Money
My attention was caught along our way back to our Safari Beach resort by this lady in Thai costume. She was sitting along the Bangla Street at Patong and carving a melon with a short knife. You can see there were other fruits carving on display in front of her and lit up by a little spot light. I took out my D60 and snapped this photo. The lady was so ‘professional’ to pose for me perfectly.
Fruit carving is a traditional and highly cultivated art in Thailand. Normally fruit carving is used as display in Thai cuisine on dining table. Fruits used for carving includes watermelon, pineapple, honeydew, and even carrot. This is one of the highlight at Bangla Street at night in Patong Beach. – Travel Feeder, the ultimate travel photo blog.
Subscribe to Travel Feeder's RSS Feed For FREE Updated Stories!
It’s coming! Another 2 months and I’ll be in London! A big round of applause to our budget airline AirAsia, which had encouraged me to travel to Europe again after 12 years. I’ve booked my air tickets 3 months ago and I finally have my first Western Europe tour itinerary drafted recently. The whole idea of the trip is to visit some of the top cities in Western Europe in a short period of only 14 days. Reasons why being such a short period off course includes budget, my work and also my children. So 14 days is all we (initially I’m going with my wife only but eventually we are going in a group of 5 including Jean, her siste, my brother in law and a friend of mine) have in Europe. And my role has also changed from a husband and lover to a tour leader and organiser of this small tour group! Ha ha!
If you know where I’m coming from, I’m the advocate for budget travel. It would be my biggest pleasure to have saved more in my travel! 
Since budget is our next biggest constraint other than time, how and which cities to cover in Europe is a challenge to me. Since none of them have been to Europe before, I thought we better concentrate on those my Top 5 Cities in Europe. To be less ambitious, I’ve opted out Prague. Since we have only 14 days, I decided we travel only the Western European coutries, start from and end in London (the only European destination Air Asia X covers).
In order to plan out our preliminary itinerary of the Western Europe trip, I needed to consider these following factors in advance:
- Transportation cost. I would say transportation cost is the biggest expense of our trip, contribute no less than 50% of the total cost. Though we have bought low fare air tickets to London, we still need to move domestically from London to other cities and countries. We have 2 options here: by plane of train. Different route has different pricing at different timing. In other words, it affects my itinerary planning with tight budget!
- Number of places of interest. Firstly, transportation cost would increase if we travel more. Secondly, less time we are going to have at each destination if we travel more. Thirdly, which travel destinations we would die for visiting it once? These are the factors to consider.
- Season or Festival? Since we have confirmed our return flight tickets, we couldn’t change the season when we will be there. I prefer travelling Europe in May because it’s end of Spring. I love vibrancy of Spring and Jean scared of coldness, that’s it. It’s already my perfect traveling period to Europe. Festival? Ok, I’m searching for the period of any festival going on there during May, so we could pop by if possible (or we could avoid for extremely high crowd). Also the day of weekly open flea market might be our consideration as well;
- Accommodation cost. Budget hotel in Paris would not cost the same with either Venice or London. So planning our itinerary would also depends on the cost of living and number of days to stay there. For me, any place or city in Europe has its own attractions that worth hundreds Euro to stay and needs months to explore. So, which travel destination to stay longer would only depends on the accommodation cost of that place. that’s the only factor, and
- Strictly for ladies. They haven’t got enough money to try the German knuckles or beer but they always have plenty to spend on fashion! Insertion of certain shopping paradise into our itinerary would please our ladies in group. Planning to spend a day in London shopping at the final days would be a good idea.
In view of the above factors, I have drafted a preliminary Western Europe tour itinerary for 14 days. Check this out:
- 1st day – From KL to London. Stay in central London;
- 2nd day – From London to Paris via EuroStar. Stay 2 nights;
- 4th day – from Paris to Munich via rail. Stay 1 night;
- 5th day – From Munich to Venice. Stay 2 nights;
- 7th day – From Venice to Florence. Stay 2 night;
- 9th day – From Florence to Rome. Stay 2 nights;
- 11th day – From Rome back to London. Stay 2 nights, and
- 13th day (midnight) – From London back to KL on the 14th day.
This is just my preliminary planning. I need your feedback to tell me whether I’m too ambitious or we should stay more days in either city. What do you think about this itinerary for short trip to Western Europe? – Travel Feeder, the ultimate travel photo blog.
Subscribe to Travel Feeder's RSS Feed For FREE Updated Stories!
Unless we are professional travel photographer, what we normal shoot and how we capture a scene normally is, we take photos of those scenes of our travel destinations whenever we find it attractive or important to capture (as a travel blogger) by the time when we are there in whatever season and under whatever ambient lighting. We don’t care much on the perfect lighting and timing it should be. This is called casual travel photographer.
We travel and we shoot photos. To which we put more priority depends on every individual traveler. Some might travel more places and shooting less for each place, or, some might travel less places but shooting lots of photos from there at different day, time, angle and under different lighting. But we still travel to different places and shoot. We don’t travel to one place again and again just because we haven’t captured the most beautiful moment of the scene. Because we are not professional travel photographer. We don’t take photo for our living and we don’t travel to get paid either.
So, don’t upset if you can’t capture the best moment of that tourist spot. Don’t worry if the weather was overcast when you were only allowed 1 hour to shoot photos of Eiffel Tower. We travel and photograph as our hobby and passion to do so (also hobby to blog about travel ). We have budget for our hobby, don’t we?
What we should do to produce ourselves some nice photos of places we’ve been to (not bought from pro travel photographer) is more important. If a casual travel photographer could take fantastic photos, it would be great pleasure. If a casual travel photographer could capture what only a pro can, it would be more satisfactorily. Here are the top 5 things a casual travel photographer should do:
- Set your travel plan along side your photo plan. We know the best photos come from the best surrounding lighting to the scene. So fix your travel period to that country or city to suit the weather we want for our ambient lighting. If you plan to photo snow scene, go now!
- Take as many photos as you can. Shoot the same scene with different composition of light, different exposure compensation EV value, high or low key setting (I’ll come to this other time), different shutter speed and aperture or even with and without flash.
- Bring along your camera accessories like ND filters, polarizer, tele-convertor, tripod, flashes and so on. You could then explore different ways of capturing the same scene. If you don’t have any of these, buy them now!
- If we still couldn’t get what we wanted or no where near it, plan your travel to be less ambitious. Travel lesser and spend more time or days on each place;
- Thank god. If nothing from the above has been achieved, we still have our final tool. In this digital era, we have photo editing tool like Photoshop CS4, lightroom or Elements! They can savage poor lighting, poor colour or even poor composition!
Finally, we should be more happy to be a casual travel photographer. We can shoot whatever we like. We don’t have to worry about copyright infringements, contract requirement or so on. Happy shooting and traveling! – Travel Feeder.
Subscribe to Travel Feeder's RSS Feed For FREE Updated Stories!
Happy new year 2010 again. 7 days have passed. Have you got your new year resolution firmed up? Most of us have our resolution of the year but do you have any resolution for travel in this new year? I don’t think so. Most of the people set their objectives of the year normally for [...]
Recently I was being tagged by Mark from Travel Wonders Of The World when he wrote about Three Travel Secrets of Sydney. Not because he referred some of its content to Travel Feeder. It’s beacuse of a game intiated by Katie from TripBase where worldwide bloggers list their Three Best Travel Secrets and then tag other bloggers [...]
What are the lenses I normally bring along for travel? Readers following me on Travel Feeder should know that I love to have my favourite Nikkor 35mm f1.8 fast lens fitted on my D60 whenever I go travel. It gives me full flexibilities to shoot whatever scene under whatever ambient light, especially under low light conditions where [...]
I’ve been following Malaysian satellite Astro TV travel game show ”Ready To Fly?” lately, and am sitting here at home asking myself the same question: “Am I ready to fly?” The countdown of my Phuket vacation travel is just around the corner. If I’m not wrong (can the flight ticket wrongly printed? ), I’m going to depart to Phuket Island, [...]
This is an update to the Top 5 digital camera for travel post published 2 months short of a year ago. Exactly. Within a year, the top 5 camera for travel need to be reviewed and updated. No surprise at all. New models are coming out every half a year for compact cameras while we can [...]
Congratulation, and celebration…. First started to blog for travel on 17th June 2008, I’m glad, though not excellent, that Travel Feeder could reeach its 100th post benchmark in 10 months or slightly less than a year! Hurray! I love travel, especially vacation travel. I will travel whenever time and money allow me to do so. [...]
I’ve been busy sorting and processing my photos from my previous travels recently. Why? I WANT TO SELL MY PHOTOS TO EARN ME MY NEXT TRAVEL!! Have you got thousands of photos captured during your past vacation travel that you wish to share with others? On top of that, have you ever thought that those [...]
Che-Cheh (2)
eunice (2)
ALY SHAIKH (1)
shasha (1)
Recent Comments