As a photographer using remote cameras, you tend to travel heavy. Cases and cases of equipment add up—as do their contents. Bolts, batteries, camera mounts, camera bodies, lenses—you name it. And it seems it all has to be loaded and unloaded multiple times just to get one usable frame.

At the beginning of a National Geographic magazine assignment to photograph grizzly bears and mountain lions in northwestern Wyoming, my wife, Mandy, and I had our first baby. Talk about adding a lot of equipment to the kit.

But working close to home allowed me to get my daughter out in the field from a very young age.

As a first-time dad, I remember being scared to death about the future—as