So what is the best camera for backpacking? Here are five photos taken with the Nikon P7000. It did an adequate job. All the shots are hand held as I did not take a tripod. I did not want the weight of my DSLR camera. Jordan took his D800 and didn't seem to mind the weight, but I am more picky about ultralight.
Some people recommend just using a cell phone, however I usually kept my phone powered off to save battery since there was no reception anyway.
The P7000 allows some amount of control such as picking the f-stop (2.8 to 8). However the time to save a photo to disk is still long compared to my "real" camera. The shots can be saved as raw which allows some editing later. I am on the side of getting as much right in camera as possible (like my old days of shooting slide film), but I would still rather shoot raw instead of straight to jpg.
The P7000 also seems to have too many external buttons and dials and just getting the camera out of a back and turning it on seems to set/reset options to things I did not want so I had to really pay attention.
All in all, I guess I was pleased with the camea since the trip was really a backpack trip rather than a photo trip, but I do miss my DSLR when I don't have it.
Location:Pictured Rocks, Lake Superior
