Travel photography may be the most challenging genre of photography of all. Well, next to wartime combat photography and shooting studio portraits of toddlers. What makes it difficult is precisely what makes it so appealing to me. I love the challenges, the constraints of time, weather and circumstances. In this series of posts I’m going to share some of my experiences and ideas about travel photography. If you can’t learn from my techniques I hope you’ll at least be able to learn from my mistakes…
In his book Bay Area Wild (ISBN 9781578050109), Galen Rowell showed the astonishing beauty of the area around San Francisco in some pretty amazing photographs. Galen Rowell had a lot of things going for him. He had remarkable talent, sharp mind and keen eye and excellent technical abilities. But he also had another key advantage for this project: He lived in the San Francisco Bay area. This meant he could go out shooting often. Revisit the same locations at different times of year and different times of day (at any time of day he felt like) and in different weather conditions. In short, he could stack the deck in his own favor when it came to being in the right place at the right time to get a great photograph – simply because he was in the area so often. This is precisely the advantage we give up in travel photography (and which Galen Rowell himself gave up for the bulk of his work). When we travel we’re often visiting places that we won’t ever see again. And we almost always face restrictions of when we can be at a specific location and for how long. Stonehenge? We’ll be there on Tuesday around 9:00 a.m. And we’ll have an hour and fifteen minutes before we have to set off towards our next destination. And don’t be surprised if it’s raining when we get there.
You can count on everything going right for travel photography precisely ZERO percent of the time. When the real world fails to fully cooperate with your photographic plans you have two options: Pack up the camera gear… or think on your feet, imagine, adapt and create.
This series of posts will be all about choosing the second option. More to come…
Stream and Stone Bridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
