West Malaysia loop ride

One of the things that has been constant over the last few WMLR events was the blog and how it is updated as frequently as possible as during the ride. I remember lugging along my trusty HP laptop in 2010. It was nice and light (at that time) and worked admirably. I decided to bring along something a little more powerful as images took quite awhile to edit and brought a bigger HP laptop loaded with Ubuntu in 2011. That was a heavy beast and did not work too well. Last year, I brought along my very light HP DM1Z laptop and it worked a treat. Except that it, too, was not really equipped to handle Lightroom (my photo editing software) speedily enough. I really do want to continue the tradition of blogging while on the road but obviously lugging along a loptop is not exactly the best idea anymore.

An adventure blog is not a lot of fun without pictures. I have been using my trusty Nikon D2HS over the past three years and it was fantastic! I love that it is reliable, fast, sharp and weather proof (with the right lens on at least). However, I am starting to feel the weight of that camera on my neck (I ride with it slung on my neck so I do not miss a picture). While I do love that it is fast and sharp and weather proof, I am ready to make a compromise to save the neck!

Over the last year I have been looking for viable alternatives for blogging and photography. I explored quite a number of options for both and eventually settled on what I could consider the ideal travel photography and blogging setup. Here is what I will be riding with.

Blogging

One of the most important things for me when it comes to blogging is the ability to write without an internet connection. It was a lot harder to find a platform that can do this reliably than I had initially thought. I tried many different alternatives on my very light laptop and while there were options, they were not satisfactorily robust nor easy to use. All this changed when I was presented with a wonderful gift…

Yes, it is an iPad! I was really excited to explore what this little device had to offer. I immediately started thinking about blogging and how this would be a perfect platform for doing that while traveling. I found many apps for note-taking and word processing and blogging (to some degree). I tried many of them and eventually found a gem of an app called Blogsy.

This nifty little app that manages to take the complicated world of blogging and make it really simple. I did take a few hours to get used to how Blogsy handles the different aspects of writing and publishing a post but the people who built Blogsy have been extremely helpful and responsive to all of my needs. The working area was nice and big, pulling images into posts is a simple drag and drop, publishing takes no more than a few seconds. This is my very favourite blogging platform today.

Photography

Another breakthrough I had with blogging was the photography aspects to it. I wanted a simple setup that I can take with me that can handle simple photo editing tasks. I started off looking for apps that could mirror what I do with Lightroom with camera raw files with limited success. There were apps that did this but the iPad (at least my iPad) was not equipped to handle that kind of heavy lifting. However, I did find a couple to three apps that handled almost everything that I needed with JPEG files (rather than raw) and I have been really happy with the results.

The first one (and my favourite one) is Filterstorm. This is a fantastic app that makes editing photos on the iPad a dream. One of the things that makes this app really nice is a cool Curves tool with different modes and brushes. It is a wonderfully simple and intuitive way to edit photos. I like the amount of control I have for every edit and the ability to undo actions should I need to. The ability to manage the edits in layers is also very useful for certain situations.

The second one is Snapseed. I tend to use this app when I want to do very quick edits because of the unique interface. It is sufficiently different from Filterstorm to warrant a seat on my iPad home screen. This app makes edits like brightness, contrast, ambience, saturation and white balance a breeze. I also like the ability to edit selective parts of the image easily without needing to tediously select the region.

So those are the apps. I also found a fantastic camera app for my iPhone that I use very frequently called 645 Pro. This app boasts a simple interface where every function is accessible directly on the main screen without the need to navigate layers of menus. On top of that, I now have the ability to output uncompressed TIFF files which means I retain more information in the image for processing.

These apps give me a tremendous amount of mobility while traveling without sacrificing too much in terms of image capture and editing. However, using the iPhone as my sole camera while on the bike is still not ideal because I have to stop and remove my gloves before I can operate my iPhone. My ideal bike travel camera has to be one that is small and light, is operable with gloves and capable of taking good quality images. After a lot more research, I eventually found the ideal setup: a Panasonic Lumix GF1 micro-four-thirds camera with a 14mm pancake lens.

This lens is so light and small it feels almost like a compact! Yet with the micro-four-thirds sensor, I am able to use interchangeable lenses, have a respectable low light capability and the shallow depth of field look that is comparable to what I get with my Nikon D2HS. I just love having this slung on my neck so I can take pictures like this one below without fuss.

I think I have found the ideal setup for blogging on the WMLR. My Panasonic Lumix GF1 is the ideal bike travel camera, coupled with a nice flat but sharp lens like the 14mm keeps it compact, files get transfered to the iPad for editing with Filterstorm and Snapseed, and they get added to the words in my articles as I blog with Blogsy.

Perfect!