I'm back in KL and very busy processing all the footage from our American trip. There are hundreds of hours of footage to recolour and package for Corbis, and sometime I will also have to get all the stills ready too. It's a mammoth task, in between which I also have to re-start the business here and make sure that we earn a living. As you can imagine, keeping up with the various blogs is a toughie.

So here's a shot that I treated very quickly last night just to get things moving. It was taken from the top of the Empire State building in October last year. More to follow soon.

We're about one month away from the end of our grand journey. From Virginia we headed down to Tampa, Florida, then across to New Orleans, through Austin, Texas, and the into New Mexico for Santa Fe, Roswell and lots of desert. On the way through Arizona we popped into the Meteor Crater, off the old Route 66 (see middle shot, below). Now we're in the final day of our stay near the Grand Canyon, AZ, which also included a drive up to Monument Valley in Utah. I got plenty of great shots there, but this is one of my favourites. Click it for a full HD resolution version.

It's been a long time since I updated this blog. I tend to be more active on Facebook these days, although that might change soon. Since July we've driven over 12,000 miles up the west cost of the USA through Portland to Vancouver in Canada, over the Canadian Rockies, back down into Minneapolis in the USA and around the Great Lakes (including Chicago) to Maine, then down to Boston, New York and Washington DC. We dropped in on a lot of people that I've known online for many years, and strengthened a good few friendships. So here are a couple of shots from those travels. When I get back to Malaysia I'll update this site more fully.

The hero shot above is from Antietam Battlefield, which remembers a particularly savage engagement of the Civil War. I took a lot of pictures there, but this one says it all. However, there's always room for another one, including this one from underneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

So far we've had to get through the process of opening bank accounts, transferring money over (which has been totally mishandled by Standard Chartered Bank), buying a car and stuff. Our first weekend was spent visiting an old 'virtual' friend, Darrin 'Boogie' Berlin, who lives in a quiet place about half way between San Diego and LA.

Darrin has an awesome collection of fabulous guitars, which is quite appropriate because he really knows how to play them. He used to be the lead guitarist in several now defunct LA Country/Punk bands, most notably Tommy Homicide and The Last Americans. Now he's settled down to the quiet life, but there's still a big heart of the rebel in him. You can hear his lead guitar skills at the bottom of this post on a track that I released as Calamity Pop and featured on our second album in 2006.

Sunday morning, we engaged in the traditional American pursuit of firing some lethal ammunition at some paper targets. Handguns not being allowed in the parts of the world that we live in, this is always a great opportunity to have some fun, and we fired plenty of lead at into the back wall, from a variety of guns including a Magnum 44 hand cannon. It was our youngest son's 10th birthday, so he also got the chance to save the world from a Zombie Apocalypse.

Here is the gigapan of the first launch event in Abu Dhabi. This one took quite some time to do as lots of people moved around while we were shooting, so I had to fix many dismemberments to make people whole again.

OK, to be fair, I'm not showing the batteries and tripods here, nor a special super-secret device that we'll be carrying to get perfect interviews every time, but I'm sure you get the picture. The full kit includes: the Red Epic M, a backup Canon EOS 5 MKII for alternate angles, four lenses covering every focal length from 11mm to 200mm, two lapel radio mics, backup audio and scratch mic. The reflector will be coming with us too.