Oh, the places I’ve been

The last couple of weeks have been quite an adventure. I was on planes, trains, and automobiles – sometimes all in one day. I traveled back and forth across the U.S. twice, and even visited Canada for a few days. It’s amazing that I get paid to do this.

It started in Bridgeport, CT where I covered the first round of the women’s NCAA tournament for Sports Illustrated. Four basketball games in one day. I had a few remote cameras set up which pushed my total number of photos to more than 6,000 for the day.

After a short bout with strep throat, I was off to San Francisco to speak for Apple on the Aperture World Tour. Since it’s so close to Cupertino, there were a few Apple managers sprinkled in the crowd of about 300. No pressure, right? The day went smoothly and feedback was great, so I can’t complain.

The only hitch was that after flying for almost 7 hours I had to take a shower in the hotel health club because my room wasn’t ready. I also panicked fora bit because I thought the front desk staff lost my drivers license. That would have made it difficult to get on my flight home the next day. But then I remembered I had turned it in for a locker key at the health club and they simply forgot to give it back. Whew.

I was in California for one day before flying back to NYC.

TRAVEL FUN: There was a guy on my flight who refused to move his clothes from the last open overhead bin so that I could put my roller bag up (containing $15,000 worth of camera gear).He had a tweed coat and what looked like a fedora and the items were taking up a ridiculous amount of space. I asked him nicely and he simply refused to move his stuff. I was about to push harder when the flight attendant came over and forced him to take down his stuff So I could put my bag up.

The next day I drove to Atlantic City to work for Avril Lavigne. I was hired to shoot the stills for her live DVD filming in Toronto so I decided to go to the Atlantic City show in advance to see the show and the lighting.

I drove back home after the concert and got in around 2am. Twelve hours later I was on a plane back to California.

I’m proud to say that I won the plane-wide trivia contest on the seat-back video monitor. My late father would have been proud because his brain was filled with all kinds of useless trivia. I usually don’t retain data like that in my brain, but I had just enough to beat out about 25 other passengers.

I spent a few days at the Palm Springs Photo Festival and met a lot of cool people including awesome portrait photographer Frank Ockenfells III. He’s surprisingly down to earth considering his list of big time clients.

I was home for another 12 hours before heading to Toronto. I spent one day documenting a video shoot for three bands on Wind-Up Records and the next day shooting the Avril show. Those two days accounted for another 4,000+ images.

One advantage of having that much time in the air is that I was able to re-watch the entire third season DVD of the new Battlestar Galactica – the best show on television.

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