Live From Down Under

April 5 and 6 I'll be broadcasting the radio show live from Sea FM/Heart 107.3 Hobart, TAS, Australia. It'll be 4-7 am Sunday and Monday local time, but the show will air at its normal time here in the Northern Hemisphere! I'll be taking calls as usual, and if I can wake anyone up at that hour there may be some special Tasmanian guests, as well.

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.