Getting some headspace on my ‘Data Holiday’ in Laos & Cambodia – and watching kids messing around in the Mekong River

I just got back from ten days of exploring and generally running around Laos and Cambodia, and am feeling all the better for it. My self-imposed ban on all feeds digital, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘www’ and mobile worked pretty well, and I will be doing this activity on a more regular basis in future – it’s just too easy for me to get caught up in all the pace and excitement of a thousand trillion bits of information all vying for your attention – and most of those bits being things I set up for myself.

I have a big pile of photos to sort out, and some architecting (if that is a word) of my images. I took the plunge and bought a new camera (‘finally!’, I hear you say) – a Canon 5D, allowing me to gain free access to the lenses and toys of my flat mate’s 5D MkII – and have been shooting in ‘digital negative’ RAW. I am quite excited about the extra options this will give me, but a little unsure of how I want the workflow to operate, since iPhoto does not really help me too much in that respect. I am messing around with Adobe Lightroom, and I suppose I will be spending the next few weeks working out how I want my data to exist. One thing is for sure – my spacious 250 Gb internal hard drive that I bought six or so months ago is now 40 Gb from becoming full up, and shooting in RAW is going to knock that space out in a jiffy.

Anyway – I’ll aim to pump out a bunch of images in the conventional fashion using iPhoto for the time being so I can get a full blog post up, and then perhaps use Flickr more for my artsy fartsy messing around with images. All very exciting.