I have been asked by a reader (well not really, but I’m going to tell you anyway) what camera gear I have been using over the last few months to capture our travels in Italy and other places. For my last birthday I received a Nikon D7000 body which replaced my old but hugely competent Nikon D70.

This camera body is an amazing piece of kit. All the niggles I had with the D70 had been fixed or improved and the video capability and “live view” are a bonus. The operation with my existing lenses is seamless.

On the front of the camera I use a Nikkor 18-70 zoom lense, a Nikkor 80-200 zoom lense and a Sigma 10-20 wide-angle lense. For the times when carrying a full size DSLR is not convenient I have a Sony T500 point and shoot camera and, of course, my trusty iPhone.

My most useful accessory is a good solid tripod followed closely by a Nikon SB400 flash unit. This flash is Nikon’s smallest but it is ideal for situations the on-body flash can’t cope with. A good solid, waterproof camera bag is also a must – mine is an over shoulder Lowepro Stealth Reporter (where do they get these names from?) which holds a body and up to 4 lenses and accessories with ease.

All images are downloaded to my MacBook Pro and stored in Aperture. Any retouching is done in Photoshop.

I have two portable drives for backing up data – one for the Aperture vault and one for the rest of the data on my MacBook. A word of advice – back up your stuff. For us, the thought of losing the photos and attached memories we have collected on this trip because of a hard disk failure is not worth thinking about.