Photography and a family

Planning a trip abroad when going on a family holiday as a photographer is tricky. How do you balance the overwhelming urge to create your art with the overwhelming need of your family to have your undivided attention? In many ways this is impossible. There are however several approaches you can take:
1. You can ignore your photography
2. You can ignore your family
3. You can arrange a couple of days to yourself to pursue your art
4. You can go out at extremes of day and spend the days with the family
5. You can try surreptitiously to look after your family and pursue your art.

I have tried all of the above and there are advantages and disadvantages to each.
How can you ignore your art? To all photographers the disadvantages of 1 are obvious, especially as you are bound to see the shot of a lifetime. The answer is to go somewhere where you could not possibly pursue your particular type of photography.
For those who wish to remain married and remain alive number 2 is not really a viable option.
Choice 3 has some strengths, but can you arrange the weather, the light etc. Similar disadvantages apply to 4 as well as being exhausted at the end of the holiday.
On my recent family holiday to Rome I tried option 5. I planned to travel much lighter than usual, carrying far less camera gear. I bought a Sony compact camera system and carried it in a shoulder bag. I even travelled with only a small tripod, which I only took out a couple of times.
I had planned the itinerary so that my children, who are 6 and 8, would be shown all the key sites in the 5 days we were there, especially as they had been looking at Roman ruins in the UK. I then tried to make sure I could take advantage of the light, angle of the sun etc for some of the shots I had planned and snuck these into the walking around the city e.g. backlighting a fountain.

Fontane delle Naiadi, Piazza della Repubblica
Nex 7 E18-55 at 51mm 1/400 f8
Taken with backlighting and processed to highlight the water droplets as a main feature of the image.

This was achieved by using maps, Google Earth and The Photographer's Ephemeris and guides on Rome.
Gear:              Sony Nex 7
                      Sony Nex 5N
                      16
                      18-55
                      55-210
                      Lensbaby Tilt Transformer and single glass lens
                      ND, ND grad, polarising filters
                      Benro tripod
The gear was carried in a Lowepro Event Messenger 250 and the tripod was in the hold luggage. I also took a 15" MacBook Pro with 2 external drives. The images were processed in Adobe Lightroom, CS5 and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

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