stars equals publish candidate, three stars equals hero image. We delete everything unmarked that evening, so we’re never sitting on 8,000 unedited raws at home.
• We export at two sizes simultaneously: full-resolution for the blog and a 1080px version for Instagram. Lightroom’s export preset does this in one tap.
• We back up to iCloud and to the SSD before bed, every night. Non-negotiable since the Iceland card failure.

How we handle writing and captions while travelling

This is the part most content creators struggle with more than shooting. Writing requires a different kind of energy than photography, and it’s easy to let it pile up until you’re home and have completely lost the feeling of the place.

• Voice memos replace notes. We talk about what we experienced immediately after — in the car, on a walk back. Five minutes of voice memo is worth an hour of trying to reconstruct the emotion two weeks later.
• We have a shared Notion board with one card per trip day. Each card has: location, three descriptive words for the feeling, the “what surprised us” moment, and any practical detail worth noting (opening hours, a price that shocked us, a local phrase).
• Captions get drafted during transit, not at home. We open Notes and write three or four options for each key image. The best one gets used, the others get cut up into Stories text or discarded.
• Blog drafts start as bullet outlines, not prose. We write the headings and bullet points first — essentially a structured dump of everything in the Notion card — then expand into paragraphs once we’re home and have the images in front of us.
• We use AI for the expansion step, not the ideation step. The ideas, the voice, the “what surprised us” — that’s ours. We use Claude or ChatGPT to expand a bullet-point section into readable paragraphs, which we then edit back to sound like us. This halves our writing time without flattening our voice.

Mistakes we made creating travel content on the road

• Buying gear we didn’t need. We spent three months travelling with a full-size tripod, a 400mm lens, and an extra drone we thought we’d use constantly. We used the drone twice in four countries. Travel light.
• Editing at the scene. Standing in front of a midnight-sun fjord trying to get the perfect export instead of watching the light change. We don’t do this any more.
• No shot list, no consistency. Early trips, we’d come home with 600 photos of one subject and nothing of everything else. The six-shot framework fixed this completely.
• Forgetting the unglamorous shots. We used to delete anything that didn’t look perfect. Those are the shots that now consistently outperform everything polished.
• Writing at home, months later. The worst blog posts we’ve published were written from memory, six weeks after the trip. The voice memos and Notion cards changed this.
• Inconsistent backup routine. We lost all our Iceland 2023 content to a failed SD card because we hadn’t backed up in four days. Now we back up every single night, no exceptions.

What we actually use vs. what we thought we’d use

• Thought we’d use: full drone setup. Actually use: iPhone wide-angle or GorillaPod perspectives. Drones require permits, registration, and weather windows we rarely have. The creative constraint of ground-level shooting improved our eye.
• Thought we’d use: dedicated camera for every moment. Actually use: iPhone for 80% of daily content. It’s always in a pocket, it’s fast, and it doesn’t make locals feel like they’re being documented.
• Thought we’d use: full desktop editing suite on a laptop. Actually use: Lightroom Mobile on the iPhone, synced to desktop when we’re home. Slower on really complex edits, but we’re never home during the trip, so it doesn’t matter.
• Thought we’d use: separate content planning app. Actually use: Notion and Apple Voice Memos. Simple wins.
• Thought we’d need: a content calendar with daily targets. Actually need: one hero shot per day and everything else is gravy. The calendar made us stressed; the minimum made us productive.

Frequently asked questions

A final word from Rovaniemi

The single biggest shift in our travel content creation didn’t come from buying better gear or learning a new editing technique. It came from accepting that the system matters more than any individual piece of it. A good camera used inconsistently produces worse content than a smartphone used with a clear, repeatable workflow.

We’ve visited 21 countries across Finland, Scandinavia, the Baltics, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia, and the workflow described in this post has worked in all of them — in a -30 degrees Celsius Lapland forest, in a humid Singapore hawker centre, and everywhere in between. The only thing you need to adapt is the preset and which shots feel native to the place.

If you’re building a travel content habit and you don’t know where to start: buy nothing new. Use your phone, adopt the six-shot framework, record one voice memo per day, and back up every night. Everything else can wait.