Based on how much friend and commercial photographer Dean Casavechia raved about his Canon S90 I decided to make the jump to a new point and shoot – the updated S95.

I have to say that this camera rocks. In a small package I get raw capture, HD video with stereo audio among a lot of other great features.

I’ll be shooting a lot over the 3 weeks I have off in December, hopefully will have the opportunity to travel around St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Martinique for shooting and relaxing.

If anyone is looking for a small camera that pumps out professional shots, this is definitely your guy. I’ve even posted some  shots up to Getty Images where they stand strong beside images from my 5D MKII.

Where have I been? As of Sept 1st I have started furthering my education. I’m currently enrolled in first year of a 4 Year Medical Doctorate program.

What about photography? With the dramatic changes in photography of the last 4 years, the collapse of the magazine industry, the shift in advertising and the fall of value in photography, I felt like it was a good time for me to pursue a career that I had been thinking about since I was a child.

While I was in Borneo earlier this year, it came to me that if I live my life and pursued photography to the end I would look back and ask myself “what if I had of become a physician?” That was a question I couldn’t sit around on. I had to answer it now. As my Family Physician said to me, you can always be a photographer, you can’t always be a doctor.

So you are done shooting? No, not at all. I plan to continue to shoot both for personal and professional purposes for the rest of my life. Photography is a passion and it will always be. The hardest part is having to be more picky with my work. Recently I had to turn down an opportunity to work with Mens Journal on a story about Montreal.  (Side note: Make sure you have your photos listed everywhere, they found me via PDN’s Photoserve.) Saying no to Mens Journal was a touch heart breaking, but this is the path I’m on.

Here are the new shots, for larger images make your way over to the flash page and run them full screen.

After 2 weeks covering the entire length of the Mahakam river, I have arrived in Thailand. The journey up river was long, relaxing with little more than rice to eat for the two weeks, I’m glad to be back in civilization where I can sit down and have a good (spicy) meal.  While up river I was able to meet with a Dyak elder and do some shooting. I’ll be posting the shots in a month or so when I’m back on Canadian soil.

In the mean time, I’m on the southern part of the island of Phuket for the next few weeks shooting Muay Thai fighters. Before I head back to Saigon to do some shots of Vietnamese footballers.

Talk soon.

josh

Monday morning I set off for Phan Thiet, about 200km away from Saigon. I have to say that driving here in South East Asia is pure insanity, no one obeys any type of rule or law, it’s a mass free for all. I’ve seen several accidents in my first few days, including a few bikes get ploughed over by buses and trucks. My mission en route? not die.

With in 20 minutes I was failing miserably. As I was making my escape from Saigon I took a right turn and as I rounded the bend someone stepped out in front of me, I grabbed a fist full of front break and the wheel washed out and we went sliding across the intersection. With a little less skin and a whole lot more adrenaline I pick up the bike and proceed to get out of town. Maps and directions here are like a tanning oil in the winter, more or less useless not many people have seen a map or do they know where to direct you, this was a lesson learned after ending up on the wrong ferry to the wrong place and several more attempts make my way to the coast.

Finally after accidentally getting on to the right road I made my way through the country side where I ended up staying for a few days hoping from beach hut to beach hut, doing a little stock shooting and some exploring I decided to make the trip back in a straight shot. About 30 mins outside of Phan Thiet the Top Gear 125 sputtered several times and died. I pushed it to the nearest place that resembled a garage and in my best sign language tried to explain that the bike was not amongst the living. The older Vietnamese man quickly got to work, cleaning out the carb, replacing a fuel line and getting the bike up and running. After about an hour of work the bike was working again and he refused to take any sort of payment.

One thing I find about travelling is that regardless to all the negative media and the paranoia out there, people in the world are inherently good, they want to help others and share their knowledge and experiences. Whether they give you the wrong directions, unintentionally serve you a bowl of an animal you’d otherwise never eat or fix your motorcycle for free, they all just want to help.

This is a typical example of an intersection here in Saigon. On a scale of 1 to 10 on the crazy factor, this is about a 6. It gets much worse.

I'll be shooting and travelling around this part of the world for the next 90 days.

Today, well the last 3 days I have been making the journey from Halifax, NS to Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. The entire trip took about 36 hours, 4 flights and thousands of miles. This is not the first long haul flight I’ve done, I’m not George Clooney from Up in the Air, but I have logged a lot of travel experience, so I thought I’d share some advice.

• Get on the plane last. I don’t understand what the rush to get on the plane is? It just means you have to spend more time in that cramped, dry environment. Wait till the very end, get on the plane, then look around for an empty row or a free seat in an emergency exit row. If you are the last person on the plane you’ll end up with the best seats 99% of the time. This trick scored me great seats the entire 36 hours of travel. Had lots of room to move around and sleep.
• Print off a list of all the baggage terms and conditions. With recent terrorist events flights from Canada to the United States have strict rules for what can be carried on. When I arrived at the airport they told me my carry on bags (cameras, laptop, etc) were not allowed. I pulled out the printed rule list, they apologized and allowed me to bring them with me.  These rules are always changing, you can’t expect every employee to know them, but if you know them you’ll save yourself major headaches.
• Bring and empty bottle, fill it with water when you pass through security. They never give you enough water when you travel, planes dehydrate you, stay hydrated, stay fresh, reduce the jet lag.
• Never check your principle camera gear. Things get stolen, lost, broken. While down in Austin my bags got lost with most of my lighting equipment. I had, thankfully had enough gear in my carry on to execute the shot I wanted. It ended up taking United Airlines 2 days to finally get my bags, if I had of checked my gear,  I would have been in a world of trouble scrambling to find rental equipment.

Krystal – November 2009

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