Vacation time: On the Road Again

There's nothing like being out there snapping away

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Memorial Day is the traditional start of the summer vacation season, and if you’re like me, I’m sure you’ll be out there (at least in spirit!) with a camera in your hand, snapping away and making memories of beautiful things.

I’ve got several tips here on what you need before you go—as well as things to remember when you’re out on the road. They’re all included in my latest video. Be sure to watch it before you head out there, please.

Why I love road trips

I’m the guy who would always rather drive 6 hours plus to San Francisco than to do the one hour plane ride. Ditto for 5 hours to Las Vegas. Why, why, why?

• Freedom. I like to go when I want, leave when I want and put anything I want into the car without having limits to the size of my bag(s.)

• The view. I like looking out the window and seeing things. All the photos showcased here wouldn’t have been possible from a plane. If I see something great, I pull over. Just ask the wife, Ruth.

• The people. When you drive, you stop into small towns, meet locals and get a real feel for what it’s like to be somewhere else. This is the best part of traveling. You don’t get that on a plane.

• Exploring. Changing course and going a different direction.

Drive your own wheels or someone else’s?

I have a big Photowalking road trip coming up, heading from Los Angeles to South Dakota, by way of Prescott, Arizona, Monument Valley and Moab Utah, Breckinridge and Boulder, Colorado and then on to Badlands N.P. in South Dakota, where I’m looking forward to also visiting Deadwood, Tombstone and some other classic stops.

I’m attending a photo workshop in South Dakota put on by the photographers Erik Kuna and Jay Grammon, filming a new video class on photographing the American West for my friends at Kelbyone.com, and will be filing PhotowalksTV episodes as well.

Going home, we have several great options of places to stop into, whether that be more of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, or through Wyoming and Utah. Because I’m not locked into a plane flight, I’ll make that decision at the last minute, the way I like it.

I’ve been convinced by my friend Mike to leave the wear and tear of my Hyundai back home and to rent a vehicle instead. Great idea, as I have a car with 150,000 miles and no spare tire.

In booking, I found one expensive, but reliable offer: Enterprise and $1,800 for a monthly rental. Or $1,000 from SIXT, a German based firm that offers cheaper rentals here.

What a deal, right? You know how they tell you to read the fine print? I did some online research about SIXT and boy am I glad I took a look before clicking the button.

The problem? Sixt may be fine for local drives, but not if you take it out of state, Sixt only approves driving through certain states. So while I can drive it through Nevada, Arizona and Utah from California, South Dakota isn’t on the list. I asked a company rep what would happen if I did indeed cross state lines. “That wouldn’t be allowed,” he said.

The blog at AutoSlash points out that SIXT has ways to figure out if you cross state lines, and will charge you accordingly.

What will be in my bag?

I’ll be bringing four iPhones, a Samsung Galaxy, 2 GoPros, the Insta360 X3, DJI Mavic Air 2S, iPad and my beloved MacBook Pro laptop. Because I’ll be driving and not flying, expect some larger cameras in there as well and a lot of chargers and cables. And per Jay Grammond, one of my guitars, which thankfully doesn’t have to be charged up at night. Everything else does.

For more details on what not to leave behind before you head out, click above to give the episode a view! Or read about the tips on the PhotowalksTV blog.

In other news this week

Max Time

HBO Max morphed into just Max, and you may recall I thought the name change was really stupid, but now I get it. HBO Max to many people sounded like a streaming service that was just about HBO. The new service is Warner Bros. and TCM movies and TV shows, Looney Tunes, DC Comics , Harry Potter and the dreck from Discovery and that’s more apparent now. However, still, I’ll be canceling my subscription Monday after the Sunday Succession finale, because that’s how I am. I move from service to service when shows come and go. I like the TCM movies, but not enough to pay $16 monthly.

(Side note: how much did the folks at Warner Bros. Discovery have to pay for the max.com URL? I’m betting it was a fortune.)

Photoshop + AI

You may have heard this week that Adobe released a beta version of the new Photoshop, which includes AI tools to add fun, scary and cool things to your photo. More importantly, the AI also radically speeds up the process of taking distracting things out of our photos.

With a few quick clicks, I used Photoshop’s “Generative Fill” tool to remove the Cafe sign, street sign, pole behind these two ladies in Kobe, Japan, a woman walking down the street and another store sign. As Scott Kelby said on the live show this week, these were all things that were possible before, but would have taken quite some time to pull off. In my case, it was less than a short song.

Adobe offers different subscription options for Photoshop, starting at $9.99 monthly, which also includes Lightroom. To get this new version, use Adobe’s Creative Cloud to download the Photoshop Beta build.

Final Cut on the iPad

The editing program that I’ve been using pretty much every day on my laptop since 2011, Apple’s Final Cut, finally was made available for use on the iPad, and my first impressions aren’t great.

The positive is that instead of lugging the laptop on the road, I could just use an iPad and do some quick edits in my motel room. Great—but on first glance, Apple is asking us to work with the iPad with our hands behind our back.

We can’t plug our hard drives—where all our footage and photos, show titles and background music live, directly into the iPad.

The workaround: Apple sells a $39 card reader, which you can use to get footage from cameras like GoPro, Insta360, Sony, etc., into the iPad. Or you could AirDrop your files from the iPhone to the iPad, but that will start eating at your iPad storage big time. That’s why I prefer to work with the small SSD drives. To store everything there and not fill up my iPad/iPhone/MacBook storage.

The other option is to upload your footage to a website like SmugMug, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., and to download them to the iPad. Still have the storage issues.

That’s a lot of work to use a software program that Apple is charging $5 monthly to use. For those on computers, there is no monthly fee for Final Cut.

For now, I’m sticking with the Mac for editing.

(UPDATE: Comment from reader Bobby Thompson:

“With Final Cut Pro you can plug in a hard drive, you just can't leave the footage on the drive while you edit, it must reside directly on the iPad. Either import into the FCP library, or drag them into the Files section. Clunky, but I'm expecting that will be addressed in future updates. Acasis makes a 10 port dock with card reader slots that you can also add your own SSD drive to. (The little stick-of-gum shaped ones - I forget what they're called) I've used it with Lumafusion on an iPad Pro for a year or so, and it works great, but you should be able to plug in most hard drives - I've also used the Samsung T5's and T7's.”

Thanks as always for watching, reading and listening. I’ll be back at you tomorrow with some tips for getting great shots from the road this summer.

Jeff