The images in the video are all from my trip from Pennsylvania to Virginia to visit my brother, by way of Shenandoah National Park. With this in-car camera rig, I used a radio remote to trigger the shutter when there was an interesting scene. Post-production was done in Aperture, Quicktime, and iMovie HD.

I arrived in the park later than planned, which left me just enough time to make camp before driving to the trail head. Dinner was in the car - a turkey sandwich from the camp store. With the light waning, I double-timed it up the trail to the summit of Stony Man, and was rewarded with a great view, beautiful colors, and a nice collection of rocks and small pools in the foreground. After a few hours of shooting the changing scene, I donned a headlight and hiked back down in the dark, relieved that the glowing eyes in the forest were just deer and rabbits, not bears!

With less money to spend on travel, camping offers a great bargain - especially if you can borrow gear from family and friends! (That tent is older than I am.) As for comfort, they key is throwing out all the catalogs of slick but uncomfortable backpacking gear and embracing the excess of car camping: an Aerobed and extension cord do wonders to change your perspective on sleeping outdoors!

Beyond the money, there’s the experience: being in the park, sunrise to sunset. That means catching great photos, seeing more wildlife, and being able to take advantage of more ranger programs.

Gear

While photography was a focus of the trip, traveling in developing countries with a small tour group meant making some compromises in order to travel light on buses, trains, and boats. I took the Canon 50D camera and Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 Image Stabilized USM and the Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM, though the  50mm got little use and could’ve been left home. The Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash provided lighting, along with CTO (warming) gels and a StoFen diffuser.

Instead of a tripod, I took a smaller Gorillapod SLR Zoom with a mini ball head. And instead of the MacBook Pro, I bought a 120 GB HyperDrive Space to offload memory cards. All this went into a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home bag, which is very discreet for a camera bag and also offered room for the essential water bottle, guide book, sunscreen, and anti-bacterial gel.

Shooting

Like packing, shooting was a compromise between having alone time to compose and experiment and touring with limited time to perfect photos. In the harsh heat and light of mid-day, shooting became a basic exercise of finding decent light and composition, maybe adding some fill or bounce flash, and moving on. A nice complement to this was high-speed, handheld HDR. Using the 50D’s 6.3 frames per second and auto-exposure bracketing, I was able to capture 3 daylight frames for high-dynamic range images without a tripod.

The Gorillapod was useful for night and sunrise; being in mostly urban and developed areas, there was generally something to rest it on to get more height. While the mini ball head was easier to adjust than the Gorillapod’s legs, it was a little shaky for the camera’s weight.

Using many kinds of transportation made for good motion shots from boats, tuk tuks, and cyclos. Like any motion blur shots, repetition was key to getting good frames, and flash at dusk helped freeze passengers as subjects.

Though I wasn’t changing lenses much, some dust did still accumulate on the sensor. Most of it cleared with a good blowing, though without being able to periodically check photos on a computer, a regular test shot would’ve been a good idea. (A high f-number shot of a white bedsheet examined at high zoom on the camera worked well enough.)

Security

Keeping camera and images safe was a natural concern in big cities and developing countries. It was nice to have a discreet shoulder bag that could be swung around to the front in market crowds, though that much weight on one shoulder took some adjustment.

I also swapped out the obvious steal-me “Canon 50D” strap for a plainer and more comfortable OP/TECH Pro Loop Strap. That and the bag strap were generally slung across my chest, making me feel much more secure than the people I saw with SLRs dangling in hand. The final touch was a Opteka Wrist Strap, which I tried to slide into before even taking the camera out of the bag and also provided some support gripping the camera all day.

Backups

I copied images to the Hyperdrive each night using its built-in verification process to randomly check a selection of images. The best images were write-protected on the card before erasing it, providing a second copy of about 500 photos over the course of the trip. The Hyperdrive always copies the complete card, and with that duplication, the 2200 photos took up 98 GB of the 120 GB.

As the cards filled up, they went into my money belt with my passport, and the Hyperdrive was generally locked in the hotel’s safe. The Hyperdrive had gotten mixed reviews, so I made sure to test drive it for a while before the trip. But I was still surprised when it became slow and started garbling screens; fortunately, it continued to copy cards.

Processing

Of the 3026 images, 2216 survived in-camera deletion and returned home on the Hyperdrive. From there, I copied them onto a Western Digital 2TB My Book Studio II Drive with RAID 1 Mirroring, essentially creating two more copies. The Hyperdrive then went into the fire safe as backup.

Each card copied into its own directory, so this was a convenient way to import and process a day’s worth of images at a time. The 17-85 lens has some noticeable pincushion distortion at the wide end, which was corrected in Canon’s Digital Picture Professional software.

HDR frames were processed in Photomatix Pro. Though I’ve been striving for more natural HDRs, some of the scenes lent themselves to a little more color and a softer, more surreal final product. Most images got a boost in saturation, contrast, and sharpness, along with a slight s-curve when I needed a little more pop. My use of monochrome was pretty sparing; most of the scenes in Asia are too colorful to desaturate.

Another common issue was bringing some definition back into blown-out, hazy white skies, which was generally possible with recovery and highlights adjustments. Bright skies also made it clear where the dust spots were and how many days since I had cleaned the sensor!

Final Numbers and Thoughts

The final tally of 657 images surprised me a bit, though I was glad to keep that many given the photographic compromises of the trip. About 30% were wide (< 24 mm on a crop sensor), which met my goal to expand my perspective a bit.

The gear I took felt appropriate, though after carrying around nearly continuously for 3 weeks, it would be nice to shave some weight from it. Processing and publishing in small batches worked well and took about 2 weeks in total.

Overall, it was a successful and productive trip as a photographer; my skills and practice served me well, and southeast Asia provided a wealth of interesting subjects!

See the Asia photos

• How much do you and your employer pay in total premiums for health insurance?
• What does a doctor’s visit or medical procedure cost you, and what additional amount does insurance pay?
• What would the same visit or procedure cost without insurance?

Those simple questions are often difficult to answer because there’s little information or transparency when it comes to health care costs. Employers often don’t disclose the majority share of the premiums they pay, and after your copay most costs occur behind the convoluted curtain of the insurance industry.

Here’s an idea of those costs:

• “Family coverage can cost on average about $1,000 a month, according to Families USA, a national nonprofit. The average monthly COBRA premium for individual coverage is $388.” (ajc.com)
• My last regular office visit was a $10 copay, plus an additional $46 paid by insurance.
• Without insurance, the same office visit would’ve been $80. Over the years, regular services I’ve received under insurance averaged a 60% discount from standard rates.

Two groups should be interested in increasing cost transparency: employers and insurers. Both pay significant amounts on behalf of the insured, and should be eager to quantify those benefits.

Aetna is off to a good start; their website allows you to view claims and see the amount billed and those actually paid by yourself and your insurance. They are also starting to take the next step by providing cost estimates before you go to the doctor.

With more information like this, we would have a better understanding of the true costs of healthcare and be able to plan & save accordingly.

The little bit of research I did revealed that there was a tourist information desk at the airport that was a good resource. My overnight flight from Vietnam arrived before they opened, so I had a chance to grab breakfast and brush my teeth before the very helpful (and English-speaking!) woman gave me some pointers.

Her suggestion: take the bus downtown, and ride and hop-on hop-off tourist bus circuit to over 2 dozen sites. It worked quite well; the downtown bus was a full coach with incredible legroom for the 1.5 hour trip from Incheon airport into downtown Seoul. The tourist bus was right there, and stops at several palaces, markets, and museums. And they even take care of you if you lose your ticket because your brain is only running at half power

My first stop was Deoksugung Palace, which was more oriental than any others on the trip. They also do an intricate traditional changing of the guard, which amusingly happens with Dunkin Donuts as a backdrop. Dozing off on the next bus ride convinced me to get some lunch at Itaewon, a street full of western chain eateries and stores. Behind them, though, was Buddha Belly and some decent Thai curry and lemongrass tea. (After thinking how nice it would be to have some cold weather after all the heat, I got more than I bargained for with a windy 52-degree F day and desperately needed to warm up.)

Then it was onto Nasamgol Traditional Village, a collection of classic homes overrun by school kids and couples taking part in a traditional marriage ceremony - robes, live chicken, and all. Riding up to the top of Mt. Namsan behind the village took me to the N Seoul Tower’s high observation deck, where I even managed to spot a few of the day’s destinations.

Back at the bottom, I started to get nervous - I still had to ride the last half of the tour bus circuit, and then catch the airport bus, check in, and clear security - and it was starting to get late. The buses made good time, though, so I got to breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to finally sleeping in my own bed again.

Overall, it was a good day; the city is much more modern and sane than those of the last 3 weeks and fairly tourist friendly - not a bad place to spend a day layover.

This class was “family style” at Gioan, where all of us sat around the table chopping ingredients and then cooked one batch together. Our teacher Vinam was very sweet and energetic; she gave us all vegetable names (I was “Lemongrass”) and jokingly threatened to put us in the corner if we didn’t pay attention. (I was too tired and sunburnt that night to go crazy with my camera, so I stayed in her good graces.)

The ingredients were similar to the Thai dishes, though with less intensive preparation. The one exception were some ingredients that had to be wrung out or juiced by the “big strong men”: Barn “Green Papaya”, Matt “Aubergine”, Chris “Cucumber”, and myself.

We learned how to roll and fry the spring rolls we’d been enjoying all week, as well as make a surprising green papaya salad, and fish wrapped in banana leaves. Vinam was flexible with all the recipes, making vegetarian substitutions for Jenn (”Baby Onion”), and suggesting less exotic ingredients we might be able to find at home.

With 5 dishes, several rounds of drinks, and an impromptu fashion show of some of our new clothes , it was a long but enjoyable night learning some new recipes.

Many of us had been planning to get clothes made, and decided to make dinner quick our first night to get to the tailors. We didn’t even have to finish dinner; the small restaurant across from our hotel was next to a clothing shop, whose owner came over with her toddler to say hi and invite us in for a look. It might’ve been clever marketing, but their samples and fabrics looked good, and Matt & Anna reported similar findings at another nearby shop, so we had found our store!

That turned out to be the easy part, as their table was stacked with thick catalogs of styles, and the walls piled high with enough fabrics and silk to satisfy my mom and grandma! We had a fun scramble through catalog pages and fabric bolts, which was certainly more fun as a group. Jenn and Chris provided a good sounding board for my choices, and the final tally was astonishingly low for so many custom pieces.

Then it was on to shoes! Everyone seems pretty well connected in town, so we also were introduced to the wife of the local cobbler, who was similarly willing to make us any pair of shoes in any material. The measurement process was fun: she traced each foot on a piece of paper and wrapped a tape measure around the foot in a couple of spots. And she did all this while quite pregnant!

We returned late the following afternoon for fittings, though a few items weren’t ready yet. Big piles awaited all of us as we cycled through the make-shift dressing room in the back kitchen. Adjustments and the remaining items would be ready that night, after our cooking class, so we’d have everything when we left the following morning.

The cooking class was good fun, until someone looked at the clock and realized we were nowhere near finishing by the time our guide had advertised. Vinam, our cooking teacher, was great, though. She called the 3 different shops and arranged for them to bring all the clothes via motorbike for us to try on there! It was quite a scene of food and fashion, and a level of service that you just wouldn’t find at home.

Instead, we got more worn, drab-green cabins whose only real charm was getting a good “roughing it” experience. After a beer or two to ease the jolt (a Gorillapod can be twisted into a cupholder, by the way), the stewards brought around schedule cards with pictures of much nicer cabins. Chris and Matt set out to find these mythical cabins, with clean, already made beds and walls paneled with fake wood instead of real grime. Having honed their negotiating skills after two weeks of beating down local hawkers, they came back with an offer to upgrade all 3 cabins for our group for half price, or about $8 a person. With 12 hours to go, we all jumped in and moved on up.

Except, that is for our tour guide Huy. Unlike our Cambodian guide, he hasn’t really endeared himself to the group, and had disappeared to take a nap. So he got quite a surprise when he found us not in our assigned cabins, but up in a higher class. Once he found out we weren’t squatting and had struck a deal, he followed suit. The look on his face must’ve been priceless, though.

Another good advnture was walking to the “dining car” at the back of the train. This passed through the non-sleeper cabins, where the locals were sprawled on the seats and the floor with babies, assorted food, and TV, surprisingly. A few squat toilets with the light of the tracks flickering below completed the picture. The dining car itself was only four booths and staff preparing rice and selling beer straight from the fridge - much colder than off the drink cart!

The rest of the ride wasn’t as exciting; we pretty much lounged, muched, and socialized in our fancy cabins until everyone was ready for bed. It wasn’t a terribly restful night, with the alternating motion and stops of the train, and bunks that were a little too short to stretch out. At a little past 4 in the morning, though, we made it into Hanoi with yet another story to tell.

The region is dense jungle, crawling with centipedes and snails and quite loud once the other biomass starts talking. It’s tough to imagine finding or fighting anyone here, even without the tunnels. With tunnels, traps, and bombs everywhere, victory seems impossibile.

A tunnel entrance, invisible under a covering of leaves, is a tiny 18 x 10 inches - just enough to admit a skinny person’s torso with their arms held up. A few of us dropped in with headlamps and began a doubled-over duck walk through tunnels no more than 3 feet high and 2 feet wide. After the first bend, all outside light and air disappears and the heat and claustrophobia hit me quickly. Then it feels like a urgent scramble to get out, and looking at the surface distance our crawl through the tunnel seems much longer.

The remainder of the tour shows - above ground - how the villagers prepared weapons and nasty spiked traps, made sandals from tires (which lasted for 5 years), and fed themselves with rice paper and rice wine. Craters from the many B-52 delivered bombs dot the landscape, and it one a formidable bundle of bamboo has grown dead center. The most striking part of the experience was crawling through the tunnels, though - it took some very tough people to live and fight in them for weeks at a time.