The moment I step on a plane I usually feel a sense of relief. In the confines of a plane, nobody can call you, nobody can email you, and nobody can make demands of you. I’m a one-man band for the most part. As small business owner, I not only do the shooting, but also am the marketing and sales departments, accounting and archive departments, IT guy…. The list goes on. If you’ve ever worked for yourself you know what I mean when For better or for worse most of my time is spent dealing with the aspects of running a business than shooting photographs.

It’s Nov. 18^th, 2005 and I’m writing this on a plane heading home. I’ve been in Thailand for the last few weeks doing a story on the tsunami survivors; specifically the Moken people who are also known as the sea gypsies of the Andaman Sea. The client was Yahoo.com and they will publish the story on a new adventure channel called Richard Bangs Adventures. The Moken come ashore during the wet season and build temporary homes on the beach, only to leave for the sea again in the dry season. With all the loss of life caused by the tsunami it was amazing to find out that the Moken people lost almost no one.

Photo Caption: Living on the sea as the Moken people have done for generations, this husband and wife pay a visit to our boat in hopes of getting some free gasoline for their outboard motor. Photo (c) Didrik Johnck.

These stories are incredibly media rich with photos, audio, videos, and writing. Over the course of the assignment we sent up 5 dispatches to the editors at Yahoo. Each dispatch consisted of a day or two of shooting, after which the team hunkers down for about 6-8 hours while the writer writes, and the photographer and videographer edit. I’ll send everything out over the internet to my editor, who reviews and publishes the material almost immediately. This online format allows for stories to be published almost immediately and with an amazing diversity of material. Previously the same story in a print magazines would get published 6 months (or longer) after the field work and with a few images. When it’s all said and done this Thailand piece will publish about 11-12 videos, 100-120 images, 5-10 audio clips, and 5000 words of writing. I’m not just talking about quantity here, as everything is highly edited for quality. Check it out at: http://adventures.yahoo.com/thailand.

Gear wise I was traveling a bit heavy with almost 110 pounds of gear (about 105 pounds of equipment between three Pelican Cases and 5 pounds of clothes…). I’ve had bad experiences with camera/electronic equipment being affected by salt water and I brought backups of almost everything.

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