Traveling? Carry It… Check It… Rent It… (very good travel tips, especially for photographers)

IMG_1364

While I’m not a road warrior, I easily log 50 flights a year for my job. I’ve had to travel with equipment all over the world for both photo and video projects.  Traveling just gets more and more expensive these days.  Here are a few rules that I apply to getting there safely with my sanity and equipment intact.

Carry It

I always carry these things onto the plane.

  • A roll-on bag with all my lenses and camera bodies. I have had luggage stolen, the thieves know what gear bags look like.
  • A laptop shoulder bag. With laptop, power supply, 2 TB of portable storage, and spare cables for all items.
  • The Internet. I have an iPad, an iPhone, and a Wireless Modem. Why do I have 3 internet connections at all times? Because its cheaper than paying for WIFI at the airport and hotel.  Plus its much more reliable than counting on clients and coffee shops.
  • A change of clothes. Because your bag will get lost at the worst time.

Check It

When it comes to checked luggage, here are some tips to try to stretch your budget.

  • Weigh your bags. Weigh your bags before you fly.  A simple bathroom scale is worth keeping near your gear.
  • Prepay. Some airlines offer annual passes for baggage, while others give you a free bag with their branded credit card.
  • Choose wisely. One of my favorite airlines is Virgin America.  Not just for their lovely service and planes (with Internet), but for their $25 per bag and up to 10 bags policy.
  • Pack a bag. Overweight bags are more expensive than checking another bag.  I carry a very lightweight bag inside my suitcase for “overflow.”
  • Skycaps are your friend. Those great folks out front of their airport are often nicer than the folks inside.  Just walk up and hand them a five or ten dollar bill with your driver’s license.

Rent It

Don’t feel you have to lug all your gear with you.  All those bags can sure add up.

  • Hire local. Find a local crew person or assistant for the market you’re traveling to. These can be a lighting assistant or someone to help with gear on the shoot.
  • Find a peer. Use the ASMP Find a Photographer app or site to find a colleague to rent gear from.
  • Look for a grip house. We typically rent lighting equipment and support gear. from a grip house, which are used by the video and motion picture industries.

Why all this hubbub?  These days every dollar counts.  Clients don’t really look at your rate plus expenses, they just see the bottom line.  In my experience, the better a traveler I am, the more money left over to go in my pocket.

______
This Post Sponsored by:

Viewbug – Fun Photo Contests

EPSON® Signature Worthy®. High-quality fine art papers. 30% rebate ends 12/31

ShootProof – Use code BOURNE20 to save 20% off the first year of any level plan – even monthly

Image Wizards – Save 20% Off Your 1ST Order – Promo Code: SB20PF

Pogie Awards for the Brightest Ideas of 2012 (excellent article!)

We don’t award these coveted trophies to the best products of the year; everybody does that. No, the Pogies celebrate the best ideas of the year: ingenious features that somehow made it past the lawyers, through the penny-pinching committees and into real-world tech gadgets — even if the products overall are turkeys.

So now, for the eighth straight year — the FedEx envelopes, please!

SMART STAY On Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone, the front-facing camera looks for your eyes. When you’re not looking at the screen, it dims to save battery power. It brightens right back up when you return your gaze.

POWER NAP Most of the world’s laptops do exactly one thing when you close their lids: sleep. All other activity stops.

But Apple asked: Why? Why can’t network activity keep chugging away even when the lid is closed? Why can’t your laptop keep backing itself up, downloading e-mail and syncing its online data (calendars, calendar notes, reminders, photos)?

That is the idea behind Power Nap, a feature of OS X Mountain Lion that works on recent MacBook models. You can wake up, grab your laptop and head out, confident that it is backed up and has the latest mail downloaded.

SLIPSTREAM On Amazon’s 8.9-inch Kindle HD, something ingenious happens when you call up a big-name Web site: It pops onto your screen fast, all at once. It’s almost as though the Kindle’s browser is loading a JPEG screenshot of a Web page, rather than the dozens of individual graphics, text bits and other elements that constitute a Web page. And that’s exactly what it is doing. Behind the scenes, Amazon’s servers grab frequent screenshots of the most popular Web sites; when you visit one, what you see first is that JPEG image (with live links in the right places, fortunately).

While you are studying that image, the browser continues to fetch the component pieces of the page — and after a few seconds, a blink (and occasionally a shifted element) lets you know that you are now looking at the real deal. It is a sneaky, logical, brilliant trick that saves you time and costs you nothing.

CYCLORAMIC Just when you think that nobody could possibly have another fresh idea for a phone app, Cycloramic ($1) makes 360-degree panoramic videos — without a tripod or swivel.

You stand the phone upright and tap the Go button. Incredibly, the phone, balancing on its end, begins to rotate itself. Freakiest darned thing you ever saw. Great for winning bar bets or establishing new religions.

If you’ve ever seen a phone scoot itself along a table when it is in buzz mode, you get the principle. The app triggers the phone’s vibration module at exactly the right frequencies to make the phone turn on the table. The phone’s sensors figure out how far it’s rotated.

It works only on shiny surfaces like glass, polished granite or laminated wood (like desks), and only the iPhone 5 has exactly the right balance. It’s a jaw-dropper.

ELECTRONIC LEASHES The Ciago iAlert and Cobra Tag are Bluetooth keychain fobs that communicate with your iPhone or Android phone. Once you’re 30 feet away from the phone, the keychain starts beeping, as though to say, “You’re leaving your $200 phone behind, you idiot!” It works the other way, too; the phone beeps if you leave your keys behind.

In practice, these fobs are cheaply built and, if the Amazon reviews are to be believed, not always reliable. But remember — on the night of the Pogies, it’s the idea that counts.

BLUETOOTH 4.0 Bluetooth is that wireless technology that connects gadgets within 30 feet — your phone to your headset, for example — and kills your battery charge. Right?

Actually, it doesn’t anymore. Bluetooth 4.0, built into the latest iPhone and Android phones, is also called Bluetooth LE (low energy) for a reason. For the most part, it uses power only when it has data to exchange. The rest of the time, it sleeps.

Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? (excellent piece from Nick Kristof)

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence.

So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.

American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has five pages of regulations about ladders, while federal authorities shrug at serious curbs on firearms. Ladders kill around 300 Americans a year, and guns 30,000.

We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don’t have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys. What do we make of the contrast between heroic teachers who stand up to a gunman and craven, feckless politicians who won’t stand up to the N.R.A.?

As one of my Facebook followers wrote after I posted about the shooting, “It is more difficult to adopt a pet than it is to buy a gun.”

Look, I grew up on an Oregon farm where guns were a part of life; and my dad gave me a .22 rifle for my 12th birthday. I understand: shooting is fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be equally adult about regulating guns?

And don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually.

Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting.

The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

So what can we do? A starting point would be to limit gun purchases to one a month, to curb gun traffickers. Likewise, we should restrict the sale of high-capacity magazines so that a shooter can’t kill as many people without reloading.

We should impose a universal background check for gun buyers, even with private sales. Let’s make serial numbers more difficult to erase, and back California in its effort to require that new handguns imprint a microstamp on each shell so that it can be traced back to a particular gun.

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama noted in a tearful statement on television. He’s right, but the solution isn’t just to mourn the victims — it’s to change our policies. Let’s see leadership on this issue, not just moving speeches.

Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands.

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings.

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.

Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.

For that matter, we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.”

Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.

Some of you are alive today because of those auto safety regulations. And if we don’t treat guns in the same serious way, some of you and some of your children will die because of our failure.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google , watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

Big rebates on Epson printers

Epson Stylus Pro & Photo Printer Rebates

 

- $150 Mail-in Rebate - Epson Stylus Photo R2880 *Download Rebate form here (Valid December 1, 2012 - December 31, 2012)

- $200 Mail-in Rebate - Epson Stylus Photo R3000  *Download Rebate form here (Valid December 1, 2012 - December 31, 2012) 

- $100 Mail-in Rebate - Epson Stylus Photo R2000  *Download Rebate form here (Valid December 1, 2012 - December 31, 2012)