Who said you can't do a road trip in Hawaii?

[pakodominguez]

It is a fairly long flight from NYC. I just checked and generally under 11 hours to Honolulu and under 10 hours going back. I am so used to flying though that those seem like short flights. For example, my most recent trip was something like 42 hours to Kathmandu and then about 38 hours going home. I certainly don't like flying though.

I don't really suffer in the plane (but I don't appreciate that much the time at the airport) but my wife does, a couple of years ago we went to Buenos Aires (12 hours flight) visiting good old friends, and she need a couple of days for recovery. I already went to Buenos Aires from Paris, and it is 14 hours flight: I watched all the movies...

[bakubo]

I don't really suffer in the plane (but I don't appreciate that much the time at the airport) but my wife does, a couple of years ago we went to Buenos Aires (12 hours flight) visiting good old friends, and she need a couple of days for recovery. I already went to Buenos Aires from Paris, and it is 14 hours flight: I watched all the movies...

Someday I want to go to Argentina! One of my old friends and co-workers in California immigrated from Argentina with his family when he was a teenager and when we worked together we sometimes talked about Argentina.

The actual flight and sitting in the plane is not terrible, but the total experience is:

- Going through all the hassles of meeting all the security requirements for carry-on and check-in baggage. Any liquids more than 2oz must go in the check-in bag, but what if you don't have a check-in bag? Knife, scissors, etc. must go in a check-in bag also. If I have a check-in bag I must carefully figure out what goes in the carry-on and what goes in the check-in. Camera gear and certain important stuff always stays with me since I have had airlines temporarily (for a few days) lose check-in bags and I have had things stolen from check-in bags and now we can't even lock the check-in bag or if we do it has to be a lock that the airline people have a key for. To avoid some of these hassles I try as much as possible to not have a check-in bag, but that means that my carry-on that has everything for a month-long trip must be small and light enough that it qualifies as a carry-on. It also means that during transfers I have to lug my backpack around, sometimes for hours, inside the airport. This is my backpack in Ecuador in 2005 (I have a new one that is almost identical now):



- Needing to leave home 3 hours or so before an international flight (and about 2 hours before a domestic flight) and paying $40-50 (including tip) for a taxi (and then pay it again when I return to get home).

- Standing in line, sometimes a long line, to get checked in at the airport and then going through the hassle of security (take off shoes, belt, empty pockets, etc.) and sometimes have my bag opened, stuff removed, and then in a hurry I am trying to get it repacked so that it all fits again.

- Flights are sometimes delayed, cancelled, etc. In Kathmandu they cancelled my return flight and then I spent 3 additional days there waiting for a new flight. Fortunately, the hotel I was at had not rented out my room to anyone so I was able to keep it (and pay for it) for a few more days. It is unusual to have to wait that long for a new flight, but in Bangkok one time I arrived at the airport (way outside Bangkok) to go back to Japan and when I tried to check in they told me that my return flight had been rescheduled to about 3 hours earlier so I had just missed it. The flight had been confirmed about 3 days earlier and there was no mention that the time had changed. They tried to make me buy a new ticket, but I escalated it up and after about 4 hours of being bounced from one person to another I was finally taken to an office in the bowels of the airport where non-employees normally have no access to and can't go. The one good thing was that although the flight was a Thai Airways flight it was a code-share flight and my ticket was for ANA (Japanese airline) and I finally got to talk to a Japanese ANA employee (rather than Thai Thai Airways employees). We spoke in mostly Japanese and some English and he was sympathetic. I kept very calm and just beseeched him to help me. He finally left the office to make a phone call to Japan and about 20 minutes later he told me they would issue me a new plane ticket for the next day. Great! But, I then had to take a taxi way back to Bangkok, find a room to spend the night, and then return to the airport the next day.

- Not much need to talk about the actual flight since most people know about them. Usually not so bad, but the occasional problem. Occasionally I get lucky and get on a brand new plane with the personal video with a selection of hundreds of movies. The best I have ever been on was Qatar Airlines flying from Japan to Egypt in 2009.

- Arrival and going through immigration, collecting my check-in bag (if I checked one in), and customs.

- Then one of the worst parts. Getting from the airport to wherever I am going to stay for the night. In much of the world it is a big hassle with scammers galore waiting outside the airport. You are tired, often it is very hot and humid when you arrive (in countries such as Vietnam, etc.), you have a bulky/heavy backpack, you have to keep a watch out for pickpockets which love tired, distracted, disoriented foreigners and you are dealing with often multiple, simultaneous, persistent guys trying to get you into their car to take you somewhere. All talking at the same time, usually all lying, often tugging on your arm or trying to take your bag out of your hand, and so on. Anyway, I have gone through this enough and in enough places that it usually all works out, but that is because I generally know what to look for and a Lonely Planet book can give you some specifics about the sorts of scams that might be common in a particular location.

- Then when you go home you do it all again with some variations since you start the return trip in a foreign country where things are usually done a bit differently.

[bfitzgerald]

Henry you should have enough material for a book (put me down for one if you do!)
Some good stuff there a place I would love to see at some point.

[Birma]

Very nice pictures Henry , I especially like the light house shot. If I ever get to Hawaii I think I will choose a beer over a coffee to help recover form the flight! My shout

I'm still looking forward to the book as well (and of course the inevitable tie-in TV mini-series)

[Greg Beetham]

Good grief Henry, you’re another one who deserves a medal, I don’t know how you can put up with that travelling bullchit, I’m sure I couldn’t do it.
Greg

[bakubo]

From time to time I have sort of thought about making a book, but I suppose it would mostly be a vanity thing, I guess. I have looked at some of the publishing websites such as:

blurb.com
lulu.com
viovio.com
mixbook.com
etc.

The prices are quite high though. If I was to just make one or two books then the price is not particularly important as long as it wasn't out of reason, but it is hard to see how it would make much sense to actually think you could sell any because the price would be quite high. Go to a bookstore and generally most of the photo books are $15 to $45 or so. Some cheaper and some more, of course. Generally, viovio.com seems to have the best prices and I have seen good comments about their quality, but even with them an 11"x8.5" landscape oriented hardback, dustcover book with 100 pages is $75 each. With a softcover it is $68. Plus shipping.

Anyone have any experience with this stuff or thoughts?

[bakubo]

Very nice pictures Henry , I especially like the light house shot. If I ever get to Hawaii I think I will choose a beer over a coffee to help recover form the flight! My shout

By the way, I forgot to say that if you are buying the first round then I will buy the second.

[bakubo]

The prices are quite high though. If I was to just make one or two books then the price is not particularly important as long as it wasn't out of reason, but it is hard to see how it would make much sense to actually think you could sell any because the price would be quite high. Go to a bookstore and generally most of the photo books are $15 to $45 or so. Some cheaper and some more, of course. Generally, viovio.com seems to have the best prices and I have seen good comments about their quality, but even with them an 11"x8.5" landscape oriented hardback, dustcover book with 100 pages is $75 each. With a softcover it is $68. Plus shipping.

This morning I watched a 1 hour webinar put on by Adobe and Blurb titled:

Using Lightroom 4 to Create your Photo Books

Lightroom can make books for Blurb and then it will upload them. The photographer they had to do the webinar went through all the steps in LR to set up a book and it was interesting. Viewers of the webinar watched the guy's computer screen and listened to him talk about what he was doing and why. They had a woman (I think a Blurb employee) who would occasionally make comments also or ask him a question. He had made several books already and it turns out, he said, that the one he made as an example for the webinar was one he had already done.

It all looked pretty cool and very flexible, but I was still struck by the price. His 12"x12" hardback book with 26 pages ended up costing $100 plus shipping (plus taxes too maybe). Yes, 26 pages. Since, I assume, he sells his books at something above cost so that he can make some money from all of his work making the books then we are probably talking about a total selling price for his 26 page book of $150-200. Hmmm, does this make sense to anyone??? If it is just a vanity thing to see your photos in a book that you buy one of and put on your bookshelf then, I guess, I can sort of understand it. Or, maybe buy a small number that you give as gifts. But, thinking people who are not your family or your close friends will actually buy a 26 page book for those prices? Okay, if you are a really famous photographer and you personally sign a small number of them and sell the 26 page book for $150-200 then okay, but that is a very special case.

[bakubo]

By the way, the talk about photo books is getting pretty far off the subject of this thread so I created a new thread here:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... =52&t=7473

[Ken M]

Love it!

[bakubo]

Love it!

Thanks, Ken!