Scattered Thoughts . . .

I've been collecting all the photography-related things I'll need to pack for our Christmas trip to Manhattan.  I'm trying to stay as small and as lightweight as possible while still bringing enough high quality gear to get excellent photos and video.  It has been a bit of a struggle but I think I've narrowed down my photography gear making for perhaps the lightest travel photography bag I've ever had on any trip.   I usually pack my small Microsoft Surface tablet for storing photos at the end of each day and for some quick blog updates with photos.  My Surface is getting very old and the keyboard is actually falling apart now because of its age and the amount of use it has gotten over the past ten years so I'm packing a newer and, unfortunately, larger laptop that I use exclusively for astronomy.  This laptop has a touchpad but I'm not too fond of touchpads so I planned to bring along my old Microsoft Arc portable mouse from my Surface. I dug out this littl

O ver the past couple of weeks, I purchased some better art supplies.  The brushes I had weren't all that great, the paper was kind of lousy when using it for painting with watercolors, and I quickly realized that I could use a few different sizes of drawing boards. I had been doing my sketching and painting on a table which wasn't ideal.  Sometimes I kept the paper loose so I could turn it and angle it but then it seemed to buckle and warp more.  Other times I taped the paper down to the table which helped with the buckling and warping but I lost some control in positioning the paper just right.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each method but I decided to purchase a couple of pieces of acrylic to use as drawing boards. This way I can still mount loose sheets of paper for sketching or painting while still allowing full control over positioning and angling the paper as needed. I purchased two 16" x 20" pieces of 1/4" thick acrylic to use as drawing boar