The suitcase is open on the floor with clothes ready to be washed.

I'm back.

I lost a jacket somewhere in Ireland and had to surrender my Swiss Army Knife at Heathrow. Other than that, the adventure was a smashing success.

My Aperture library has 2,337 new images. 251 of them are rated 3 Stars or better. Those are what I call the keepers. A dozen of them I'm hanging on to for contest entries or for possible publication. Those are the treasures.

There's no better feeling than when your plan works.

Most of the images were captured with the Olympus OM-D E-M10 that was packed in an Lowepro Dashpoint 30 and transported across Europe in the Walking Man Shoulder Bag. Many of my Instagram shots were published while riding buses to and from destinations.

The workflow was simple: photos were captured with the petite E-M10, wirelessly transferred to the iPhone 4S containing a SIMsmart card, edited in Instagram 6.0.1, then shared with my friends home and abroad.

The master files, which remained on the SD memory cards, are now sorted in my Aperture library. I'm viewing them at 100 percent on the Retina Display screen of my MacBook Pro. There's plenty of detail, contrast, and color. In years past, I would have been thrilled with photos like these captured with a camera of any size.

I did a lot of planning for this trip. I tested potential equipment configurations for weeks, making adjustments along the way, crossing my fingers that I would have the gear I needed. In the end, my plan paid off.

It's a great time to be a Nimble Photographer.

There's no going back.

-Derrick