What is travel photography?

Seems like a pretty simple question really? The obvious answer would be it's the kind of pictures a photographer takes when they get on a plane and go somewhere. For most people it means going somewhere exotic, out-of-the-ordinary and completely different from the world they live in.

And this was always my assumption as well. My beginnings as a travel photographer started long before anybody actually paid me to print my pictures. I started as a wanderer. From Morocco down through the Sahara desert, through West and Central Africa, and then down to East and Southern Africa. Nine months travelling through Africa that changed my life. Then followed by Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Nepal. You get the picture. For me travel photography meant going somewhere that wasn't descended from the British Empire, where nobody spoke English and the food didn't look like steak and three veg.

This is one of the first photos I ever took somewhere I considered 'exotic' This is Asilah in Morocco and, as you can see, even the thrill of exoticism can't save this photo! Oh and there's an old guy in a djellabah standing in the doorway but it's too dark to see him and I was too shy to ask him if I could photograph him. We all start somewhere.

I remember years ago reading a book on travel photography that recommended that photographers practice with their gear while at home so that they could be prepared for the 'real event' when they got on a plane.

And I've been thinking lately that we might have things the wrong way round. Travel photography doesn't have to be about the photographer travelling huge distances to take pictures. It's the reader that needs to be taken on the journey. And it's the travel photographer's job to show them a world that they've never seen before. Or, more difficult to do, show them somewhere that they think they know pretty well but in a totally new light.

And once you change this way of thinking about your own travel photography then I think your pictures will change as well. You'll start to imagine what a visitor to your home town would find interesting, unusual, photogenic. You see it really used to be quite easy to make the exotic look exotic. The subject alone was enough.

But heading towards 2010 we've all seen a million photos of the long-necked Karen tribes in northern Thailand, or the body-piercing festivals in Malaysia. Where once a photo of something exotic was guaranteed to wow your audience it isn't the case any more. So going beyond that requires a deep knowledge and understanding of a place. And what better place to start than your own local area. Sure it may not be the glamorous travel photography you've always envisioned but it will hone your vision to make pictures of something that is really familiar to you in a way that will surprise and delight your viewers.

So when you think of what travel photography is take yourself out of the equation for a minute. Imagine that you're taking your viewers on the journey with you. They don't care whether you've travelled 5000 metres or 5000 kilometres, they want to know what you saw, how it moved you and be shown something that they want to know more about. They want to see it in beautiful light, with interesting interactions with local people and with a story teller's sensibility. And that's the real event whether it's down the road or on the other side of the world - it's a travel destination for somebody.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

How's that for a bit of alliteration? One trend that I've really noticed lately in the travel photography world is specialisation. I guess it's happening throughout the photography world but with travel photography it seems to be happening in a geographic sense, as opposed to a style. And economic times being as they are travel photographers and writers seem to be more and more turning to their own backyards to discover the wonders on their own doorstep.

It's quite ironic really considering many of us got into this profession because we love the adventure of hopping on a plane and going somewhere exotic. But I certainly am lucky in that I chose to live in a part of Australia that is simply spectacular. And so I've decided to introduce a different part of my local area every Friday. Hopefully it'll give local Australian photographers some ideas of the next place for a photo shoot, and also encourage those of you who've always wanted to visit Cairns to think beyond the Great Barrier Reef.

So hold my hand as every Friday we take a look at fantastic FNQ - or Far North Queensland. FNQ stretches from Townsville in the south all the way to the tip of Australia at Cape York in the north. It encompasses beaches, rainforests, dry savanna country, urban areas, And it's all amazingly photogenic. Dry for much of the year, the landscape is shaped by the huge floods and cyclones we get in the wet season, which we're just heading into now.

They don't like to tell you about this little fact in all the tourism brochures featuring shiny, happy people frolicking in the sunshine.

But our annual rainy season is what makes this place so beautiful, and the cyclones that come along with it are just a part of life.

This image was taken after one of the biggest - Cyclone Larry - went through. Contrary to what CNN in the US reported the entire state wasn't evacuated, although the small town of Innisfail just down the road from us got walloped pretty horribly. Here in Cairns we all bunkered down in our house until it was over, trying to make it as non-scary as possible for our little boys. After it had gone through we went outside to see the destruction and get on with life again. They're a pretty resilient bunch up this way!

The first thing we noticed was the incredible amount of leaves that were just covering the road in front of our house. I used a wide angle lens to get the whole sweep of the street in and show just how green it all was. I placed my little boy Mirai in the foreground and my wife with her colourful umbrella a bit behind him to add some interest. I love the way the colourful raincoat and umbrella contrast against the green and black of the road.

Not that I would suggest visiting here just to see a cyclone but if you happen to be in town when one hits remember to keep your camera with you because there can be beauty in even the most destructively powerful of events.

How safe is your film?

I've been doing some scanning lately. Getting some of my favourite film images up on my new website. And I've discovered something pretty scary - many of them aren't in as good a condition as I hoped.

In this digital age we're always told to back up up the wazoo in case of terminal hard drive/DVD/CD/Blu-Ray failure. But how many of us are looking after our film archive?

After all many of us were shooting film for a lot longer than we've been shooting digital and have some pretty precious stuff in there. Whether it be pictures of family and friends, treasured moments or just holiday snaps.

Now if you live in the Sahara Desert you're probably doing OK but if you live anywhere that's got a bit of moisture in it you could be breeding fungus. Fungus doesn't just grow in the lunchbox of your kids when you forget to clean it out for a couple of weeks. It also lives in camera lenses and eats film. You can see its fine tendrils stretching out over your trannie like an evil spider web.

And that's what I found on this image above and it took a lot of work in Photoshop to clean it up. Now granted I live in a pretty hot and humid part of the world but I take precautions like putting moisture zapping buckets in the filing cabinet etc. I have a friend who has all his film in an air-conditioned, dehumidified room and he still gets fungus in his slides!

So if you're reading this and thinking you could have a problem I urge you to go and pull out those precious film memories and take a look. And if there are any that are looking suspicious take the time to get them scanned straight away. After all you can always back up your scans on 100 different types of media if you want but once that one film image is gone it's gone forever.

Quality over quantity - the bad photo tax

One thing about digital is it has led us to take ALOT more photos. I mean when you think about it we used to put a roll of film in the camera with a finite 36 exposures in it. And each one of those pictures was costing us money. So we took it easy on the shutter finger. Not any more.

Digital isn't costing us as much to take photographs. Yeah we have to add hard drives and update computers and buy a new camera every couple of years or so, but leave that all aside. If you're happy chugging along on your current camera with your current computer then it really is pretty cheap.

Which means that we tend to take a lot of pictures just because we can but what do we do with all the duds? In the film days we used to edit them all ruthlessly and bin any pictures which didn't make the grade. Experiments that went wrong, camera firing while in the bag, lens cap on! We used to hope we didn't bin too much because....well it was costing us money.

But now with digital we have a tendency to keep everything and photograph everything whether it's a good idea or not. After all we made such an effort to get up early to go out and photograph so we have to shoot something right? What if I charged you money every time you pressed the shutter? Think of it as a bad photo tax. Or more to the point a lack of a good photo idea but let's shoot it anway tax. Would that cut down the number of photos you take? Maybe force you to really think about the photo you're about to take before you press the shutter?

I was thinking this the other day when I went out to photograph sunrise with a friend and former student Warwick. We headed up to the rocky point at the end of Four Mile Beach in sunny Port Douglas. Only it wasn't sunny. It was cloudy, grey and spitting rain. But rather than running around blindly photographing everything we mainly spent time talking and enjoying the view without feeling the need to push the shutter button.

And at the end of a couple of hours what did I come away with? Some OK pics and only one that really made the cut, which is the one above. One of the beauties of digital is that it allows us to experiment and really push the limits of our photography for exactly the reasons that film made it difficult. It doesn't cost us anything. But at the same time that isn't an excuse to just photograph willy-nilly without thinking about what we're doing. Getting one shot that you're really happy with and want to show people is always a lot better than 100 mediocre pics that will just live in the bowels of your heard drive. Quality over quantity.

Oh and if you think the bad photo tax is a good idea please fell free to send me your tax payments. :)

Whoa what's with the new colours?

If you're just popping back for the first time in a while you'll notice a new look to Have Camera Will Travel. How come? Well I've just set up a new website on Photoshelter - something I've been working towards for the last few weeks, captioning and keywording my favourite pictures to put up into galleries. Anyway it's pretty much done so I'm opening it up to you, my loyal blog readers, and at the same time changing the look of the blog so it matches the other site.

I'm working towards populating my site with thousands of stock images from various parts of the world, many of which have never been seen before. Many will be from Cairns and north Queensland as well as Hokkaido in Japan, as well as pics from India, Nepal, Africa and Thailand. All will be licensed as RM stock and I'm then hoping to get some photographs up for sale as prints which I hope you'll like.

Anyway I hope you like the new Paul Dymond - Photographer website and stay tuned for more blog posting.

Photographers should definitely write!

Thank you everybody for your emails and comments on Monday's post about travel writing and photography. It really made me sit down and think even more about these ideas that have been running through my head.

And before you think I've gone completely off the rails and am going to go back on what I said on Monday, rest assured I'm not!

I think photographers most definitely need to be able to express themselves with the written word. Hell if I didn't think we needed to be able to write I certainly wouldn't sit down to pound out my blog five nights a week.

I guess I was talking about a specific writing situation - that of the travel writer/photographer. For the most part travel writers in Australia get sent on famils where a PR company will send them away somewhere interesting for a few days to gather story ideas.

Notice I said writers get sent on famils. Photographers don't get sent on famils mainly due to reasons of economics. Why pay for two to go when you can send one to write and take some pictures as well, or give any camera-phobic journos a disc of images to use with their articles?

Famils mostly tend to be pretty structured in terms of what the writers see and do, often down to the time they need to be where. And these timetables are not structured at all around photography. They're designed to give the writers as much access to as many interesting places in as short a period of time as possible - more bang for the buck.

But as photographers we often need as much time as possible in one place. And not only do we need more time, it has to be the right time. Take this Boyd's forest dragon above. These guys don't just pop out and beg you to take their photo. You need to be calm, quiet and most of all patient. They might scamper when they see you but if you wait 10 minutes or maybe even more they'll come back and you can get a photo. Unless you're being told that you've got to move on to the next spot.

When you go away on a trip you've organised yourself then the tables are turned. You can plan your trip around the light. Organise interviews when the conditions aren't right for photography and skip breakfasts and dinners when you need to be outside in the golden hours of day. But even then you're likely to be on a pretty tight time frame, especially if you're getting help from a tourism bureau in terms of accommodation etc so you've had to tee everything up in advance.

Either which way you'll probably find yourself leaning towards one end or the other. Either you'll be fretting about being in the right place at the right time for photography (and totally forgetting to jot down any notes about the experience) or you'll be concentraing on writing down your feelings and putting the photography on the back burner.

So I guess I was talking about the type of travel photography we see in newspapers and magazines where there's been a limited amount of time on site and most of that time revolves around getting access to good information for an article.

But does that get you out of needing to write? Not at all. Captioning, keywording, the ability to talk in the same written language as your clients, the ability to communicate the logistics of an assignment. All of this is vitally important. I thoroughly enjoy writing, and these days channel that passion into writing about photography mostly.

But really fantastic, out of this world travel photography that takes the viewer's breath away is a pretty tall order from a writer who is also trying to cover as many angles as possible to maximise their time away and get as many articles as possible out of a short trip. It's not a question of the writer not being able to photograph - many of my writer colleagues are far better photographers than I am.

But the writer usually needs to move quickly and fluidly, talk to lots of people, discover lots of details. The photographer looking for brilliant images needs to slow things down, spend time with their subjects and let things develop in front of their lens while they wait. And most likely they'll need to skip all planned dinners as well! After all the food can wait, the light can't.

What do you think?

Travel photography and writing - do they go together?

This image was taken on assignment for a magazine out of Jakarta, Indonesia known as Destinasian. I've done a couple of assignments for them over the years and they've always been great people to work for. Everything gets shot on medium format print film (which means my film cameras almost die of shock when I get them out!) and a lot of it is natural light, high quality imagery - which suits me down to a tea.

But one of the unusual things about working for these folks (at least here in Australia) is that I don't have to write anything. Here in Australia, and I believe the UK, as well as more in the US now, many travel publications expect their writers to photograph and their photographers to write. And I can't help but wonder if this hasn't played a small part in the lowering of expectations in the eyes of magazine and newspaper readers.

Being a travel writer as well as a photographer invariably means that something has to suffer and often that is the photography. Why? I think it's mostly a time thing. When you're a writer you can watch a scene and describe it beautifully for the readers back home no matter how good or bad the light, whether there is anybody interesting in front of you or not.

In other words you can take something that might make a lousy picture and make it sound fantastic. Sure the Taj Mahal can seem pretty impressive even if you visit it during the middle of the day but the written word can make it sound much more spectacular than any image taken during that harsh noon light.

Photographers don't have that luxury. Unless you're creating a fantasy world in Photoshop you're pretty much reliant on what the laws of serendipity throw your way. Which often means a lot of waiting around for beautiful light, interesting people and something that is visually enthralling. Something that a writer usually doesn't have time to wait around for. They need to be getting on to the next experience so they have plenty of things to fill their article with.

So the quality of imagery falls, especially in travel magazines where the writers are at the destination for such a small amount of time. So the publisher has a choice of either going for the images the writer took, which may or may not be publishable, or reaching for the CD of free images from the tourism bureau. Now you get into a situation where we see the same tourism images popping up again and again and again and it's hard to differentiate one publication from another. Living in one of the world's premier travel destinations means I see the same pictures pop up over and over and over ad nauseum.

But what to do about it? I certainly don't have all the answers and in some ways am just musing to myself (and the few thousand others of you tuning in) but I can't help but wonder if the answer might lie in good old fashioned collaboration. In writers teaming up with photographers to create article packages. For the photographers to create images (or pull them from stock) that align themselves with the text to create something inspirational. For writers and photographers to talk about the aims and direction of the story and work together.

Another way might be for photographers to get their own image collections on-line and aggressively market them to travel publications. But can you compete with microstock and freebie tourism bureau give-aways? Again I think it falls back to quality. Being able to offer something that nobody else can. Then it just becomes a question of whether the publications are prepared to pay for that quality - at least enough to support an income.

This train of thought was sparked by a good friend of mine by the name of Ewen Bell, a wonderful photographer who also writes beautifully. Quite a while back now Ewen and I were chatting on the phone and he mentioned that he was working hard to improve his writing. And I thought, you know what, I work every waking minute of every day to improve my photography but I have no interest whatsoever in trying to be a better writer.

I can write competently and have been published in lots of magazines (sometimes even without pictures!) but at that moment I had a bit of an epiphany. I suddenly realised that I want to work to become a better travel photographer and continue to evolve my style but I have no interest in working that hard to be a better feature travel article writer. Which made me realise that I have no business trying to be a travel writer because it's in nobody's interest to be merely good enough to be published. We should all be aiming to be so brilliant that it would be impossible for people not to publish us.

And I think if more people really concentrated on what they love and really want to excel at, then that would go a long way to improving the level of published material that we come across every day. Of course I'm still stumbling along trying to figure out how this is going to work but following your passion was never supposed to be easy.