A Fuji in Fiji

What's the ideal camera system for travel photography? Which of the various sensor sizes is the optimum? And how about the lenses: is it better to travel with a couple of decent zooms or a selection of primes? These are a few of the questions that I decided to try to answer when I recently spent17 days sailing around the South Pacific on Holland America Line's MS Maasdam .

My passion for cruise ships stems from having spent my twenties living and working on them as a photographer. For me, one of the only things more magnificent than watching a cruise ship sail into some exotic port is being on board and watching it from the deck. And there is no finer way to enjoy a sunset than when it is reflected in 360° of ocean.

Back in my cruising days I spent much of my free time shooting travel photos for a picture library on a Nikon FA loaded with Fuji Velvia, and would routinely carry a Billingham bag stuffed with eight Nikkor prime lenses because I didn't trust the quality of zooms – probably rightly so, at the time. But my days as a pack-horse are long gone, so on this cruise I decided to try out one of the many fabulous new mirrorless systems that come in and out of the office. But which one? And which lenses?

Choosing my kit

There's a lot of buzz around full-frame mirrorless cameras at the moment, but some of those optics can be pretty hefty. The Micro Four Thirds system, with its wide range of tiny but superb primes, is a no-brainer