Camera gear is small, dense, expensive and allergic to everything a house move involves: dust, damp, knocks and being stacked under a box of books. Prints and film are worse. Here is how photographers who’ve moved more than once pack and store their kit so the first thing they shoot in the new place isn’t a damage claim.
The three enemies, ranked
Humidity comes first. It’s what grows fungus inside lenses, swells mounts and curls prints, and it’s exactly what garages, lofts and the back of a car provide. Shock is second: a dropped body, a lens rolling loose in a box, a tripod leg bent in transit. Dust is third, and it’s sneaky, because it gets into sensors, mounts and film during the chaos of a move and only shows up on the first shoot afterwards.
Bodies and lenses
Every lens gets its caps on, both ends, and goes in a padded case or wrapped individually with no room to move. Bodies travel with the body cap on and the battery out. Pack lenses upright in a box with dividers or dense padding, never loose, never with anything heavy above. Drop a silica gel sachet in each sealed case or bag; it’s the cheapest lens-fungus insurance there is. If you still have a hard camera case, this is the move it was for.
Film, memory and backups
Unexposed and exposed film stays cool and dry and travels with you, not the van. Memory cards get backed up before they move, because a card lost in a move is a shoot lost forever. Drives holding your archive get a verified backup to a second location before anything is unplugged, then travel padded and separate from the computer.
Prints, negatives and frames
Prints go flat in archival boxes or between stiff boards, never rolled unless they already are. Negatives in sleeves, in a rigid box, upright. Framed work travels face to face with a sheet between glass, corners protected, marked fragile on more than one side. None of it goes on the bottom of a stack.
Lighting, stands and the bag of cables
Light stands and tripods collapse fully and get strapped together. Modifiers, umbrellas and softboxes go flat in their own box. Every cable, charger, trigger and adaptor goes in one labelled bag, because rebuilding a kit from scattered leads is a weekend of guessing.
Where it lives between homes
The dangerous moment isn’t the van ride; it’s the gap, when dates don’t line up and a few thousand pounds of glass has to wait somewhere. The free options all fail the humidity test. What a photographer actually needs is a dry, secure facility that will take the kit now and give specific cases back when the new studio corner is ready.
Collection-based moving storage is built for that. A crew collects the labelled cases and boxes from your door, keeps them in a monitored facility, and delivers the body-and-lens case the day you want to start shooting again while the lighting kit follows when you’ve got space for it. You never hire a van, never carry a tripod bag up three flights, and never leave a lens in a damp garage for a fortnight because it was the only option.
For anything irreplaceable, check conditions and standards before you book. Members of the Self Storage Association UK must meet set criteria for security and customer protection, which matters when the contents can’t be re-bought.
Insure the glass at today’s price
Photographers routinely underinsure because they think in terms of what a lens cost years ago. Value the kit at replacement cost now, declare high-value items individually, keep serial numbers and photographs of everything before it’s packed. Without that, a claim is a conversation rather than a cheque.
The first shoot after the move
Before you trust anything, check each lens against a bright light for fungus or haze, clean the sensor, and run a few frames. If a lens picked something up in transit, you’ll see it now, while the cause is fresh, rather than halfway through a paid job. Pack and store it properly and the only thing you’ll notice is how good the new light is.