usa, 13 Aug 2006 --

In preparation for The Big Trip, I’ve put a lot of thought into how I’m going to make shooting with a bulky DSLR camera work for me on this hostel-to-hostel, minimum budget trip work for me.  From what I understand, one of the main purposes of this “Internet” everyone is talking about is to share information with the general public (that and looking at porn, I guess), so I thought I’d give a little back and post my list of photography gear, and my logic for what I’m taking.  Worthy of note: this is only the second bit of useful information I’ve contributed to the internet, with the first being my kunaffe recipe that exactly one complete stranger was able to find thanks to google.

My camera is the Nikon D70s.  It’s the camera I’ve been shooting with for a little over a year and a half now, and I love it.  The only other camera I considered was the D200, but that was impossible to find when I ordered my D70 a few months ago, and was probably more than I wanted to spend anyway.  The only feature that stands out as something I may miss is that I hear the construction is more rugged.

My only lens is the Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8 AF-S.  This set me back quite a bit of cash (if you want to know exactly how much, you can look it up on Amazon and send me an email telling me just how crazy you think I am for dropping that on a lens).  At least Nikon was nice enough to give me a $100 rebate on it.  I love to shoot low light situations with available light, and I’ve found that all my favorite pictures from recent trips have been from fairly close in, so hopefully this will prove to be the ideal lens for me.  It does seem a little heavy, but it’s supposed to be very rugged…which is good.

In the past, I’ve felt trapped inside mosques, temples and such by lenses that didn’t go wide enough like the Nikon 24-120mm VR.  Also, since I want to get better at “breaking the wall” and talking to people when shooting candids I figure the shorter 55mm will keep me from chickening out and shooting from a distance.  I was going to take a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 prime, but that got the axe in the interest of lightweight packing.  I had placed an order in April for the Nikon 18-200mm VR that everyone is talking about, but Amazon twice pushed the delivery date back and eventually said they wouldn’t arrive until September…so yeah, not so much an option.

As far as storage goes, I’m not taking a laptop so this took some thought.  I’m only carrying four 1GB Lexar Professional 80x CF cards.  I’ve had enough strange problems with larger sizes in the past to be skeptical, and I don’t want to be stuck waiting for a giant card to fill up so I can back up the images and send them home.

For long term storage, I eventually settled on the Apacer Disk Steno CP-300.  This is a device that burns straight from CF cards to DVDs.  A lot of people seem to be using hard drive solutions lately, and in particular many people recommend using an iPod.  I just don’t trust hard drive devices to hold up to the way I’ll probably end up abusing my gear on this trip, and my iPod craps out frequently.

In playing with the CP-300 so far, I’m pretty happy with everything but the fact that it seems to be a little picky about the DVD media you use.  I’ve had the best luck with DVD-Rs, and the general opinion seems to be that -Rs are better than +Rs for archiving anyway.  The funny thing is that not all -Rs seem to work.  My current brand of choice is Sony, which is good because I’d think they’d be fairly easy to find in Asia.

So with all those pieces, the workflow will go something like this:  I have the camera set to shoot RAW+JPEG Basic.  I want to have the flexibility of coming back with RAW adjustments later, but I need the ability to upload JPEGs from web cafes while we’re on the trip.  After I fill a card, I’ll burn it to two DVDs, verify the images and wipe the card.  Once I’ve burned four CF cards to a DVD (totalling 4 GB), I’ll mail one copy of the DVD home and keep the other.  Once my mom (who was kind enough to offer to help me out) confirms that she’s received a given DVD, I’ll be able to throw away the backup copy that I have with me so I’m not stuck dragging around too many.

Sounds simple enough, right?  Guess we’ll see starting in a few days….if you don’t see pictures starting to show up in the gallery I guess that means I forgot something obvious.

usa, 13 Aug 2006 --

With the beginning of our trip only two days away, I took two steps today that made it abundantly clear that the beginning of the adventure is finally upon us:

First, I made the first two days of reservations at The Atlanta hotel in Bangkok.  Cara and I don’t intend to do much advance accomidation planning on this trip, and the majority of the places we’re hoping to stay don’t even take reservations (or take credit cards, or probably have telephones for that matter).  Still, we figured rolling into town at midnight after an 18 hour flight and under the influence of an 11 hour time change wouldn’t leave us in the greatest shape to go searching for a place to stay.

The Atlanta is awesome.  I saw it last time I was in Bangkok, and wishing I was on the kind of trip where I could stay there was one of my first inklings that maybe work travel isn’t the best way to go.  Their lobby is like something straight out of a 40s black and white film, and every where you look there are signs posted on the wall basically telling you that the customer is not, in fact, always right.  Quirky doesn’t even begin to describe the place.  They generally only take reservations by fax, but I talked to the heavily british accented owner on the phone, and he was kind enough to make an exception for us.  On its website, the Atlanta claims to be popular with:

“cultured occidentals, with writers, academics, artists, cinema & theatre and other professional people, with dreamers and innocuous eccentrics.”

I’m not sure which (if any) of those groups Cara and I fall into, but our 600 baht (about $16 US) will be getting us a third floor “you get what you pay for” room with air conditioning.  We would have gone for the unairconditioned room for $2 less, but that would also have meant a shower with no hot water and we figured we’d splurge on our first night in town.

The second thing I did today that made me realize that this trip is going to be a reality was to pack.  What does one take on a several month backpacking trip around asia?  I’ll tell you:

• (1) Backpack, 3500 cubic inches
• (1) Small day pack
• (3) Short sleeved shirts
• (1) Long sleeved shirt
• (1) Pair shorts
• (1) Pair zip off pants
• (3) Pairs underwear (I was thinking about just going commando, but thought I’d want the option)
• (1) Light fleece
• (1) Rain Jacket
• (1) Pair of Chacos
• (1) Pair hiking shoes (damnit, couldn’t force myself to go with Chacos alone)
• (1) Pair long underwear
• (1) Warm hat
• (1) Baseball cap
• (1) Pair socks (Cara loves it when I wear socks with my Chacos)
• (1) Nikon D70 SLR with 17-55mm f/2.8 lens (I hope I don’t hate my camera after lugging it around Asia)
• (1) CF Card to DVD burner
• (1) Travel sheet
• (1) Spoon
• (1) Bandanna
• (20 ft) Clothes line
• (1) Mosquito headnet (This may still get the axe)
• (1) First aid kit
• (1) Small towel (Ford Prefect would be proud)
• (1) Drybag (for the camera when it pours)
• (1) Pair sunglasses
• (1) Small toiletry kit
• (1) Roll of toilet paper (Everyone says this can be key)
• (1) Pocket knife
• (1) Bottle of doxycycline (Malaria pills)
• (1) Headlamp
• (1) Notepad and pen
• (1) Book (The Amber Spyglass)
• (1) Watch
• (1) Passport
• (2) Credit Cards
• (1) Debit Card
• (1) Copy of Lonely Planet - Southeast Asia on a Shoestring

I plan to take the pack as carry-on luggage (yes United, length + width + height is less than 45″, thank you very much) but sadly thanks to our friends with the exploding toothpaste in the UK, we’ll have to check a small box of toiletries and the knife.

So there you have it, 30 lbs of stuff that will hopefully be all I need to get by in Asia for 6+ months.  Actually I’m sure it’s more than enough.  Since I started traveling so much, one of my favorite sanity-saving mantras during packing for trips has always been “As long as you’ve got the tickets, the money, and the passport…anything else you forget doesn’t really matter.”

USA, 17 Jul 2006 --

It’s been a whirlwind week of carrying heavy things up and down (but mostly up) many, many stairs…but Cara and I managed to move everything we own from our (sadly now former) Dupont Circle apartment to my mom’s attic in Columbus.  Having had the pleasure of parallel parking a 14 foot UHaul with attached “auto mover” in downtown DC, I can definitely say I hope to never do it again.

We (foolishly?) thought that the temporary No Parking signs we put up 72 hours in advance of the move would at least guarantee us a perfect parking spot for our 35 feet of UHaul joy, but we returned from the UHaul office at 9 in the morning to find a shiny new black Mazda wagon occupying the majority of our Emergency No Parking zone.  After a brief dispute on the karmic repercussions of having our new best friend in the black Mazda towed by DC’s finest, we got lucky and a few other cars on the block left.  This left room for me to get the beast out of the middle of the street and allowed us to keep our karma intact.The move itself can best be described as epic.  As Cara and I carried box after box (after box, after box) out to the truck and having just seen Madagascar the night before, I found myself endlessly repeating the line “We like to move it, move it” in my head.  (If you haven’t seen the movie, there’s this scene where a bunch of lemurs have a dance party involving the techno song “I like to move it,” good times.)

Fortunately we managed to stick to our “no injuries” rule and the only casualty was the Ikea wardrobe that I managed to haul all the way out our back door and into the alley before watching it rotate in slow motion off the UHaul dolly to land face down on the attached mirror.  I smuggled the remains into a dumpster at an undisclosed location and moved on.  It’s rare that you get to see the net volume that you and your posessions take up in the world all in one place.  We have too much stuff.

So, the adventure begins…29 days until we get on the plane to Bangkok!