Goodbye LA, Hello LAX: My Journey Home Begins With Exploring LAX With My Phone Camera
Photos from exploring LAX and my personal phone camera workflow for travel photography.
Farewell Los Angeles.
After 5 days in sunny Los Angeles, it was time to head to Los Angeles Airport (LAX) for my long journey and flight back to Australia with Qantas.
LAX is one of the world’s busiest airports.
Qantas, along with 40+ international airlines, fly out of Tom Bradley International Terminal (Terminal B), LAX.
LAX is not my favourite airport to transit through, especially for international to domestic transfer. But flying directly out of Los Angeles was actually a really pleasant experience.
I Uber’d straight to Terminal B and the check-in counters for all the airlines were a 2-minute walk away.
Los Angeles traffic can be hectic and unpredictable.
To be safe, I aimed to get to airport 5 hours before my scheduled departure, in case I got stuck in a 2-hour LA traffic jam—I was heading to the airport around the after-work traffic rush.
Thankfully, the drive from Hollywood area to LAX only took an hour as predicted.
The terminal was bright and airy. I’m not sure if it was normal for the counters to be this quiet at 5 or 6pm in the evening.
Since Qantas only had 3 flights out of LAX to Australia that evening, the check in line and bag drop was short and quick even if you flew economy.
A Qantas First ticket didn’t offer me priority access through TSA security.
While there were plenty of travellers, I thought the security lines moved fairly quickly and efficiently. Especially now that we don’t have to take off our shoes, the baggage security screening went even faster.
I was through security within 30 minutes.
I was curious to check out the American Express Centurion Lounge in LAX for myself since I had an AMEX Platinum card that gave me access. But unfortunately, AMEX lounges only allowed access 3 hours before your flight departure.
I wasn’t going to wait around just for a sneak peek.
Instead, I walked around Terminal B and did a little bit of “airport photography” using my phone camera before heading up to level 5 where the Qantas First lounge is located for some R&R before my 15+ hour flight to Sydney—that was only one of three flights I had to take for that journey.
Right inside Terminal B, West Hollywood’s popular Book Soup bookstore had a little airport branch of the bookstore.
The small shop was packed with travellers but I managed to squeeze in to do a quick browse. I found the blurb for this book, The Satisfaction Cafe by Kathy Wang intriguing and have added it to my reading list in GoodReads.
I love taking architectural and interior photos.
I’m drawn to well-designed spaces, beautiful interiors and the creative detail that goes into creating buildings that humans get to enjoy.
I usually share photos taken on my “serious” camera, the Fujifilm X-T4 and the various Fujinon lenses I own.
But all photos in this post were actually taken with my trusty Pixel 7 Pro phone camera—a phone that’s over 3 years old.
Phone cameras these days are brilliant, especially to document and photograph our daily life. Plus, the convenience factor is unrivalled.
With all the travel we’ve done in the last 2 years living abroad, I’ve really come to rely on whipping out my phone camera in a moment’s notice to take a quick shot. Because of the convenience of always having a camera with me I’ve taken a ton of images that I wouldn’t have if I just relied on my Fujifilm X-T4.
I firmly believe this constant practice of taking photos has really honed my photography skills.
It’s sharpened my creative eye.
It’s allowed me to visualise and pick out interesting scenes that would make for a great photo, much faster.
My phone camera workflow
Photos on my phone are automatically backed up to Google.
Once I’m home this is the overall process I follow:
Download photos from Google Photos
Import the photos into Lightroom, along with photos I’ve taken on my Fujifilm X-T4 camera
Pick out the phone photos I want to do a light-touch edit on. Our phones these days are excellent at generating ready to share vibrant photos to share. Doing any more intense editing will typically ruin the photos! The biggest edit I make to my phone photos are cropping, straightening and perspective shifts.
Export the photos from Lightroom into new jpeg files for sharing with family and friends, Substack, blog, social media. etc.
All my photos that are stored on my laptop or hard drive are backed up locally to another location, so I always have 2 copies of the same photo files in case something goes wrong.
If you want to know more about taking photos with your phone, or want more detail on my phone photo workflows, let me know in the comments.
I’m happy to share more!
Coming up next
As part of my journey to Australia, I also got to experience:
The extremely comfortable flight in Qantas First from Los Angeles to Sydney—for just USD$180.40 thanks to travel points.
The quiet and elegant Qantas First Lounge at LAX—the perfect place to relax before a 15+ hour journey in the air.
The convenient but no-frills Plaza Premium Arrival Lounge at Sydney International Airport to freshen up before the next leg onward.
I’ll be sharing more on each of these in future posts.
This post is something a little different. I hope you enjoyed this small travel story.
And if you did, let me know in the comments as I would love to write more of them!
I’m on a mission to help you create memorable travel experiences, capture better personal travel photos and optimise your points & miles to travel more often in style.
If you enjoyed this, comment, restack or share it with one person—that’s the best compliment I could receive from you.
I loved reading this week's email, but also sad at the same time, knowing that we're on different continent now. Also, way to score a great deal on Biz class with Qantas for less than $200 cash!!