Trip Questions & Answers

Taking an idea from some friends we met on our travels here is a list of commonly asked questions we've received.

Favorite Country?
Abby (A): Hard to say because we enjoyed so many places, but India and Nepal are at the top of my list.
Ross (R): Definitely a tough one, but I'd say India.

Favorite City?
We loved Hong Kong, it's a hi-tech city with loads of hiking trails just miles from the heart of the city.

Favorite Food?
A: Indian followed by Vietnamese
R: ditto!

Least favorite food?
A: Probably Chinese, we had some great food there, but also some really bad stuff, we had a disgusting black bean dumpling dessert soaked in sweet syrup and several very fishy tasting meals that didn't have fish in them, or so we thought.
R: China as well, and don't forget the boiled fish that made our lips tingle.

How did you get around?
Plane, train, boat, subway, taxi, car, truck, bus, auto rickshaw.  We used all sorts of transportation to get around and really planned as we went so normally a few days before we would leave a place we would do some research and find the best and most economic transportation.

Were there bathrooms everywhere you went?
Yes, some were very rustic and many 'squatty potties', but there were always bathrooms.  Toilet paper on the other hand was a rare commodity and became a staple in Abby's purse.

Was it hard to communicate?
Not nearly as difficult as you might think, English is widely used so we were lucky in that regard, except in China (see below).

Where was the hardest place to travel?
China, due to the language barrier, the weather (it was freezing in December) and strong cultural differences that didn't necessarily make for an easy visit.

Where was the easiest place to travel?
Probably a tie between Australia and South Africa.

Were you ever scared/in danger?
We were never in danger, at least that was apparent to us. We did have one situation arriving in Nairobi, Kenya and 3am and getting into a taxi where we both felt a little uncomfortable as they took us down some back roads, but we arrived at our destination perfectly safe.

Favorite Lodging?
A: Probably our amazing villa, The Longhouse, in Bail for Ben and Lisa's wedding followed by our little hut on the beach on Koh Phanghan in Thailand.
R:  I also really enjoyed the Two Dragons Guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Did anything get stolen or lost?
A: Unfortunately, I left my Kindle on board one of our last flights and I think I had a few Euro coins stolen in Madrid, but other than that we came home with everything in tact.

Did you get sick?
Yes, were both experienced "traveler's belly" a few times in different places (Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam) but we tok along antibiotics and never suffered with anything for more than a day.

Would you do it again?
A: Hell yes!
R: Most definitely, but days after returning Abby asked me if we won the lottery if we'd take off again…I told her I needed some time to recover :)

Did it cost more/less than you thought it would?
We averaged $185/day, we had guesstimated $150.  So we were a little over budget, but the whole trip was still relatively very reasonable.

Was it hard to adjust coming back to the US?
As strange as it sounds, coming back to the US was pretty smooth.  We think that after traveling for 7 months we were just excited to be home.

What did you miss most?
A: our bed
R: relaxing on our couch

What are you going to do with all your photos?
Like other trips we've taken we're planning on doing photo books (it's going to take several for all the photos).

What are you going to do with this site?
We'll be keeping it up for the foreseeable future and updating it with our continued travels, both here and abroad.

If you have any other questions post a comment and we'll respond.  Also check out our faq page for some more info.

Photography Workflow: Backups

I'm dedicating a separate section to backups because quite frankly, it's the most important piece of the workflow. It doesn't matter how great a photo is or what you do with it, if in the end you lose it. Since we were going to be traveling for several months being able to effectively backup photos was a big concern. At home I currently backup all of our computers to a central location (an Apple Time Capsule) and important documents are also are backed up online (Mobile Me iDisk). The important thing is that files are backed up and backed up regularly. On the road I knew backing up would be a little more of a challenge, ideally it would have been nice to just upload all the photos online, but that's not really possible with currently over 280 GB of photos and some internet connections so slow that you want to pull your hair out just checking email.

So we went with a 500 GB external hard drive (a LaCie Rugged Hard Disk to be exact) that would allow for a complete backup of everything on the laptop. I also thought the 'rugged' aspect would also help since our bags would be getting thrown around. Anyway, once photos are downloaded to the computer and processed we plug in the external hard drive and take a backup. As an extra measure of protection we travel with the hard drive and the laptop separately, meaning if I have the laptop, Abby has the hard drive. That way if a bag is lost, stolen or destroyed we should hopefully have another copy. However, if all else fails we have a copy of our favorite photos online at Flickr, but we hope we don't have to resort to that.

I urge everyone please, please backup your important data at home. If we can backup data while we're living out of a backpack, surely you can do it. If you have a Mac and later versions of Mac OS X, the easiest way is with an external hard drive and Time Machine and if you are on Windows Vista/7 you have the ability to set up backups to an external hard drive as well, but I can't speak to that process as much.

With that I've wrapped up my current photography workflow (and wouldn't you know my backup just completed). From taking a photo to backing it up and some of the stuff in between. If you have any questions please let me know. And don't worry, I'm sure I'll think up another nerdy/boring topic to write about soon.

For more info on the other aspects of my workflow, check the main post for links: Photography Workflow

Photography Workflow: Publishing

It's taken me a little while to get this post up, mainly because I think it's the weakest part of the workflow (which I'm trying my best to improve) and a little because of continued issues with China's censoring of Blogger (I don't think I'm going to stop complaining about this until I'm out of the country).  Anyway, here it is:

Once I have completed the processing of my photos, including keywords and titles/descriptions I post them to Flickr.  Currently I am using Lightroom's Publishing feature that allows uploading directly to Flickr within Lightroom.  I am also working with Jeffrey's "Export to Flickr" Lightroom Plugin, an enhanced Publishing plugin that provides a little more flexibility, but still not enough for me to be completely satisfied with publishing to the internet.

I have chosen Flickr due to it's strong market share in the online photo world.  I think Picasa Web (also blocked in China, see I can't help myself) is an excellent and free alternative (you can get a free Flickr account, but you can only display 200 photos and a few other limitations), but I think the Flickr community is larger and more established.

The Flickr and Lightroom integration allows for the publishing of photos along with their metadata (specifically keywords and location/GPS data).  I've really enjoyed being able to view the photos on a map as a way of tracking our travels.  A few of the shortcomings with the built in Flickr publisher are the inability to have a photo in more than one photo set (or group) without having to upload the photo multiple times, this is remedied with the Jeffrey's plugin thankfully.  However the largest drawback is anytime a photo is modified, even metadata updates like keywords, the photo must be re-uploaded, this has become the bane of my workflow.  Once I have tagged a photo and posted it to our blog I cannot make any keyword changes or else it will break the photo on the blog, you may have seen some photos disappear from the blog occasionally, I think they are all correctly displaying now.

Once the photos have been uploaded to Flickr they are hosted there and then displayed on our blog.  Flickr doesn't provide an easy way of posting multiple photos to a blog so we use an online app called Includr, which allows us to easily select multiple photos.  The nice thing about using Flickr as the host rather than publishing them to Picasa Web (Blogger's default image host) too is that clicking on an image in the blog takes you directly to the image on Flickr, allowing you to view the photo's title and description as well as any other metadata about the photo.

So getting the photos online is handled solely in Lightroom.  However the process to get a photo onto the blog involves Lightroom, Flickr, Includr and Blogger as well as some manual copying and pasting, definitely not my style.  There you have it, the publishing workflow.  Overall it's rather cumbersome and time consuming, but without it you wouldn't have any pictures to look at when you should be working.

For more info on the other aspects of my workflow, check the main post for links: Photography Workflow

Photography Workflow: Post Processing

I'm going to use this section to describe the steps once a shot has been taken, from organization to the treatment of photos. All of my organization and post processing happens in Adobe Lightroom, with the exception of HDR processing and some occasional editing in Adobe Photoshop.

Once I'm finished shooting I download the photos to Lightroom (currently Lightroom 3). I create folders by date and then assign each shot a label. Everyone has their own way of doing this, but I find the date + label as the best way to assign a meaning to a shot as well as the date providing a way to keep your shots in some sort of order. This organization is strictly for my own amusement as Lightroom's searching/management capabilities allow you to view and organize photos however you would like.

As you can see from the image, some days have 5 shots others have several hundreds. So the next step is to go through the photos and flag the ones I like. Again Lightroom has a function to assign photos as 'Flagged' or 'Rejected'. Once I have gone through the images a first time, I'm typically dealing with significantly fewer images. So now it's time to work with the images.

Lightroom's 'Develop' module allows for the adjustment of just about every aspect of an image, from cropping to color correction. Most images are given minor tweaks include adjusting the exposure, working with the fill light modifying the black clipping of the image, etc.  These may sound complicated at first, but it's really about making an image look how it feels to you, there's no wrong answer.  I won't go into anything specific since each image is unique, but a great resource on Lightroom is Matt Kloskowski's Lightroom Killer Tips.

Once I've gone through my 'flagged' photos and made any necessary tweaks I'll go back through them again and decide if any aren't really to my liking and remove their flag.  This just further reduces the number of images I'm left with.  I've found that on any given day I usually end up with choosing 5-10% of the total number of shots I've taken.  Since I'm trying to document this trip I'd say that's a pretty high number.  If I were just picking shots to display I think I'd be under 5%.

After flagging and treatments are done I go back through and title each image, add a short description and add keywords.  I've tried to keep my keywording high level, labels like: 'people', 'boat', 'water', 'landscape' as well as the country and city of the shot are added to my chosen images. I use the keywords to help search and organize my photos.  Things like grouping the shots of a country together.

That's about the extent of my post processing.  I've tried to keep it a fairly quick and repeatable process since I'm doing it at the end of sometimes very long days of sightseeing.  Also since I'm doing it every few days I'm trying to not make it too tedious that I get sick of it and stop doing it.

So hopefully you're still awake and haven't delete this blog from your bookmarks.

For more info on the other aspects of my workflow, check the main post for links: Photography Workflow

Photography Workflow: Getting the Shot

I don't have much to say here other than to share what I have learned from others including a quote from Chase Jarvis, a photographer I'm rather fond of, who said "The dirtiest secret in photography is you have to take a lot of pictures." Which I could not agree with more, of the 450 photos I've posted to my Flickr account over the last 80 days, there are another 4,767 that I didn't think were that great.

Here are some resources I've found particularly helpful:

• The Digital Photography Book, by Scott Kelby - this a great book that got me started, it covers lots of aspects of photography and there a follow up volumes that are good as well.
• D-Town TV Podcast - this is a podcast with lots of tips for digital photography
• Working With Artists - This is a great photography school and gallery in Lakewood, CO that I've taken several classes from.

For more info on the other aspects of my workflow, check the main post for links: Photography Workflow

Photography Workflow: Gear

First I'll start off with the gear I'm using, not that getting a great shot is all about the equipment, but we're lugging it around the world so it's worth a mention. A complete gear list is on the packing page.

camera: Nikon D90 - a prosumer DSLR. DSLRs have their advantages and disadvantages. This camera with lens is sometimes a bear to carry around, it can't slip into your pocket and sometimes it's a little big to get those 'discrete' shots. Luckily Abby has a small Canon point and shoot that can fill those gaps. On the plus side it has about all the functions you could ask for in a camera in this price range and I'm consistently able to get the shots I want.

lens: Nikon 18-200 f:3.5-5.6 - this is basically the swiss army knife of lenses, it allows for good wide angle shots, think mountain landscapes, and also has a good telephoto for getting in close. I chose this lens so I wouldn't have to deal with carrying around multiple lenses or having to change lenses in difficult situations, like hiking or on a cramped bus. Basically it's not the best lens, but it does a lot of things well.

accessories:

• Joby Gorillapod SLR-Zoom Tripod, it's been great for night shots or photos of Abby and me when no one is around

• Dawn Tech di-GPS Mini 3L, basically a little gadget that attaches to the camera so photos are tagged with the location of the shot (GPS coordinates). It has been a lot of fun being able to see the exact spot a shot was taken, Here is link of all my photos on a map.
• SD cards, about 30 GB worth, basically I can shoot over 1500 photos before needing to download to a computer.
• Tiffen 72mm Polarizing filter, basically polarized sunglasses for your camera, helpful in getting getting dark blue skies and shots of water
• spare camera battery, you don't know when you're not going to have a place to charge your battery

The above things help get the shot, but after that comes the post processing of the images. I shoot in RAW, which basically means the camera is taking a digital negative and once it's on the computer I have a lot more control of getting the photo to look how I want, similar to the film days when you would head into the darkroom. So along with the camera gear, we have a laptop for processing, uploading and backing up photos.



computer: Dell Inspiron Mini 10v - your standard 10" netbook, but it's running Mac OS X, that's another blog post in itself.

accessories:

• LaCie 500GB Rugged HDD, this hard drive was a big must have for me, since we were going to be gone for an extended period of time I needed a way of knowing that all of our photos would be safe so this hard drive is used for backups, which I'll cover in more detail later. This hard drive also touts being a little more durable than others and is supposed to be able to withstand a drop, so just in case...
• wireless mouse, cables, etc.

One of the challenges of planning what to bring is how much hard drive and memory card space we'd need to house and then backup all of the photos. As a starting point I looked back at several of the extended trips we'd taken (Peru, France & New Zealand) to calculate that I had taken on average 91 photos/day, which based on this trip at 7 months would be a total of almost 20,000 photos and over 200 GB of space.

So with that as a starting point and factoring in Abby's photos as well as documents, some movies and whatever else we had on the laptop I decided to upgrade the hard drive in the laptop to 500 GB and purchase a 500 GB backup hard drive. I also purchased a several 8 GB SD memory cards so that if we were without the laptop for a few weeks I could keep shooting.

Now all we have to do is lug this stuff around and make sure it doesn't get broken, which we've been successful at so far.

For more info on the other aspects of my workflow, check the main post for links: Photography Workflow

Photography Workflow

One question that quite a few people ask is "What do you do to your photos?..." It's not always a straight forward answer, but I figured it deserved a blog post to go over my photography workflow. So I'll try to explain it and hopefully not bore everyone, but keep in mind you are reading the words of a big nerd.

Actually, after starting to write this up I realized it's probably too much info (and would get way too boring) for one post so I'll break it out into several posts that will link from here.

Also as a blank statement for all these posts, I'm not a pro, I'm just a guy with a camera who likes taking photos, nothing more.

Topics:
Gear
Getting The Shot
Post Processing
Publishing
Backups

A Walk Around Preah Khan

Since a photo doesn't always explain what it's like to visit a place I decided to put together a little video of the Preah Khan Temple.

One day

until departure! We have been working on dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's but I think this song really sums up the feeling around here. We will see you next from Oz.....

keeping in touch

Since we are hoping to meet some great people along our travels we decided it would be fun to get some contact cards printed up so people could get a hold of us. From a great suggestion from a friend we used moo.com who have some mini cards (1/2 the size of regular cards) which are perfect for our needs.  The cards turned out really well, they are a great size and the quality is awesome.  Now let's just hope we meet some cool people to hand them out to!