Compact, lightweight (17 oz with battery), great autofocus, lowlight capable, a flip up screen for vlogging, can achieve everything from amazing still photos, to cinematic video, and spectacular milky way shots.

Reasonably compact and light. (16oz) VERY sharp. This wide and sharp 16mm lens lets you capture landscape, milky ways shots, vlog, and if you get close enough to the subject you can achieve an almost macro look so vary your shots. The coolest part is the F1.4 aperture makes this great for low light. Super affordable too!

This tiny, 3 oz affordable mic fits on top of the a6600 and has the best wind resistance with the included fuzzy windscreen, and the quality was good enough to be used in a feature film.  In our tests, the more expensive Video Mic Pro and Pro+ were terrible with wind, and muddy sounding. So stick with this cheaper / better one. This is best for dialog. If you want to record nature ambience, birds, water, etc, unplug it and use the native stereo mics on the a6600.

2.65 oz Each These are much cheaper than the Sony brand and work great. Burn rate really depends on usage. I’d say 1 battery for 2 days of moderate shooting of video and stills. For Highline we would have burned 1-2 of these per day per camera.

To achieve a “film look” it’s important to shoot at 24P (frames per second) with a shutter speed at 1/50. However, on a sunny day this would look overexposed. Even with your ISO all the way down, and iris cranked at F16. So ND filters are a necessity to control your light. These are scratch resistant which is important for the outdoors, they’re thin, which means less vignetting, and the higher quality glass and coating won’t create weird color shifts like many cheap filters. 

Reliable SD cards that can handle 4k footage are essential for the outdoors. The 128G cards lasted for a full day of fairly heavy shooting. Most people taking only a dozen or so shorter video clips can probably get away with 1 for every 3-4 days.

3oz.  This strap is minimalist, comfortable, and lets you quickly remove the strap for dolly or gimbal use. 

 3.7oz This affordable lightweight mini tripod is the only one that doesn’t seem terrible in my opinion. Many others are twice the weight, price, and are flimsy. This one is stable and super cheap. It has a pistol grip function too…though I never used that part it could be useful for some.

Only 2.9 oz!!!! There’s no competition for lightweight camera bags. You can mount this on your chest, or just keep it in your pack. Plenty of room for everything in this kit. It’s affordable too. If you want padding, line the inside with reflectix or an old padded mailer from amazon.

The above kit is versatile enough to cover MOST of the average hikers shooting needs. If you prefer to add mid-range and telephoto lenses to your kit, see below.L

This sharp lens can be used from morning until dusk and lets you zoom from wide (16mm) for landscapes, to midrange 55mm for portrait. Its not so good for wildlife though. This shares the same filter thread as the Sigma 16mm, (B+W XS-Pro MRC NANO 1.8) so no need to buy a separate ND.

Honestly I kind of hate telephoto lenses. Most are expensive, heavy, bulky, and are only useful a fraction of the time. This 70-350mm offers the best weight to telephoto reach and is what I would use if I was purely interested in wildlife or distant waterfalls and peaks. Something to note is that despite having OSS (optical steady shot) this lens is hard to keep steady at the 350 end. So a tripod would many times be necessary.

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