Digital makes it so much easier. No bricks of film, no worrying about airport X-rays, etc.

I've heard Braggadocio about excess baggage charges, multiple unused hotel rooms, and rental cars held unused for long periods of time, which makes me lose respect for certain photographers. Sometimes it's worth it to spend money on a good idea, but wasting money makes me ill.

With the Internet, you can get lots of info in advance, but a local person who knows how to work the system is invaluable.

I don't shoot many corporate or commercial jobs, but when you do, you had better have someone helping who has done it before.

RAW is very forgiving. I was photographing a farm woman in Ecuador cooking over a small fire and my fill flash didn't go off a few times. I was about to delete the RAW files but decided to play with the curves first because I like the composition. It turned out that the image, although underexposed by two stops, was better than the fill-flashed images because the fire was the only source of illumination and it looked more real.

Pre-planning is essential. Research, research, research. If you are going to do a portrait, know as much as you can about the person beforehand. The web makes this very easy.

We live in an idiotic capitalist self-indulgent society where the sex life of a pop star is more important than impending starvation, land mines and child soldiers in Africa, or more interesting than the world's biggest man-made natural disaster in oil fields of the Middle East.