Roderigo, a Brazilian Pilot has put together a nice collection of videos shot from the cockpit of an Airbus 319 he’s flying. Looks like he might have used a GoPro Camera.

[via Zapong]

DVF from Luis Aguirre on Vimeo.

Diane von Furstenberg’s narration makes this.

If you can figure out your suitcase, it’s pretty much you can figure out your life.

[via The Kid Should See This]

National Geographic Photographer Jim Richardson takes a long road trip across the USA in search of examples of “light pollution.”

Next day I would be driving on with thousands of miles ahead of me. I had a trunk full of gear and my iPod loaded with music and audio books. With luck I’d have hours out of cellphone territory, where I could crank the music up loud (great territory for Mahler, moody and vast) and tell the world to get lost.

Oh yeah. Reading this excellent story definitely gets me in the mood for a road trip.

[via Steve Splonskowski]

For the past year I’ve been using this Rubbermaid Handi-box Snap Case to pack my Canon 5D, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L lens, Canon 100mm f/2.8 L macro lens or a Canon 135mm f/2 lens (either/or), a pouch with extra batteries and CF cards, a blower, and a strap. The only part of the kit that won’t fit in this plastic case are the two lens hoods for the lenses and they go in my LowePro Stealth Reporter 200 bag.

I’d put this stuff in the bag but in fact, it’s better protected in this plastic case and the bag holds battery chargers and computer stuff I don’t need on the plane.

The camera is in a small, padded Eagle Creek pouch and the lenses are in Zing lens pouches.

I’ve used this system to pack and check my camera gear on each of my JFK to LAX flights for the past year (7 trips) and it’s worked beautifully. used to carry the Stealth Reporter bag on the plane as a carry on but given that I check a piece of luggage I figured why not check this stuff?

I also check a small Benro travel tripod and head.

I know, many of you are thinking this is a recipe for disaster: TSA will take my gear, it will get broken one of these days, or the bag will get lost. All of these are possible but in fact, I’ve done this numerous times now and nothing has happened except I get to travel lighter on the plane.

I looked into Pelican cases but I don’t need such a high end case, just something that will protect the gear in case of a direct hit. These 5 images show the kit in various states of unpack/pack.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I have a soft sided North Face rolling duffel and this case goes on the bottom with clothing on top of it. It has never moved or been compromised in any way and TSA has never opened it (that I know of) so it must look like camera gear in the x-ray image.

Something to consider for those of you who travel with a DSLR kit that you don’t want to lug on the plane.

A new Qantas trial pilot program will see one of the airline’s Boeing 767-300 jets outfitted with one iPad 2 for each passenger, according to the Australian Business Traveller. Each of the aircraft’s 254 seats will have its own iPad 2, and there will also be several spares kept on hand just in case. All seats pockets will carry an iPad 2, but business-class travelers will also get a flexible stand to use with their fold-out meal tray.

The pilot program is about testing Qantas’ in-flight Wi-Fi streaming capabilities, Qantas Executive Manager for Customer Experience Alison Webster told the ABT. The ultimate goal is to be able to provide passengers with access to the Q Streaming service through their own devices, be they Apple’s iPads and iPhones or Android tablets and handsets.

I love using my iPad on United PS flights cross country but I must say, gogo inflight internet isn’t the greatest (yet). I buy and use it to keep up with email and RSS and comments at this site but for anything serious like a video download it’s useless. I don’t know where the bottleneck is but no doubt this kind of deal is the beginning of working it out.

The American Civil Liberties Union overview of your rights as a photographer in the United States.

Fantastic. I’ll be doing tech support on my cross country United PS flights. Cool.

Early on post 9/11 I felt for TSA agents; they have to absorb quite a bit of nervousness, aggravation, racism, and idiocy from people who don’t flow well. However, lately there has been a change in the way TSA seems to be doing their screening and instead of helping with flow, they’re getting aggressive which is unnecessary and hurts their PR.

I routinely travel with a pack and a camera bag with high end gear in both. When I run this stuff through x-ray (computer out of bag) I like to get through screening so I can be there to pick it up when it gets through the conveyor belt. But, if I’m not, I make mention to the TSA agent that I’d like to keep an eye on my stuff. I make this request politely with a smile on my face and good eye contact. It has never been a problem until now.

On my last four trips the various TSA agents not only became irritated with my request, two of them (two separate airports) walked me over to desks further away from my stuff for no apparent reason just to press the point that they were in control and who was I to make such a request. One of them held me at the desk for 5 minutes for no reason, long enough for many people to paw over my stuff on the conveyor belt.

As many of you know there is no one watching the conveyor belt to make sure that the right person picks up the right stuff. This has always been a logistical problem with air travel (since metal detectors started to be used) and isn’t the fault of TSA. However, because TSA can cause a bottleneck in getting through they can exacerbate the problem. They should at least acknowledge the problem rather than making it worse.

I didn’t make a scene and I eventually got all my stuff but not before it was piled up with other people’s stuff in such a way that someone could have easily walked off with my computer, phone, or camera gear.

This is both a logistical problem but also a social one: two times TSA agents not only failed to acknowledge my concern but made concerted efforts to show they had power by making it harder or me to see my stuff.

That pushed me over the hump and now I’m dead set against TSA unionizing. Frankly I think TSA should be dismantled and redesigned with better logistics, better screening, and better training.

Equipment

- Canon PowerShot S95 (Steve’s camera)
- Sony DSC-TX5 (Kristen’s camera)
- 5 SD cards ranging in size from 1GB to 4GB
- AC chargers for both cameras
- iPad 2 (16G Wifi model)
- Zagg iPad case with built-in Logitech Bluetooth keyboard
- iPad camera connection kit
- 2 iPad AC chargers (also used for charging iPhones)
- USB charging cable for the Zagg (using an iPad charger)
- 4 US to Spain (Type C) plug converters

The plan and its execution

1. The plan was to offload each camera every day onto the iPad for back up. And to change SD cards occasionally during the trip. We considered shipping the cards back home during the trip but did not do this.

2. The first misstep of the execution was forgetting to change the date/time on the cameras when we arrived in Spain. I had thought about this ahead of time but forgot when we arrived (jet lagged) in country. To compound this problem one of cameras was setup for DST and other other was not. So not only where they on the home timezone, they were about an hour different from each other. I plan to programmatically adjust the image file timestamps now that we are home.

3. The iPad and camera connection kit turned out to be a very smooth way to offload the photos and view them. This was a complete success for us. Altogether for the 22 days we took 1244 photos with a total size of 4.3 GB. The iPad started getting full at one point – we had a movie on it that we were planning to delete if needed and that did the trick.

4. For sharing photos with folks back home I setup a ‘Spain trip’ set on flickr that we would push photos onto during the trip. The good news is that we had Wifi access at all of the locations we stayed (this was part of the criteria for selecting lodging). As a note, this was much different from our experience 4 years ago in France and Italy were we struggled to find internet access. We pushed a couple of pictures up to flickr each day – everyone back home liked seeing the photos and keeping track of our progress on the trip.

5. I had found an app for the iPad called Snapseed that provided some basic photo editing capabilities and sharing to flickr. This worked out pretty well. It would be nice if Snapseed had better photo library browsing UI (it uses the standard iOS UI in a popover and does NOT remember your place from the last browsing session). The editing facilities worked just fine. The flickr upload worked pretty well overall, but seemed to have problems adding the photo to the flickr set on marginal Wifi connections (it would report a timeout). Richard noticed that photos uploaded to flickr with Snapseed did not seem to have their original EXIF data. I need to do some testing to see if any of the iPhone/iPad apps get this correct. Finally, the EXIF data is intact on all of the photos that were loaded onto the iPad (and then subsequently brought onto my Mac in iPhoto).

6. The Zagg case with the Bluetooth keyboard was a huge success. It is a rigid aluminum cover for the iPad so it is well protected for travel. And the keyboard was a pleasure to use for writing email and other typing chores – huge benefit over using the on-screen keyboard. The keyboard battery did not require charging for the full three weeks.

Except for forgetting to set the time/date on the cameras, things work out really well. This was a light kit of gear that provided a bunch of functionality and a good way to backup and share our photos while traveling.

If you have questions or comments please post them here.