Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending a photography seminar put on by the National Geographic called Putting the WOW in Your Nature & Outdoor Photography. The seminar was talk by Eddie Soloway and Tim Davis.

Soloway and Davis have very different styles in photography with Soloway focusing on more fine art nature photography (sometimes abstract) and Davis on more wildlife and animal photography. Each of them contributed one of my favorite parts of the seminar.

Soloway did a segment called “How Come Mine Don’t Look Like That?” where he shared some pictures he took just out of high school and some of his first commercial pictures and critiqued what was wrong with them and how he could have improved them. Since they looked like some of my photographs that was a great lesson in looking at a scene as a photographer.

Davis has gone to Antarctica to photograph Emperor penguins, Borneo to photograph Orangoutangs, and elsewhere. He talked a lot about what kind of shot would sell such as composing a photograph so that an editor could use it and have a place to put the text of a story or shooting a theme (like “follow the leader” with penguins) that an art director would buy to use in an ad campaign. Editorial photography is how to make a name but commercial photography is how to support your family. Since I recognized a number of the photographs he showed this added special value.

The seminar covered the following areas:

• Lighting Your Fire for Nature Photography
• What Are the Skills A Nature Photographer Needs?
• How Come Mine Don’t Look Like That?
• Gear: Keeping It Simple
• On Assignment: Behind the Scenes, From Start to Finish
• Breaking Out of Your Box
• The Spirit of Nature Photography
• Your Next Steps

If you have a chance to attend a seminar by either Soloway or Davis I would recommend it.

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When a friend was in town recently and we drove up to San Francisco. When we strolled around Chinatown we stopped at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. Now factory may bring up the wrong picture in your head. This small business located off an alley in Chinatown is not for the claustrophobic. It has room for two fortune cookie making stations, a woman who takes the money for cookies or pictures (taking a picture costs $1) and about 6 customers. It is interesting watching the process of the cookies being made. A machine creates and backs a series of circular cookies. A worker then grabs a fortune and folds the still warm cookie over a metal bar.

The factory is between Grant and Stockton. Grant Avenue is where most people go to in Chinatown, but the heart of the real Chinatown is a block to the west on Stockton Street. On Stockton you will find food markets selling live turtles, live fish, and vegetables that you might not normally see at your local corner grocery. So next time you are in Chinatown get off the beaten path. Try a fresh cookie or a bean pastry filled pasty from a local bakery. We all enjoyed the experience although there were some differences of opinion between my wife and I about how how good a fortune “a new pair of shoes will do you a world of good” is.

Popularity: 39% [?]

As of this afternoon a video on YouTube that is the latest safety video has been viewed 350,000 times. Huh? A safety video? Isn’t this what most people avoid watching on the airplane? Delta has even blogged about the making of the video and the press it has garnered.

Joe Dion from Fly With Me interviewed the star of the video on his most recent podcast.

Delta Airlines’ latest safety video has been getting a lot of hits on Youtube, and “Deltalina” is the reason. I talk with Chris Babb, the creator of the video, and with Katherine “Kat” Lee, the flight attendant who is featured in the video. Kat has gotten the nickname “Deltalina” because she looks like Angelina Jolie.

Popularity: 52% [?]

There is no truth to the rumor that the way my wife and I figured out the itinerary for our next vacation was that we consulted TripAdvisor’s recent survey to figure out which are the dirtiest cities in Europe. It is true however that both London (#1) and Athens (tied with Rome for #3) which we plan to visit are on that list. To make matter’s worse Athens, since being voted #3, is having a garbage strike.

According to World Hum:

If the survey had been done this week, however, Greece’s capital might have made first place. Garbage collectors have been on strike for days, as part of a nationwide union protest against government pension reforms.

The garbage hills are not quite mountain-sized yet, as they were last year when the city landfill was overflowing. But the rot is stinking up the early spring air and prompting breathless television reports declaring the streets “apocalyptic,” a la Naples. Striking workers are even pelting police with the garbage during demonstrations.

It sort of the ruins the mood when you’re out for a $10 (and climbing) fancy coffee at an outdoor cafe.

Sadly, Athens didn’t make any good TripAdvisor lists, i.e. best cuisine or most romantic. The cleanest city was apparently Zurich, though it was also voted one of the most boring. But clean doesn’t always mean boring: London was voted the dirtiest city, but also the city with the best nightlife.

Zurich being the cleanest city I can easily imagine. Those of you who listen to the Amateur Traveler may remember that in episode 100 I talked about going to Zurifast. The huge crowd had scattered garbage, broken bottles etc everywhere by 5 AM. Magically by 10 AM the city was already Swiss clean. Those guys are efficient.

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This week I had a rare business trip to Atlanta, Georgia. I booked the least expensive flight as usual using an airfare aggregation site. In this case I used Kayak.com as I often do. But fare alone is not the only measure of which is the best flight. I had two things that made my trip less than ideal.

• The night before I was scheduled to depart, US Airways cancelled my flight. They did not have a crew. So after I had spent a lot of time picking the right flight so I could spend an evening in Atlanta (not knowing that a tornado had torn up downtown) I ended up instead getting to my hotel at midnight.
• I had a very tight connection on my flight back (26 minutes) which is less than I would recommend for anyone. My flight was delayed a few minutes by bad weather and I ended up running between flights and arrived at the gate where the monitors said I would find a flight to San Jose but found a plane waiting to go to Seattle instead. A moment later they announced the last call for my flight 2 gates down.

There are always things that cannot be controlled when you fly, but situations can be predicted. For instance, some flights are habitually late. What if I had known that my flight from Atlanta was always late, then there is no way I would have taken a chance on with such a short layover. There is now a airfare aggregation site has just that sort of information. The site is InsideTrip.com.

Boston.com writes:

You thought you got a good deal when you booked that $200 flight from New York to Fort Lauderdale after scouring various websites to find the lowest fare. But after suffering through a long delay, a cramped flight on an old plane, and the airline’s losing your bags, that flight may not have felt like a bargain, after all.

Most travel sites, like Expedia and Kayak, do a good job of digging up the cheapest airfare for a given route, often giving you dozens of options. But when it comes to key factors that can help determine whether a flight is worth the money or is one to avoid - like how much legroom you get, a flight’s on-time performance, and mishandled luggage rates - travel sites tend to fall short.

For each search, InsideTrip provides not just fares but also evaluations of what Pelter calls 12 “pain points.” These include the amount of legroom in a cabin, how often the flight is on time, the aircraft type (larger jets get higher ratings), how crowded a specific flight typically is, and if you can walk to your connection. It even considers how long it usually takes to get through the security checkpoint nearest the gate.

Popularity: 43% [?]