vacation | At Home with Tech

June 23, 2024

4 Helpful Tech Packing Hacks for Vacation

Here are a few ways to help ensure your tech stays safe, organized and fully functional throughout your trip for a more seamless travel experience.

Taking all your tech with you on vacation comes with inevitable risk. But if you’re committed to your decision, you should take these few extra steps while packing to help ensure both your gear’s safety and maximize its functionality during your trip.

Set up a Charging Station
Many hotel rooms don’t have enough convenient outlets or USB ports to charge all your gear. Instead of spreading your tech around the room to tether to the few available outlets, it’s much better to centralize and create an organized charging station of your own.

The trick is to bring your own mini power strip. Make sure it has a long cord so you can snake it from a wall plug to a table or dresser where you can construct your charging station for your hungry tech.

Yes, it may seem counterintuitive to weigh down your luggage with a power strip, but there are a variety of travel-worthy models out there that are relatively light.

Believe me… It’s a game changer.

Bring a Dedicated Camera Bag
If you’re a photographer with a larger-profile camera and lenses, you don’t want to throw all that delicate gear randomly into a piece of luggage. You need a dedicated bag to properly protect it.

A few years back, my family and I took a vacation to New Orleans, and I purchased a Peak Design Everyday Backpack 30L for my camera gear. I carried it onboard the plane with me. Its dimensions are right on the edge of being too big, but I did successfully squeeze it under the seat in front of mine. That said, it would have easily fit in the overhead bin, but I already had my suitcase there. (My family and I had challenged ourselves to not check any luggage on that trip.)

My Peak Design backpack performed absolutely great during our time in The Big Easy. It even housed my little Manfrotto travel tripod.

Pack your Apple TV
If you‘d like your hotel room television to have the same streaming options as your home TV, packing your little Apple TV puck could be your solution. Just connect it to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and the TV’s HDMI cable. (You may need to bring your own HDMI cable.)

This type of MacGyvering works best with less advanced hotel Wi-Fi systems that don’t require signing in with anything more than a password. If you need to first navigate through a hotel’s web portal to sign in, your Apple TV won’t activate.

If it all works, it’s a nifty trick.

Stash a Portable Bluetooth Speaker
Sure, you can play your tunes from your smartphone’s speaker, but it you want to really bathe yourself in the goodness of your playlists, you’ll need to bring along a dedicated portable Bluetooth speaker.

They’re so small these days. Why not throw one in your bag?

Travel Ready
By incorporating these simple packing hacks into your vacation-planning routine, you can ensure that your tech remains safer, organized, and fully functional throughout your trip. From setting up an efficient charging station to protecting your camera gear and enjoying your favorite media, these strategies can enhance your vacation experience and keep your tech running smoothly.

Happy travels!

December 31, 2023

My Biggest Discoveries I Blogged About over the Past Year

Here’s my At Home with Tech year in review. Below are the links to my key learnings and tech discoveries.

So yes, these next few weeks can all be about looking forward. The fresh start. The resolutions. The turning over a new leaf. But I like to think of this time of year as the next chapter that builds on the past. It’s not so much ‘the new’… as ‘the next.’

I try to carry it forward. That way, I can greet these annual cycles with the perspective of my past years’ experiences. Said another way, it’s important to look back as you look forward. Otherwise, a lot can get lost across the years.

That’s why I think it’s critical to package up the story of your past year in an organized photo collection (digital or book) or perhaps an edited video-clips overview.

You might also want to perform a mental review and acknowledgement of your other notable actions and learnings.

Take it in. Then lock it in, or let it go if need be.

At Home with Tech Year in Review

As you know, I document my thoughts on technology and family life each week. So, I’ll follow my own advice and offer this summary of my blog posts that reflect my big learnings across the past year. Please check out the links below that most interest you!

My Growth as a Parent

Working in our Post-Pandemic World

My Journey as the Family Photographer

My Role as the Family Archivist

How a tiny film-to-digital converter brought new life to my father’s old analog slides
How to quickly turn a scanned negative into a positive image on a Mac
How to use SmugMug as a family photo archiving tool
How to prevent your family’s identity from being washed away by time

Maximizing your Family Video Clips

My Family Vacation Tips

Best Practices for your iPhone

My Evolving Understanding of Apple Computers

Here’s to a Prosperous 2024
As always, thank you for reading my blog. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you in the year to come.

Happy New Year!

October 22, 2023

How to Organize Vacation Photos to Tell a Complete Story

This is the start of our recent trip to Alaska. Here’s why this type of ‘reference photo’ is so important when you want to curate a complete visual story of your vacation.

After a family vacation, I always like to go through my photos and pick out the very best ones. Actually… the best few. (And that’s usually harder to do than you might think.) They’re the ones that really tell the story. And I’m talking under 40-50 pictures.

If you’ve tried a similar exercise, you know what a challenge this can be. Sure, creating a photo book with hundreds of your vacation photos doesn’t require you to choose from all your darlings. But if you’re going to simply show off your photos from your phone to family and friends, their eyes will quickly glaze over after only a dozen of your finger flips.

You’ve got to keep your presentation short. And you should choose the pics that go well together and represent the total arc your trip.

Ideally, they should also visually represent the key information about your travels. Sure, you can audibly fill in the details through a little voice-over support as you share your pictures in the moment. But I think the best collections of family travel photography don’t require that. The photos should stand on their own.

The 3 Categories of Vacation Photos

To create the best collection of vacation photos, you’ll need to take and include three types of shots.

#1 – The Money Shots
It’s obvious that you’ll want to show off your ‘money shots.’ These are your best photos of the ‘place’ you’ve visited. Whether it’s the natural beauty of the wild or a famous urban landscape, those are the photos that anchor your entire trip.

#2 – Your Selfies
And then we all know to snap some selfies along the way (or ask a friendly tourist to take a posed shot of you and your family). You’ve got to include a few of those shots in your collection, right? That’s what makes it your trip.

#3 – Reference Shots
This third category isn’t intuitive, and you’re not going to realize you really need them until you try to put your collection together. I call them reference shots. Think of them as the thread that stitches your whole photo story together. In many ways they’re like an establishing shot in a movie.

These shots provide the context you’ll want for your other photos.

The Boat
For example, on my family’s recent vacation to Alaska, we went on an amazing day cruise on Prince William Sound to get up close and personal with a few glaciers. It was incredible. So sure, I got tons of shots of the glaciers and some shots of my family posing in front of the glaciers. But I almost forgot to get a shot of the boat we were on.
The boat was really a big part of the story… We were on Prince William Sound… and cruised right up to a glacier… and there we are… on this boat. It’s so important to complete the visual sentence.

The Trailhead Marker
Another example: We took the hike of a lifetime right next to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park up the Harding Icefield Trail.
The money shots were a couple hours away up the trail, but I intentionally dragged my feet at the beginning of our hike to let everyone in our Backroads group walk ahead of me as I shot the trailhead marker that contained the key details.

The Name of the Place
Ideally, it’s great to find a shot that includes the actual name of your location. That’s so helpful, especially as an opening shot for your visual story.
I found my ‘Alaska’ shot spontaneously as we were biking the Bird to Gird path along the Turnagain Arm. Suddenly an Alaska Railroad train roared by. I braked, grabbed my camera from my belly bag and snapped my photo!

Set Up your Visual Story
These reference shots are easy to forget. But they’re the glue to help group together all your other photos and represent a complete story.

In the same way that any written story has a beginning, middle and end, so should your collection of vacation photos.

Whether you think of them as ‘reference’ or ‘set up’ or ‘establishing’ shots, just a few of them can serve this need exceptionally well. You just have to be mindful to find them along the way.

Don’t Dilly Dally
And if your traveling companions glance at you quizzically the next time you take an extra few beats to snap one of these shots, just remember the value they represent.

Even through you might then have to hoof it to catch up to the rest of your group (guilty), it’s worth it.

Just don’t take too long. Otherwise you’ll risk falling too far behind your own story!

Category: vacation

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