If you are a travel photographer at all, this is a little trick that’s part ingenious with a dash of pretentious thrown in.
If you are traveling with expensive camera gear and you’re like me, you place as much as possible in the overhead bin. You try to steer clear of checking anything. I’d consider checking my 2 year old before I check a $1500 lens. (As a side note – a dvd player and a Snuggie and they are usually fine.)
Someone just found out they are getting checked.
However, if you end up having to check gear, your new priority is making sure that it arrives at the destination.
Enter the firearm.
Or, more accurately, the starter pistol. You see, it appears that packing a starter pistol in your gear bag (and declaring it of course at check-in) gives that bag special priority. Meaning, some dude with a reflector vest is going to be watching that bag from check-in all the way to loadout.
Why the starter pistol (or perhaps we should call it the travel pistol)? Because you don’t need a license to purchase one, so you can pack it and travel paperwork-free across all 50 glorious states. And, as an added bonus, you can serve as a starter-guy at any of the hundreds of road races that happen each year.
Lifehacker has all the details.
While the idea seems pretty sound, I don’t know if I have the jewels to try it out. With my luck, I’d be arrested, and the evening news would have some poor lady proclaiming “He seemed like a nice man. But then it was obvious that he was about to ‘start’ something – I don’t know what. A race, perhaps. But thankfully he was tackled and beaten before he could board the plane.”
Are you a travel photographer that has tried this before? If so, let me know in the comments.
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