Greece and Turkey Travel Gear and Workflow

Note: This post is way overdue. I usually write these post-trip gear and workflow reviews a couple of months after I get home. I’m writing this in January 2026 – about 15 years after the Greece and Turkey trip – but dating this as June 1, 2011 like it was posted just a couple of months after returning.

After packing a compact digital camera and a camcorder to document previous international travel I was ready for a camera that could record both high quality stills and video. The Nikon D100 was announced in February 2002 and I made the decision to make the DSLR move with this camera about 18 months later in November 2003. The D100 was an outstanding camera for making this transition, but was a stills-only camera. Nearly 5 years later, in August 2008, Nikon announced the D90 its first DSLR with video capability, but I wasn’t convinced it was time for a new DSLR yet. In 2009 I made trips to China and London and Paris, traveling with both a Canon HV10 camcorder and a Ricoh GR Digital II compact digital camera instead of a DSLR. Then Nikon announced the DX format D7000 in September 2010, just about a year after I returned from London and Paris. This new DSLR featured an ASP-C format 16.2 megapixel image sensor and full HD 1080p capability. A single camera I could travel with and use for both stills and video. Three months later I bought one to bring along to Greece and Turkey.

I already had an assortment of NIKKOR glass to go along with the D100, so for this trip I packed the 12-24mm f/4.0, the 24mm f/2.8, and the 17-55mm f 2.8. Looking back it’s an interesting selection without any telephoto reach, likely stemming from my experience using the Ricoh and its 28mm fixed-lens on prior trips. I also packed the GR Digital II, Blackberry 9300 for work, and iPhone 3GS. The gear was packed into a generic backpack with a camera insert to protect the D7000 and lenses. Greece and Turkey was a cruise, so I could unpack once, keep the gear in the room safe, and only bring what was needed on the daily excursions.

The Nikon D7000 holds two SDHC memory cards. For this trip I brought along two 16 GB Lexar Professional SDHC Class 10 cards. At roughly 20 MB per raw photo (NEF format), each 16 GB card could hold about 400-500 images. I used the card in Slot 1 to store the raw files with the card in Slot 2 set to store backup JPEGs and the movie files. Between the D7000, GR Digital II, Blackberry, and iPhone once I got home, selected and processed the keepers, I ended up with 536 photos. That’s a shooting ratio of about 60 images per day – a little more than my previous trips. For video I totaled 126 files with a running time of around 18 minutes for a total of 4.11 GB.

The Greece-Turkey trip preceded the introduction of this blog by a couple of years. So there were no daily blog updates, but I did use the iPhone 3GS camera and the Facebook app for a couple of posts each day.

Back at home, I used my established workflows for photo and video. Photos were imported using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to folders named by date and location or event, duplicates and rejects were deleted, files were renamed by location or event with sequential numbers, keyworded, geoencoded, captioned, and post-processed. As a precursor to this blog I uploaded trip photos to a SmugMug gallery in early June, 2011. Work on this blog wouldn’t start for another 18 months.

All video was digitized to events named by date and location or event in Final Cut Pro X. The edit process took 29.5 hours starting September 26, 2012 and finishing April 13, 2013. I made sure to finish before departing on the next trip at the end of April. (In my early days of travel the goal was to complete photo processing and video editing before departing to the next travel destination. That worked while the trips were space out every couple of years, but once we increased the pace to yearly trips I couldn’t keep up!)

The Nikon D7000 performed incredibly well on this trip, surpassing my expectations with outstanding picture and video quality. Even so this was my only international trip with the D7000. In September 2012, Nikon would release the full-frame D600 DSLR. I bought my mine a month later to bring to the Galápagos Islands.