Speak Softly And Carry A Big Camera Bag

I'm leaving tonight for Australia on the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop Adventure 2008: Tasmania! My good friend Mikkel Aaland, author of O'Reilly's Lightroom Adventure is leading another photo expedition; this time it's to Tasmania with a bunch of the world's top photographers for the next edition of his book and he invited me to come. I couldn't resist even though I'm no photo pro. (They're billing me as a "special media guest.") I do apologize to my friends on the mainland - the itinerary is limited to Tassie: A week in Hobart and a week in the wild. Our Qantas flight does stopover for seven hours in Sydney, so thanks to Aussie Mike, we'll do an impromptu meetup at the Starbucks at Terminal 3, Sydney Airport, 11a-1p on Tuesday. (It's a 12-hour flight and we cross the International Date Line so even though I'm leaving Sunday night I won't arrive in Sydney until Tuesday morning!) If there are any fans in Hobart who want to set up a meet up on Thursday or Friday let me know. I'll be doing my radio show from Sea FM/Heart 107.3 Hobart Sunday and Monday morning 4-7a local time (Tasmania is UTC +11 but it'll be live in the States). The following week I won't have access to a studio so we'll air two shows I've recorded ahead of time with all new material. I'm bringing enough gear to equip a multimedia army.

• Canon 5D digital SLR with 24-105mm, 50mm f1.2, 70-200 f4, 180mm Macro, and Lensbaby 3G lenses
• Pentax K20D DSLR (my backup camera, on loan from Pentax) with 50mm Macro and16-200 Zoom lenses
• The new Canon HV30 Vixia Hi-Def Video Camera with wide angle converter and Canon shotgun mic
• HHB FlashMic flash audio recorder
• Marantz PMD-660 flash audio recorder with Shure SM-58 mic (as backup)
• Apple MacBook with 250GB internal and a 160GB external backup drive, equipped with Final Cut Express 4, Amadeus Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS3, and Lightroom

All this fits into my Lowepro CompuTrekker Plus AW backpack (it's huge) but I'm also bringing a Lowepro Slingshot 200 AW to carry into the field. And a change of underwear. Thank goodness I'm not going by ship. I think I'd sink it. There's a reason for all this gear. I'll be blogging the whole time I'm Down Under, including photos (on Smugmug and Flickr), audio (here), and video (on Smugmug and Viddler) so watch this space. Many of the other photographers will be blogging as well on the O'Reilly blog site.

San Francisco Here I Come

It's vacation time. The kids' last day of school is today and Sunday we're flying to San Francisco, just north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for a week at Costa Azul. We haven't been there before but we know two families that have and they say it's great. A little rustic, but great. Rustic is fine by me. As long as it's not touristy. Henry and I will be taking surfing lessons. Jennifer and Abby plan to go on a hike through the rain forest. We'll all be spending a lot of time at the beach. I don't think I'll be able to get online while I'm there, but I am bringing a laptop. That's because right after I get back Patrick and I will be flying to Washington D.C. to speak with the US Secret Service electronic crimes task force, ECSAP on Monday, June 23. I've been downloading material on Microsoft's Palladium and Intel's Trusted Computing Platform and I'll be using Keynote on my old G3 Powerbook to create a presentation for the Secret Service. TSS meets The SS. I had to send back the Nikon D100, but I've got an Olympus E-20N and 512 MB of compact flash I'll be bringing with me to Mexico. It's a high-end prosumer camera, no interchangable lenses, but the CCD is five megapixels and the built-in optics are quite nice - f2-2.4, 35-140mm - so the pictures look great. I'll post some when I get back on the 24th. Meanwhile Brett Larson will fill in for me on Call for Help. Kevin Rose and Jessica Corbin will co-host on The Screen Savers with Patrick. See you on Tuesday, June 24!