Heh, here I am sitting fully clad in my apartment, bags waiting to go.

I think I did a pretty good job this time round of packing and preplanning, as I’ve managed to cram everything into my bag and the weight feels about right, somewhere around 20kgs, based on just lifting my luggage up with both hands.

Hand luggage is still a pain, as my D70, D300 and the attached lens already border around 2.5kgs. As I will be hopping from plane to plane (NY -> Denver -> LA -> Sydney -> Melbourne), I’d rather not have too much stuff to carry. I always have a paranoia with flying, as there are so many things out of your control. The weather for one, as America is notoriously known for flights being delayed/cancelled due to bad weather. Then you have to go through customs, security checkpoints and there are like 101 disagreeable items that you can carry on board. Heh, I’m just thinking I need to survive the next 15 hours and as long as I’m on the plane from LA, hopefully I will be fine. Bought some books to read for the flights, and my DS Lite just in case I need extra entertainment.

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I have been following up a lot on various types of photography. Heh, I realise that I’ve been looking at a lot of photos over the past few years but not paying very much attention. Heh, so 3 years I had a good camera in the D70, and I complain about certain aspects of it. Those complaints are still valid, but rather than complain about it, I should have found ways around it. It just never occurred to me then to check out the Internet for more ideas.

Learning photography is like work. You can either go about it the monotonous tried and true way where you get your shot, it sort of gets the idea and works for you, but it’s not value adding. These days I’ve been evaluating a lot of photos online, looking at shots and wondering how I’d frame the subject, how I’d approach the lighting aspect. I have all these ideas now that I want to try but haven’t had a chance yet. Heh, my pile of lenses are in Melbourne and they offer the flexibility to test these ideas. That and the fact that the sun sets at 845pm allows me more time to catch the rays of light.

The idea is to not revert to one’s comfortable mode of shooting, cause if I did, my photos will look good, just not outstanding. I want to be able to make outstanding photos, and preferably not just through random luck of pressing the shutter button at the right time and place.

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Okay, praying that I make it back in one piece and can post something on Monday Melbourne time.