Tag Archives: travel

New Year’s Resolutions – #4: Travel

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In an attempt to hold myself to my resolutions this year, I’m blogging them. You can read more of my resolutions here.

Travel

I love travelling. I love exploring new places and meeting new people. Now that, for various reasons, I won’t be travelling as much for my day job as I have in years past, I want to make up for it by travelling more for my own reasons. Even if that just means going to new places within Blighty, or going to places that I’ve been before and to which I’m longing to return.

I have the perfect travel partner, too – my wife, Sarah. And I’d love for us to go out and travel and shoot some cool images together on the way, like we did in California this April gone past.

KYH: On the road, part III

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The trouble with summer is that it’s warm. Turns out that this holds especially true during heatwaves, and it further transpires that London is not the best place in the world to look if you’re trying to find a gently, cooling breeze.

The plan for yesterday was to have a morning of not doing very much, followed by a shoot in the afternoon; I didn’t know where we’d be shooting – I’d said ‘somewhere woody’ and left it up to the Londoners to help me out with finding something that fit the bill – but I had some ideas in mind, mostly to do with wide-angle shots in woodland.

Of course, the best laid plans often go awry, so when my intended subject for the day texted me to say she had a migraine, I thought that I’d be struggling to get anything done. Of course, I have cool friends, so Alaina, who you can see in the photo at the top of this post, agreed to stand in. The ‘where’ turned out to be Wimbledon Common, which is very, very woody in places and which has now been permanently entered onto my ‘shoot here regularly’ list, in gleeful ignorance of the fact that’s 250 miles from my house. Eventually, after some shots barefoot in the long grass, chasing a starburst from the sun, Lainey decided that it would be cool to climb a tree…

To fill the time before Alaina arrived I shot some frames of Michelle, my hostess for this little adventure. Mich is, amongst other things, an artist, and I quite liked the idea of doing some editorial-ish shots of her whilst she was working on an image. My favourite shot is this one, nice and simple and clean:

Editorialising

And this afternoon, once I’ve had chance to relax a bit after a morning of wandering about central London, I’ll be shooting with some more dear friends of mine. About which I shall tell you more tomorrow, naturally.

KYH: On the road, part II

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Here begins day two of my London road trip. It’s going to be a blisteringly hot day from the look of it and I have a shoot booked this afternoon. Which probably means that I’ll be sweating like a donkey again. At least it’ll help me shed some pounds.

Yesterday I shot an engagement set with my friends Melissa and Fabrizio. I’ve known Melissa for ages, and it’s always great to catch up with both her and her fianceé. They’re a warm, welcoming, fun couple to be around and we had great fun shooting the set in Southwark park.

I really enjoyed the shoot. Beforehand, this was the most terrifying of all the shoots that I’ve been planning to work on this weekend, mainly, I think, because I’ve never shot an engagement set before. But having such a great, loving couple in front of the camera helped immensely. I know I’m not up to the standards of, say, Pieter van Impe, but for a first time effort it wasn’t too bad.

Lessons learned

  1. One lens really is enough; I shot the whole thing with a 70-200 and didn’t find myself wanting anything shorter.
  2. I need to be a bit more daring, more adventurous, to make the shoot come out the way I want it. This is a confidence thing; now I know I can do the easier stuff the more adventurous stuff will come with practice.
  3. Shade, shade, shade. And a reflector. Mid-day sun isn’t a problem when you have trees.
  4. Auto WB gets it wrong sometimes, but it’s worth shooting in auto mode when you don’t have a grey card and you’re shooting in changeable light conditions. It gives you an extra starting point when you’re trying to balance the images later in post.

Today

I’ll hopefully be shooting somewhere wooded and shady. If not, my shoot-through umbrella may see use as a parasol.

As McNally would say, more t/k.

KYH: On the road, part 1

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It’s 06:23 as I write this. I’m on a train that’s just left Warrington and is now accelerating on it’s way to London Euston. The sun is still just low enough for the light on the fields to be golden rather than white and just high enough to be exactly in my eye-line. I have had less than four hours of sleep. Your author, therefore, is not quite with it yet.

But I’m not on the road for work, for a change. Well, I sort of am – on Wednesday I’ll be doing some user interface testing from the Canonical offices in Millbank Tower – but for the first four of the next five days I’m all about the photography. This is, for me, a long weekend in which to be nothing but creative, and to relax and enjoy it while I do. I’ve got four shoots scheduled – one engagement shoot, two portrait shoots and one which I’m calling in my head a romance shoot – and I’ll have at least one full day to indulge in some street photography.

So, in the spirit of KYH, I’m starting a series of posts about it. Photos and text and larnin’ and things to come.

And now, I’m going to sign off, because the act of using my laptop on the train, even with the very reasonable wifi, is making me feel seasick. I’ll write again from somewhere that doesn’t rock from side to side.

What I did on my Holidays

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I’ve been back from Barcelona for about a week now, but between getting used to the routine of working every day and overcoming some tropical disease or other that I picked up whilst I was over there (I keep telling people it was the Coughing Pig Death and there’s a moment where they actually believe me, which is fun) I’ve not had time to blog much about it.

And then I came to actually blog about it and I realised that if you’re a Planet Ubuntu or Planet Ubuntu UK reader you’ll have read most of what I’ve got to say on the subject of UDS and AllHands already (Empathy and Banshee by default (maybe), Android on Ubuntu, Scott James Remnant is insane and wants your machine to have booted before you even switch it on, etc.), and if you aren’t a reader of either of those planets then you probably don’t really care about any of that anyway, so I decided to not actually bother saying it. You can always go and find it if you want to, because you’re smart and savvy people.

So suffice it to say that Barcelona was an interestingly manic place, though not somewhere that I think I’d want to spend oodleplexes of time once I’d done all the touristy bits. You can see some of the photos I took on the one day that I did any serious tourism – with the camera and one lense and nothing else, because nothing says "hey, I’ve got some expensive gear here" than lugging around a Stealth Reporter 650 bag as you wander, your spine crooked from the weight, down La Rambla – on my Flickr stream.

The week before UDS, that of Canonical AllHands and, before that, SomeHands (which I didn’t attend) was spent out in the back of the Spanish beyond at the La Mola conference centre, which is slap dab in the middle of an area that is half forest, half golf course, and which has buildings with turfed-over roofs, a swimming pool that was empty apart from some scummy water and a couple of pissed-off-looking frogs, and a three-hundred-year-old chapel-cum-hall-cum-terracey-thing in which the assembled cognoscenti sweltered for plenary sessions every morning and afternoon. I later appropriated the terrace for a very brief and rather rushed portrait shoot with my good and at-a-slight-angle-to-the-universe friend Michelle, the results of which will appear once I’ve got round to finishing the editing (having a tropical plague plays merry hob with your sense of contrast, I’ve discovered).

And that about covers What I Did on My Holidays. Except it doesn’t really tell you anything at all because I can’t fit into one blog post – or even into several – just how much I enjoyed AllHands. UDS is something that I’ve grown used to, I suppose – the people are always astounding and scarily smart (or in some cases just scary) – but AllHands is something really special, because when you’re at one you realise that every single person that you work alongside is awesome at what they do and at the top of their game to boot, and that’s something that I think’s bloody hard to find in any other company on the planet (though I confess I’m biased).

And now it’s twenty-to-two in the morning and I’m not sleeping again (which makes this the fourth time this week that I’ve seen two AM when I didn’t want to and which might end up making it the third time this week that I’ve watched the sun rise), so I’m going to go and find a warm drink and hope that tiredness will drop on me in a sort of fluffy lump. On the other hand, I could suddenly get a second wind and start writing the story that’s knocking about in my skull, which as usual is the result of two or more things smacking into each other when some neuron or other in the thing that I tentatively call a brain misfired.

Sleep tight, folks. May the morning bring you happy things.

The sound of money not whooshing out the door

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Nikon have conspired to leak the specs of their next top-line pro DSLR, the D3X. Naturally, I want one. Because, you know, what Nikon user wouldn’t?

I’ve spent most of the week trying to work out the best way to cart camera gear to the states for UDS week. I’ll be there all week (try the pasta, folks) and I’ll have the Sunday before UDS to be Mr Tourist, so I figured that taking at least some gear with me would be worth it.

Of course, I’ve got to deal with Virgin Atlantic’s stupidly small hand baggage limit of just 6kg (13lbs to our American brethren), so I’ve spent much of the week trying out various configurations of equipment in the two camera bags that I own to see what I can manage.

As far as I can tell, for 6kg, in my lightest bag (a Kata R-103 backpack) I can take:

  • My laptop and its charger.
  • The D300
  • My 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor (the lightest lens I own)
  • and nothing else.

So, I toyed around with a couple of solutions:

  • Buy a lighter bag.
  • Buy a Nikon 18-200mm lens to replace the 18-55mm and 55-200mm lenses

And then I realised something fairly fundamental: I was actively trying to work out how to spend money so as to not fall afoul of Virgin’s silly restrictions. Even I, crazy as I am sometimes, am not daft enough to actually thing that that’s a smart thing to do.

So on the advice of a friend of mine who travels so much I’m surprised she can ever stop to lick a stamp I’m going to use the strategy known as "you’re a man, you’ve got pockets: use them." Once I’ve checked in the lenses can go back in the bag for security and everyone will be happy. Hopefully. Well, we’ll see anyway.

But all this arsing about with weighing scales and gear configurations brought me to ask myself another question: Why the hell am I trying to take all this stuff with me? What do I actually need?

Looking back over my photos from the last year I’ve realised that I don’t actually use all that many different lenses most of the time. As far as I can tell, my preferred lens is the 10-20mm Sigma, with the 30mm Sigma coming a close second.

So, for San Francisco, then, a challenge: Can I shoot The City with just two lenses? I’m going to take with me the 10-20mm, the 50mm Nikkor and, for insurance purposes only, the 55-200mm. I aim not to use the latter unless I absolutely have to (and if I have to then I’ve failed in my task, evidently).

I’ll let you know how it goes.

A quick note

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Back from Lexington; tired, grumpy, ready to eat brains (though I might have to have diet brains because, as always seems to be when I go away for work – and especially to Americky – I’ve put weight on again). More on that another time, perhaps.

But I just wanted to say that the Bishop of Lancaster is a fool. Education is bad, apparently:

Bishop O’Donoghue, who has recently published a report on how to renew Catholicism in Britain, argued that mass education has led to "sickness in the Church and wider society".

"What we have witnessed in Western societies since the end of the Second World War is the development of mass education on a scale unprecedented in human history – resulting in economic growth, scientific and technological advances, and the cultural and social enrichment of billions of people’s lives," he said.

"However, every human endeavor has a dark side, due to original sin and concupiscence. In the case of education, we can see its distortion through the widespread dissemination of radical scepticism, positivism, utilitarianism and relativism.

Leaving on a jet plane

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A cliché of a title, I know, but it’s late and I’m past being able to think about it.

Yes, dear readers, I’m off on my travels again. Tomorrow I’m off to London (rather stupidly I’ve got to fly from Manchester to Gatwick because there’s no train journey that would get me to London from Lancaster in less than six hours and with less then 5 changes). I’ll be there for two weeks (I would come back in the middle weekend but for the aforementioned train nonsense) for a Launchpad sprint / conference / summit / thing. After that I’m back home for a week and then I’m going to Lexington, MA, for more work-related things (though as yet I’m kind of fuzzy on what exactly I’ll be doing there).

This is one of the things that I both hate and love about my job. On the one hand I’m going to be away from my home (my new home, incidentally, into which we moved only a week ago) for three weeks out of the next four. There’s so much to do in terms of unpacking and arranging and getting used to the place and I’m just going to end up leaving my fiancé to do all the hard work. On top of that we’re in the midst of arranging our wedding – there will be a trying-on of wedding dresses whilst I’m away – and though I know it’s traditional for the bloke to not be involved (flaming stupid tradition if you ask me) I’ve really enjoyed being involved so far; I’m going to miss whatever gets done while I’m away.

On the other hand I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks in the company of an amazingly smart and talented bunch of people with whom I get on extremely well. We’ll be concentrating on how to make Launchpad even cooler and easier to work with and I’m sure we’ll have a great time. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it, I just wish I didn’t have to go through this period of not enjoying the idea of it first.

There are some highlights to the next couple of weeks, though:

  • I’m going to the ORG event Piracy v Obscurity – an evening with Neil Gaiman on Friday.
  • I’ll be at the London Intrepid Ibex release party Thursday week.
  • On Friday week I’ll be attending a signing by Neil Gaiman of his new book, The Graveyard Book (yes, I’m aware that this may make me look like a fanboy).
  • On Saturday I’ll be doing a photo walk around London with some friends from Canonical. I love photographing London; it’s full of interesting people and places and atmosphere, and it’s going to be even more fun going round it with a bunch of like-minded people.

So when you think about it, working for Canonical’s not all bad.

Dear lazyweb traveller types

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So, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?

In December, I’m due to go to UDS Jaunty, which is to be held in Mountain View, CA, at the Googleplex. Okay so far (except for the 10-hour flights, but what can you do). Now, I’ve booked my flights with Virgin Atlantic for the following reasons:

  1. I’ve no wish to fly from terminal 5 at Heathrow, which I’d need to do if I flew with BA.
  2. I’ve been told wonderful things about Virgin by the people who’ve used them in the past.
  3. I’ve been told horror stories about BA (though I’ve never had a problem with them myself in all four flights of theirs that I’ve been on).
  4. I’m an idiot, and didn’t bother to check cabin baggage allowances beforehand.

Point 4 is the problem. Virgin Atlantic has a ridiculously small cabin baggage allowance of no more than 6kg (13lbs) for Economy travellers like me. BA, by contrast, has a cabin baggage allowance of 23kg. The problem is, of course, that I’m planning to take at least the following:

  • Laptop + power brick
  • Camera
  • At least three lenses

The bag that I usually carry such stuff around in fits well within the dimensions laid out by Virgin (which are smaller than the standard guidelines, but we’ll skip over that), but with all that packed I’m likely to be well over the cabin baggage allowance, probably by at least two or three kilos.

So, my questions for you, dear lazyweb, are as follows:

  1. Does anyone know just how strict Virgin are about cabin baggage weight on a flight from Heathrow to SFO?
  2. If I’m over weight with my cabin baggage, what happens? Am I sent to check-in and forced to pay an excess fee, or do I have to re-pack some of my items into my checked luggage (which, come on, I’m not really going to want to do with camera gear, am I).
  3. Should I just not bother taking the camera (which would be agony for me considering that I take it just about everywhere with me and I was really looking forward to doing a lot of photography at UDS – alongside my work duties, natch ;) )?
  4. Is there another option?

Answers in a comment, please (OpenID required) or by email to blog this domain.