Alison quit corporate America for a life on the road. Along for the ride is Max, her dog and companion as she travels around the USA writing and taking photographs.

In November, Richard Stupart is setting off on an overland adventure from Cape Town to Cairo with a twist: he’ll only travel by public transport.

Miss Travel Girl is the blog of Rachel, a sufferer of a syndrome that causes both slow progression of blindness and deafness. She is travelling the world to appreciate as much as possible while she still has usable vision.

Playing cricket on the streets of the Benares-Varanasi ghats. Photo by Luis Dafos.

Your camera equipment was stolen in Portugal. A clumsy bauble above the Seine left the river owning the digital SLR. You own no camera equipment, but there’s something you really want to photograph on your upcoming trip. Lots of scenarios could result in a disposable/single use film camera landing in your hands. The good news is great photos (even artistic photos) can be achieved with the simple equipment.

A whole new world opens up to the holder of a disposable camera.

My personal experience has shown there to be an advantage to carrying a disposable camera (my secret weapon is out!) – everyone thinks you’re a tourist with no serious photographic intent. This translates to an ability to capture moments that wielding more serious camera equipment can make difficult. A whole new world opens up to the holder of a disposable camera.

Disposable film cameras come in several ISO choices – 100 to 800, but at most convenience type stores (and even vending machines in Japan), you’ll be hard pressed to find anything other than 400 and 800, with 800 being prevalent. A flash is optional (and recommended). Various manufacturers make them today in a few “versions” – wedding, sport (waterproof up to 50 ft.), panoramic, and one with a zoom function, albeit a weak zoom function. Chances are if you’re purchasing one on the road, your choices will be limited to the most basic.

Despite the simplicity a point and shoot, fixed focus camera connotes, to get photographs you’ll be proud of, MORE work and creative thought is required – not less. Understand the camera’s limitations. They typically focus anywhere from 4-5 feet to infinity, and for the flash to be of use, you’ll need to be within 10-12 feet of the subject. Work within these restrictions though and magic can happen. And remember, the camera has nothing to do with how you see the world. Look for new perspectives and the single use camera will become your photographic friend.

Before we get into the tips, here’s something else to consider where disposables are concerned: kids LOVE them. Put one into the hands of each child and prepare to be amazed!

While ALL the basic photography rules apply, there are a few things in addition to the basics that will give your photos from a disposable camera some WOW power.

Disposable Camera Pointers:

• Search for reflection. Reflection can be created from water, mirror or glass, the cone of an airplane, a pair of reflective sunglasses, or a rear view/side mirror. Use it for an artistic slant on common scenes.
• Panning the disposable camera can yield photographs with a bit of movement to them. It takes practice to know how quickly to bring the camera from side to side while you click the shutter, but it’s worth experimenting.
• Try using the headlights of a vehicle, or a flashlight to light your subject matter.
• Tilt the camera to capture scenes with a twist to the perspective.
• Take a picture of part/half of something. It’s a technique I’ve experimented with on occasion, and while it works best with close subject matters, it can yield a very interesting photograph.
• Assuming you sprung for the flash, use it! Backlit photographs, especially of people, benefit greatly from using the flash. Overall, don’t be afraid of using the flash. Unexpected effects will often be the result.
• Don’t be afraid of haze, fog, steam, or any condition that to the bare eye seems out of focus. Tack sharp is overrated.

Basic Photography Tips:

• LIGHT….is the only thing you are photographing, so make it your prime consideration. Where is the light? How is it falling on your subject? What color is it? How hard is the light?
• Everyone sees the world at…eye level. For your photos to stand out, find ways to shoot at anything but eye level. Stand on something, or get lower, even to the point of lying on the ground.
• Get off the beaten path, like the star ship Enterprise; BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE.
• Don’t be afraid. Don’t be timid. Never fear to ask anyone to do anything that will make a better picture; the worst they can do is say no, or maybe HELL NO.
• Tune in to the time and place. In the same sense that you can never swim in the same river twice, you can never shoot the same photo twice; the river of light is at a continuous ebb and flow. Let that moment speak to you, and then use your camera to take that message to the rest of the world.
• Shoot with/from your heart.
• If it’s not interesting, you’re not close enough.
• Don’t put the object of interest in the middle, a rule commonly called the Rule of Thirds. Offset the focal point.
• Look for symmetry of objects or a repeating theme.
• Walk all the way around something (if you can) to check out the various perspectives. You’ll be surprised at how the “backside” of things appears.

If you’re still convinced travel photography can’t be pursued with a disposable camera, shoot with one for 2-3 weeks at home. Sometimes it’s the simple exercise of carrying the camera around and tripping the shutter that overcomes our hang-ups.

P.S. It’s photography – have FUN!

Zhiqiang and Tingyi are a couple of travel addicts from Singapore writing about their home town and their travel experiences abroad.

Jumping red howler monkey. Photo by monkeyboy1.

I could tell it was time to move on. Eight years I had spent working for the same company. It had been good for both me and them, but times were changing. My boss and mentor had been let go, and the business focus of my department was shifting away from my core skill set. I needed to find something new to do.

This is the position I found myself in during the first few months of 2008. I thought about what I wanted to do next, and came up with a number of options, including moving to another division, moving to another company, starting a new career, starting my own business or going back to school. I spent a month musing on my next move. One idea kept coming forward, getting stronger and stronger as the month progressed. In March, about two weeks before I finally made a final decision on what I would do, I decided to create a list of the options and my thoughts on what I should do next. For one of the options, I wrote the following:

I am part of a community of migrants across the globe, searching out situations where they are strangers in strange lands, all so they can feel at home.

Option: Quit job and move to London.
Analysis: Least sensible option, but for some reason this feels important to do.

That’s exactly what I ended up doing. I moved to London without a job, a place to live or any friends, and I’ve spent the last year sometimes struggling and sometimes thriving as I found a job, made some friends and started to understand English culture. People would sometimes ask me why I did moved from Canada, and I would mumble something about “wanting international work experience” or “hoping to miss the recession by moving abroad,” but the truth was I couldn’t really explain the reason why I did it.

I had moved abroad because I felt like it was what I had to do.

Searching for an Explanation

It has always bothered me somewhat that I haven’t had a better explanation to offer of why I moved abroad. Not for others, but for my own sanity. I have always been a very logical, rational person and have always liked to believe that I am in control of my actions. So faced with the realisation that I did something simply because it “felt right” without any logical or rational explanation had bothered me.

Recently, while surfing the internet for expatriate resources, I came across the definition of “existential migration,” and on reading about it, some of that fuzziness about why I picked up and moved started to clear.

Existential migration is “conceived as a chosen attempt to express something fundamental about existence by leaving one’s homeland and becoming a foreigner.”

According to Dr. Greg Madison, the Canada-born, England-based psychotherapist and counselling psychologist who coined the term, existential migration is “conceived as a chosen attempt to express something fundamental about existence by leaving one’s homeland and becoming a foreigner.” It is different from “economic migration, simple wanderlust, exile, or variations of forced migration” in that it is a chosen move, not driven by economic or political needs.

In developing his theory, Madison held intensive interview sessions with a number of voluntary migrants. These voluntary migrants all, to some degree, said that they felt like they couldn’t have stayed in their home country. They had to go. There was something in them that made them pack up and go. This urge to move was not a result of external compulsion, but due to some internal and unclear motivation. It wasn’t motivated by economic goals like increased standard of living or career advancement. In fact, Madison found that those moving internationally often ended up with a lower standard of living once settled abroad.

Rather, it was a need to live a life that was “self-directed.” By choosing to leave, the migrant has taken control of their life, forcing them to consciously work at daily life, and preventing any slippage into unconscious habit.

For these people, being in a foreign place brings a sense of comfort that they don’t get being at home. For many of them, they always felt like outsiders back in their home towns. Living abroad, they are actually outsiders. By matching their external surroundings to their internal feelings, it allows them to be comfortable with their feelings of being outside. Living abroad allows them to still feel out of place, but at the same time “at home” with that feeling. Being a foreigner allows them to feel as if they both belong and also maintain distance and independence.

The existential migrant – a term which Madison uses reluctantly, as he views existential migration as a process through which people go through, not a persistent condition or pathology to be diagnosed or cured – is a stranger in a strange land. However, they felt like strangers at home, so being a stranger is a “normal” feeling for them. Being abroad brings their external environment into line with their internal feelings.

Madison’s research covers these topics and a number of other topics, including definitions of home, family relationships and the dreaded question “can I ever go home again?” Madison examines the concept of existential migration in varying depths in works available from his website, from a short article to a research paper to a full blown, 70,000 word manuscript called The End of Belonging, currently available for free download. Within the manuscript, in addition to more scholarly works of psychology, Madison mentions some biographies of migrants like Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home where the authors exhibit some traits of the existential migrant.

Understanding Myself as an Existential Migrant

Reading the material gathered by Madison, and in particular some of the quotes that he had from those who participated in the research, I could certainly see parts of myself in what they were saying. The inexplicable draw to move and the belief that somehow I couldn’t quite live my life the way I wanted back home were feelings that I shared with those in the study, as well as the feeling of being “at home” as the foreigner.

I remember working in Paris back in 2005, a one day journeying with a Muslim co-worker to visit The Great Mosque of Paris. As my friend went in to pray, I wandered around the building, listening to the local Parisian Muslims speaking to each other in French. I remember thinking at that moment how comfortable I was, even though I was about as foreign as I could have been, speaking neither the language nor being part of the religion. I have visited Mosques in Canada, but never felt the same way. In Canada, I always felt like an intruder – I was the “majority” intruding into the space of the “minority.” That visit in Paris, I felt comfortable. As a foreigner, I was an outsider, even though in reality those in the Mosques in Canada and France probably didn’t view my presence there any differently.

Madison’s works have helped me recognize some of the subconscious feelings that I have had over the past few years, and this recognition has allowed me to consciously dissect these feelings. I am able to recognize times when certain “existential” desires like immersing myself in the unfamiliar or the need to jolt myself out of any habitually or mundane behaviours have impacted my decisions.

Reading the work has also helped calm a nagging feeling I have had since moving to London, that perhaps I didn’t go “far enough.” Since arriving, part of me has felt that in choosing to live in London, a place where most of the people look like me and speak my language, I haven’t really fully immersed myself into the foreign. Understanding that what I might be going through is a process, rather than a destination has allowed me to take a much longer view of my journey. London is a step, but the future holds more steps. London is right for now, being here is heading my journey in the right direction, but the journey is far from over.

What Madison’s work doesn’t explain, and perhaps never will be able to explain, is why I and the others he interviewed feel this compulsion to leave and live in the unfamiliar and unknown. Unlike those quoted in the research that Madison undertook, I didn’t feel like an outsider in my homeland. I had friends and was popular throughout my life in Canada, and got along well with my family. Yet, I still felt the desire to leave. I may be able to recognise and logically discuss the existential urges that have driven my migration, but I am no closer to being able to explain why the urges grip me.

I do take some comfort in the knowledge that others out there feel similar urges, though. I don’t know that I am closer to being able to explain my reasoning to my friends, but at least I know I am not alone in what I was feeling. I am part of a community of migrants across the globe, searching out situations where they are strangers in strange lands, all so they can feel at home.

I should have posted this entry as soon as I got back from Busan so I wouldn't forget the details but as we all know I'm a bit of a procrastinator. This will again be a 2 part blog this one about Busan the next about Seolleung tombs. Stay tunedhellipSo for Halloween weekend Alison Jen Margaret and I decided to go to Busan. There were a few reasons for this first we wanted to escape the scu

Welllll helllooooo So I've been getting quite a bit of grief about not keeping this journal up to date. But in all reality I haven't been doing too terribly much. I work about 25 minutes away from where I live so I go to work come home play with my puppy and go to bed to start it over again. I am still having a good time at my job it is starting to get a little hectic unfortunately. Lot

I don't really know where to start I've been having problems with this all week and haven't been able to update it so I'll try and wrap it up now.Day 2 We all went surfing on a private beach in Bondi and the weather was 40 degrees. Couldn't have had a better day to be honest even though I was rubbish at it The water was just pure clear and the coach men were all mint we all finished off

24th 27th OctoberWe awoke slightly bleary eyed and packed up things in order to be out of the hotel by 11am. We met Rory and Morg who were looking in a similar state to the day before and off Doddy and Rory went to pick up the hire car. Turns out that the advertised deal was not quite as good as it first appeared so we hired one online instead. We picked it up from Las Vegas Airport and set o

after the overnight flight from mumbai we arrived in singapore at 8.30 am went to the hotel booking desk and booked a hotel near chinatown.you couldnt get a country that is so different from the one we left the place is spotless and very very friendly we booked in and then for a stroll round town its unbearably humid so a couple of hours of that and we went back to the room to cool down.went b

http://www.acb.myOnline accomodation and travel packages provider in Malaysia

November 4 5 and 6 2009Yoursquoll have to forgive the Bloggers for their lack of communication over the past several dayshellipbut wersquove been sooooo busy. ldquoBusy doing whatrdquo you might ask. Well this is the grueling schedule we by ldquowerdquo I mean me have hadhellip 9am Slowly rise from the Westin Heavenly bed and amble over to the deck off of our room and step out

This boot will be easy since it is cheap of course bad a child that he is not too much pocket money each time a pair of shoes should be broken into the shoes placed in front of his father and told him that shoe has really broken and can not be the next day he would give us back a new pair of ugg boots. At that time with new things like how happy wearing it everywhere will immediately run arou

We are not on the trail right now however I do travel near the AT while driving my 18 wheeler. I was lucky enough to have a layover night near Unionville NY. While on the trail this year CC and I spent a wonderful night at The Mayor's House. He provides hikers a shower laundry and two super meals asking nothing in return other than to share your hike with him. I popped in with a bag o

Set off yesterday to search for condors in the Andes. Left Arequipa early in the morning in a miniibus heading for the Colca Valley which is about 200 kilometres away. On normal roads that shouldn't take long but life is not as simple as that in Peru. At least half of the journey was across what could best be descibed as badly maintained stone track and it reminded me of one of the first records I