Notes on traveling with the Panasonic Lumix GH1

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I was so busy planning this trip that I totally forgot to mention it here, but I took a two-week trip to Tokyo and Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara) and around Hokkaido (Hakodate, Sapporo, Akan, Obihiro, Daisetsuzan area) two weeks ago. I lugged the camera pretty much everywhere I went, so here are some notes about extensive travelling with the camera:

• Watch the SD card door! I had to shove a lot of things into my tiny camera bag, so the GH1 was pretty snug up against everything. Unfortunately, it was so snug that the SD card slot would pop open just from me reaching in to pull out my wallet. The plastic part of the door even completely snapped off of the metal hinge at one point. Luckily, the metal hinge bent back into shape and I was able to snap the plastic door back on without problems. Then I promptly rearranged my bag so the card door faced AWAY from all the things I had to grab out of my bag.
• The cheap camera strap has its uses. Namely, it is thin enough that I can just wrap it around one of my wrists as a make-shift wrist strap, which was a much more comfortable way to securely hold the camera in the summer humidity of the Kansai area.
• Get a second battery to keep on-hand and have at least one of the batteries fully-charged each day. With that big, shiny LCD and the video recording, the GH1 can’t get too many photos/videos out of a single full battery. It’s also nice because you can review and delete unwanted photos on one battery while charging the other (no need to bring that bulky A/C adapter!).
• Get a ball head mini tripod and keep it on you. You never know when you’ll need one of these! I had a super cheap one lying around, decided to bring it on a whim, and found myself using it quite often, not only as a tripod but as a stabilizer as well. With the ball head, I can angle my camera pretty freely, and since the legs extend, I can rest those on my own body to keep the camera from shaking too much. A word of warning, though: I don’t recommend you get a tripod as cheap as mine… mine was NOT designed to hold the weight of a DSLR and would shift out of place quite easily, though I watched it carefully so that my camera never fell.
• If you plan on recording ANY video, make sure you’ve got SD cards to spare. It simply takes too long to decode videos to take them off the SD card every single day, so even if you keep moving photos off, you will still slowly lose space on that card.