keith asks

I some­how came across your work through morn­ingdisc, a group of ulti­mate fris­bee play­ers in Brooklyn Prospect Park… not sure exact­ly how, but I real­ly like your work… I hope to do some­thing sim­i­lar, blog­ging, shar­ing images, trav­el, etc.

I would like to ask you a bunch of tech­ni­cal ques­tions, like do you use word­press or how do you update while abroad… or what few words of advice you can give to some­one who has nev­er done this… any­way… your pho­tog­ra­phy is great. Thanks!

Platform

I do use WordPress as the CMS for my blog­ging. It’s a great piece of soft­ware that does every­thing I want (though it takes a con­sid­er­able num­ber of plug-ins), eas­i­ly cus­tomiz­able, with an amaz­ing com­mu­ni­ty to boot.

However, I nev­er use the built-in media sys­tem because I don’t like the way WordPress han­dles media. Instead, I upload pic­tures man­u­al­ly to my FTP serv­er with Transmit 4, and videos to Vimeo (and pay­ing for a pro account is worth it). I pre­fer Vimeo over YouTube, because the com­mu­ni­ty and fea­tures are a lot bet­ter, and there are no ad overlays/previews on a video.

Photography + Video

I shoot with a Canon 5D Mk II, and I’d rec­om­mend a decent dig­i­tal SLR for trav­el­ing and blog­ging. There’s some­thing to be said about cap­tur­ing the colours of a scene that you can’t express any oth­er way. You don’t need a bunch of lens­es; just one decent walk-around lens will be fine for almost all sit­u­a­tions, because the best lens is the one you have with you.

Traveling

When I’m on the road, I take an old Macbook Pro with me. It’s far from being a pow­er­ful com­put­er nowa­days, but it still lets me post-process my pho­tos and videos. This usu­al­ly trans­lates to hun­dreds of gigs of data, so I also car­ry a 1TB WD Elements Portable dri­ve to store every­thing. One advan­tage of hav­ing an exter­nal dri­ve is that I can car­ry my entire music col­lec­tion with me, which is nice if you meet new peo­ple and want to share music with them.

However, if you’re doing some more seri­ous trav­el­ing, I’d rec­om­mend a LaCie Rugged Hard Disk. It’s bus pow­ered, so you don’t need an extra adapter or volt­age con­vert­er if you’re in a coun­try with dif­fer­ent out­lets. This is what I should have bought.

I also car­ry a Moleskine ruled pock­et note­book with me, because it does­n’t need pow­er, it does­n’t make sound, and it’s very dis­crete. You can also do some writ­ing when you’re tak­ing off on a plane and not allowed to have any elec­tron­ic devices on. Also, in one pock­et of every coat and bag I own, I have a black Uni-ball Onyx. Careful with smudges when writ­ing; it takes a few moments for the ink to dry on a Moleskine page.

Advice

  • Go through your pho­tos and edit them as soon as pos­si­ble. You’ll pick up details in the pho­tog­ra­phy because the scene is fresh in your mind, and it’ll help you improve for your next trip. Otherwise, they stay on your dri­ve and by the time you’re off on vaca­tion again, you’ll have twice as many pho­tos to sort through, and in my expe­ri­ence, I nev­er look at them again.
  • Unless some­thing is super sig­nif­i­cant or impor­tant, don’t post more than one pho­to of it. People don’t need to see five pic­tures of the same lake at three dif­fer­ent zooms. It’ll make your pho­tos a lot more palat­able and inter­est­ing.
  • Get a dig­i­tal cam­era that does both pho­to and video, because there are times where one is bet­ter at cap­tur­ing or express­ing some­thing than the oth­er.
  • When stay­ing with friends, leave a back­up of all the media you’ve tak­en on an old dri­ve of theirs; most peo­ple have an extra old dri­ve kick­ing around. If they don’t have a spare dri­ve, see if you can copy it to their main com­put­er, and tell them they can delete it when you get home safe­ly with all your data.
  • If you’re rushed and you don’t have time to write down a street name, or a bunch of menu items of things you’re eat­ing, just take a pic­ture of the street sign or the menu. Just be care­ful about the lat­ter, as some places (usu­al­ly Chinese) may think you’re steal­ing their prices to open your own restau­rant.
  • Use Photoshop actions to auto­mate your post-pro­cess­ing. This is espe­cial­ly impor­tant when you’re on a trip and you’re going to be tak­ing a lot of pho­tos. The eas­i­er you make your work­flow, the eas­i­er it’ll be to stay on top of your pho­tos.

One comment

  1. This is extreme­ly help­ful!!! Thank you!!!

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