Weekly Recap #4: "SSD Memory, Travel Gear, Milky Way Skies, & blogging on-the-go"
I'm currently on a road trip, sitting in the back of my mini-van writing a blog post with the Wix app. This app is one of the reasons I decided to go with Wix for my blog. Their platform seemed very easy to work with & the simplicity of being able to make posts from my phone was crucial due to the fact that I'm on the road quite a bit.
Back to something some of you may have glanced over in the previous paragraph, & others may have turned your nose up at in disgust. Yes we own a mini van... a Toyota Sienna Limited with all the bells & whistles, aka "The Swagger Wagon ". As a father of 3 toddlers I can't imagine functioning as a family without this beautiful grey spaceship. I love it when I've found out other musician-dads, or athlete-dads, basically other dads people wouldn't expect to be driving them, are in fact driving them. The ease of the suspension, surprising amount of power, & abilty to open all doors from the key fob & quickly pack my clan up is a convenience I can't currently give up even if it means handing in my "man-card" to an invisible club of wanna-be cool guys. Needless to say, I love our mini-van 🤓
(A version of the Sienna that Toyota created for SEMA a few years ago, if only ours was this sweet haha 😝)
Now onto this weeks topics & the reason I'm on this road trip. This past week we were prepping for and beginning our summer family vacation to New Mexico & Colorado. As a creative dad, and one who has work to do on the go, I needed to decide exactly what gear I was going to bring. Seeing that we were traveling in our mini van, I was able to bring more equipment than necessary, but I still packed with a mindset of fitting all that I "needed" into one bag.
My current bag of choice is the EVOC CP 26L Camera Bag. A future vlog post about this will definitely be coming, because the bag deserves a proper visual break down. A basic breakdown of what I fit into the bag:
- DJI Mavic Pro drone with bag and 2 extra batteries
- Canon battery charger & 2 extra batteries
- Sony Charger with extra batteries
- R3D Sidewinder MultiTool
- MultiCard Reader
- Back up cap sets
- Backup USB & Lighting Cables
- Business cards from Moo
- Dell XPS 15 laptop & charger
- Hand Lettering Co notepad
- Lincoln Design Co pen
Point being, this bag fits a TON of gear! One of the newest pieces of equipment in that bag worth mentioning is the 512gb WD Portable SSD drive. While it is an expensive new item, the size of this drive, light weight, FAST write speeds, & small amount of bag space it takes up is incredible!
At the moment these drives are exclusively available at Best Buy, but I've seen other similar drives currently available from SanDisk & PNY at multiple electronics stores.
In the picture above you can see a very common portable drive that is available from Lacie, & below it is the WD SSD drive. Both drives hold around 500gb, but as you can see the WD SSD drive conveniently fits in a a small zipper pocket in my camera bag. Another HUGE advantage of this drive is the fact that you can use the drive on a Mac and a PC without having to format the the drive in any special way. It comes ready to store your files on whatever platform you choose. All my fellow creative video dads shooting large 4K video files can let out a huge sigh of relief when using these beauties 👍🏻
The last thing I want to share on this weeks blog post was a photo I was able to capture at our cabin a few nights ago.
I have visited Bonita Park numerous times over the last decade & I have never seen a sky as clear as I did this night. I was walking over to my cabin, definitely a little tired and ready to go to bed, but as I looked up I could see the Milky Way just with my eyes & knew I wasn't going to be sleeping knowing that sky was out there waiting to be captured. So I grabbed my Canon 5d Mark IV & the widest lens in my bag, the Canon 17-40mm.
I was able to capture this shot after just 3 or 4 attempts of dialing in the exposure. The end result was taken with a 15second shutter, at f4 (17mm), and ISO 6400. I was decently pleased with the results & walked around the grounds to capture a few different settings. This shot still ended up being my favorite of the night.
The next two nights we were in New Mexico the night sky wasn't as bright and had a fair amount of clouds obstructing the view of the Milky Way. Point being, sometimes you have to make sure you take the opportunities to capture what you see when you see it. In this particular case I can't imagine how bummed I would have been had I gone to bed thinking "I'll just get a picture tomorrow night".
Well, that's about all the energy I have for this weeks post, and we're just about to arrive in Colorado Springs. Have a blessed week everyone! And I'll leave you with a picture of our awesome family in front of my mother in laws memorial putt-putt course at Bonita Park.
