I've sat down to watch a BBC series called "The Genius of Photography" and boy how dumb do I feel. For something that I'm utterly smitten with and which consumes most of my brain cycles, I know almost nothing of the history of photography. I should be inspired by this documentary, but all I want to do is delete and burn everything I've ever photographed. It makes me feel like a baby that just found a toy camera, my work feels immature and meaningless. At the same time, I have to laugh at some of these experts being interviewed because it sounds like they're just making stuff up. It bothers me when people treat something from the canon as holy scripture. I can understand some of what they're saying but there still lies this hint of groupthink elitest bullshit behind their comments.

Now that I'm near a reliable internet source, not moving around every few days, not constantly figuring life out on the road, not living out of a backpack... I might be updating this blog more.

Right now I'm in Saigon briefly before I fly back to Bangkok and then eventually to the south islands for a month of tropical island hopping.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to go back and fill in the details from the past 4-5 months of travel. I never bothered to write down details but since I photograph so many things, I think I can reconstruct a good story.

Along the way I've been uploading photos to my flickr account, posting updates via Twitter and Facebook. Now the trick is to see if I can collect all that scattered data into a cohesive narritive.

The first stop on my RTW trip is Dublin, Ireland. I was in a mad rush to finish things up at home in the US. I ended up not sleeping for almost 36 hours straight, which could be how I've avoided jetlag. I slept a bit on the JFK - LHR leg of my flight and then crashed when I got into Dublin. I slept a solid 8 hours at night woke up at 0700 felt peppy and decided to go for a run along the River Liffey.

Apparently there is an urban myth that the Guinness brewing company uses water from the dark & murky Rivery Liffey to make their beer. To the contrary, they get their water from a spring in the Wicklow mountains south of Dublin.

I found a great hostel called Kinlay House, it's in the heart of the city and close to everything. This is my first real hostel experience and so far I'm totally loving it. This isn't the cheapest hostel but it's not crazy expensive either. I'm averaging about 20€ per night, that might sound expensive but for Europe in summer it's pretty decent I think. I can't wait to get to SE Asia, Europe will lead to bankruptcy.

Dublin is a cool city, the weather reminds me of SF a bit (minus the rain). Sunny one minute, cloudy, cool & overcast the next. Next time I come to Ireland I definitley want to venture out and see the countryside.

So the idea here is to travel around the world for 4-5 months. Europe for two months and then Asia for 2-3 months. That sounds like a lot of time, but really it's not. I've been planning for a few months but it felt like I put a lot off till the bitter end. I had to do things like closing up shop at Adobe, finding subletters for my apartment, researching the traveling, figuring out the money aspect etc. I was enjoying the trp planning but I was starting to get antsy and frustrated with the unknowns.

The best advice so far is to plan the basics, but then cut the cord and just GO. So now I'm in Dublin getting acquainted with Ireland and trying to decide where the wind will blow me next. Originally I thought I'd go to Norway next, however as things go I think Berlin is a better option right now.

Ok this post is starting to ramble on. The goals for this trip are to relax, meet new people and capture some great images. So far I feel like it's working out.

I bought a tiny Flip Mino HD camera in December in order to record some small video clips while bouncing around Europe. Video is awesome but the effort that goes behind it is astonishing. It's easily 10x more tedious than still photography. That being said, I think the impact you can achieve video is worth the effort.

So far I've only messed with small snippets and cliche time lapse+music stuff. The 90 second rule imposed by Flickr is an interesting constraint. It forces you into this mindset of treating video as an extension of still photography. i like that.

LIFE Magazine is working to put their massive photography archive online at http://www.life.com however in the mean time they have partnered with Google to host a huge number of images via http://images.google.com/hosted/life

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google Inc. has opened an online photo gallery that will include millions of images from Life magazine's archives that have never been seen by the public before.
The new service, available at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with about 2 million photos. Eventually, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life's library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection.
The new gallery gives Google a head start on Life's Web site, which is scheduled to begin showing off the photo archive in late February. Life will draw upon its editors' expertise to pick the best shots from the archives.
About 97 percent of Life's archives have not been publicly seen, according to Life.

(via AP News)

It is really hard to describe how I feel today, the election of Barack Obama is a true inflection point for our society. I wasn't alive when Americans landed on the Moon, but I have to imagine it felt a little like last night.

I have to admit that I was old enough to understand both. I was and still am amazed by all the hard work and innovation that went into landing men on the moon. But this story has been amazing and so much more emotional, and full of hope. The moon landing seemed like the end of a major effort; this feels like a fresh start with many possibilities.

Carl Madson

Looks like my latest light painting resonated with a lot of people, it's currently #1 on Flickr Explore for 10/15/2008. As with most of my photos there's never a clear idea before hand, just lot's of improv and luck I guess.

This was shot on the Pacific coastline of San Francisco around midnight, that orangish glow to the right is the Golden Gate Bridge. I used a 30 second exposure and a Nikon sb800 speed light to create this image. The green inner arc is the backlight LCD dispaly on the flash. These clear nights on the coast are rare and it just happened to be a full moon too which made for some fantastic night shooting.