And the other favourite is...

this place. Nearly nine months in Africa and I hadn't seen a single drinking giraffe. And here in my final game park I was lucky enough to see six at once. With a flock of ostriches behind just to top it off. About five minutes after I took this photo three young cheetahs came down to drink and one of them ended up having a staring match with a giraffe.

And about ten minutes after that a giant herd of elephants came down to drink. And the best thing is that one of the best waterholes is right next to the campsite so you can sit on a bench with a cold beer, camera on tripod and just enjoy the view. Game viewing just doesn't get much better than this.

This country is also home to giant 500 metre tall sand dunes, one of the world's largest seal colonies and miles of spectacular coastline bordered by one of the driest deserts on the planet. It's in the southern corner of Africa, just above South Africa and if you hadn't guessed already - it's Namibia.

Sealed roads to pretty much everywhere you'd want to go. Friendly people and to crown it all the amazing Etosha National Park. This is where my giraffes made an appearance and was without a doubt one of the most amazing national parks I visited in the whole of Africa.

There's not much to say photographically in this one I'm afraid. It was taken with a 300mm lens on Kodachrome 64 slide film. The camera was on a tripod and I was sitting on top of a truck just photographing away as the sun went down. Another one of those pinch me I'm dreaming moments.

Commonly asked questions

Every profession has them I'm sure. Doctors get asked for back pain advice and recommendations for flu treatments. Lawyers get asked for legal advice and record producers get asked what Britney Spears is really like. Travel photographers...well my most commonly asked question is. "What's your favourite country?" (Hello to the Innisfail Camera Club - I hope you enjoyed the talk last night!)

I always find this a really difficult question to answer. I mean how do you compare the raucous festivals of Japan with the quiet sanctity of a Thai buddhist temple. The cacophony that is India with the majesty of the Serengeti plains. If the truth be told my favourite place, and I guess it's the same for anybody with a serious case of wanderlust, is always the next place I'm headed to.

But if I had to narrow it down I can think of two that come to mind. This is the first one.

It took me three weeks for my wife and I to walk here. We stayed in a little guesthouse in that tiny little village you can see in the bottom LH corner of the picture. It's called Gokyo and it's high up in the Himalayas in Nepal, near the border with Tibet. Just outside the left hand edge of the frame (and not in the picture) looms Mt Everest. There are a series of five aquamarine lakes that are just too beautiful for words.

This photograph was taken from the top of a little 'hill' called Gokyo Ri. It's only 400m or so above the village but it's over 5300 metres above sea level. There's so little oxygen up there that every three or four steps you have to stop and get your breath back. A lot of people in a hurry rush up to the top, see the view and race back down again. My wife and I walked up at a leisurely pace after everybody else had come down. We had nearly two hours up there without a soul in sight. There was just the sound of the wind blowing down the valley, we were surrounded by 8000 metre mountains in every direction and a series of Tibetan prayer flags blowing in the breeze. There are times in your life when you just have to pinch yourself to make sure it's all real - this was one of those times.

This image was taken with a short telephoto lens - about 80mm. I have a polarizer on there to bring out the colours and have used a small aperture to have as much in focus as possible.

As for my other favourite place? You'll have to wait for next time. :)

By the way I've changed the settings so you can make comments without having to log in to Google. Just hit the Anonymous button on the Comment Posting page and it will save you the log in hassles.

The right weather for travel photography...

doesn't really exist - or at least never seems to when you're somewhere in bloody awful light!

Very often when we're travelling we spend only a limited amount of time in our destination and have to make do with what nature provides us. There's always a friendly local to tell us, "oh you should have been here yesterday!"

The trick is to choose the right subject for the right light. The thing NOT to do is to ignore what the light is telling you and photograph the right subject in the wrong light.

The picture at left is a perfect example. It was taken at the beautiful Shiretoko Five Lakes, in the far eastern side of Hokkaido, Japan. This is a glorious natural reserve, World-Heritage listed and full of bears and deer. I was on a pretty rushed trip through eastern Hokkaido on assignment for a magazine and I had my wife, 2 year old son and father-in-law for company. My father-in-law had my son in a backpack on his back, my wife Chiharu carried the supplies (nappies, bottles etc you get the drill!) and I had the cameras.

Before I arrived I had seen all these wonderful images of snowy mountains lit up by afternoon sun, bathed in golden light with gloriously green forests and crystal blue lakes in the foreground. As you can see that ain't what I got! So how could I turn this horribly cloudy, tourist-filled day into something memorable? By forgetting about any pre-conveived ideas of what a place should look like and really opening my eyes.

I noticed the way the grey sky by itself was pretty boring, but was reflecting beautifully in the lake, as were the mountains. Not quite enough by itself but getting there. There was still the problem of the busloads of tourists. Did you notice them in the picture? Pretty hard to because I pretty much got rid of them with a really wide-angle lens - which has the effect of shrinking the apparent size of things far away from the camera. The only other thing I needed was something to provide a bit of foreground interest. Voila - a pyramid-shaped rock and silhouetted tree branches. I deliberately underexposed the picture to almost silhouette all the details and bring out the reflections in the water and produced an image that I'm really proud of.

It might not be golden light, or bright and colourful. But it's a personal interpretation of a well-known site and possibly more individualistic than what I would have got with perfect lighting conditions.

So don't blame the weather for ruining your travel photos - work your way around the heavens and point your camera at an appropriate subject for the light.

Photographing in the rainforest...

is hard. Not only is it physically challenging - humidity and sweat, mosquitoes and leeches all make it so enjoyable - but photographically it is very difficult as well.

Taking a nice photograph in the rainforest isn't simply a matter of heading in at any time of the day at any time of the year and coming back with the goods. You need very specific lighting conditions and your biggest enemy is the sun.

When the sun is out on a nice clear day there is just too much contrast to take a photograph. Think of how a tiger uses its stripes to blend into the forest and you can imagine what your pictures will look like. Inky black shadows combined with pure white, burnt out highlights.

In really contrasty situations to get an idea of what your picture will look like try squinting at the scene. You'll see areas of shade turn to black. This can be a good way of getting used to the difference in the way that you see the picture and your camera records the scene.

To retain all the detail you can see with your eye you actually need a really cloudy day. If you have no choice but to be in the forest on a sunny day you need to be out photographing before the sun comes out in the morning, get a book out until late afternoon, and start again when the sun has gone away.

But just timing your photo shoot for a cloudy day won't be enough to ensure rich, vibrant colours. Rainforest leaves are permanently shiny and that shine will take away all the colour in your pictures unless you neutralise it with a polarizing filter. Think of it like a pair of sunglasses for your camera. It cuts down on reflections and brings back the brilliant colours to your images.

The other thing about rainforests is that they're green. Monotonously so. I mean really, really boringly so. To break up your photographs you need to put something in the picture that isn't green. This is a pretty hard thing to do in a place where literally everything is the colour of a tree frog. That's why you usually see a stream or river in rainforest photos. To break up the monotony. If you come across a red or yellow leaf - use it! Get up close to brown-trunked trees. Stock standard point that camera at a rainforest scene photos don't work.

The photo above was taken at the beautiful Daintree Eco Lodge in far north Queensland. I have a polarizing filter on there to bring out the green in the leaves. I used a slow shutter speed to get that lovely cotton candy effect on the water. I took the shot with a wide-angle lens so I made sure to have something nice and prominent in the foreground to give me a foreground, middle ground and background to the image - thus creating a 3D effect. And although it looks like a really sunny day it was actually quite cloudy and little bits of light were filtering down between the trees to provide highlights on the water.

I was there on assignment for a great magazine called Destinasian. You can get it in Cairns for those of you who live there. It's published in Indonesia and I shot the assignment on medium format print film. You can see the images from this shoot in the May 1st issue.

Compare the pictures you take now...

to those you took last year. Not only does it encourage you to go back and look at the images you've taken in the past (instead of just leaving them to rot on your hard drive!) but it's a great indicator as to how you're improving (or perhaps plateauing) as a photographer.

Many people feel a need to compare their photographs to those of others and either lament the fact that their efforts don't come up to scratch, or rest on their laurels if they feel they've achieved a high standard. While it's very important to be aware of the work of others and be inspired by great artists, I think it's far more valuable to your photography education to compare your own work with what you have created in the past.

I look at the pictures I took in Africa way back when I started photography and often think, "if only I knew then what I know now!". I'm sure we've all been there. I certainly created some images that I am proud of to this day but the vast majority, while they encapsulate fond memories, don't really stand up as great photographs.

But rather than comparing those pictures to the work of say Robert Caputo or any of the other wonderful photographers who have documented Africa, I compare them to the images I shoot now and let that be a judge of how far I have come as an image-maker. And to show me how far I still have to go.

Not many people have heard of Mali. The name Timbuktu conjures up many adventurous images in people's minds but mention Mopti, Bamako or the Dogons and people's faces tend to go blank. I was the same until I visited and discovered this amazing country with a rich, vibrant history and culture.

This image was taken on a three day pirogue (wooden canoe) trip down the Bani River out of Mopti. Three days of lying back under a straw canopy while guides paddled us leisurely downstream, with the great Malian guitar player Ali Farka Toure serenading us from a tinny, mono tape player. I shot this picture with a wide-angle lens to make the river look as wide and grand as it was. A small aperture gives enough depth of field to see the riverbank in the background. Focussing just on the poler's legs, pole and the stern of the boat turns him into a symbol of his profession. Balanced precariously on the back of the boat as he expertly guides us down the river. The carvings on the side of the boat show that we're not in Kansas anymore Dorothy.

In case you hadn't guessed this is one of the pictures I am happy with and would be just as proud to have taken it yesterday as I am to have taken it 14 years ago.

Love what you photograph and it will show.

Long before I was a travel photographer I was a traveller. Just bumming my way round the world. I took up photography as a way to show the folks back home all these amazing things I had seen. The idea to try and make a living at this crazy game didn't come till years later but this image was a major milestone in my transformation to being a professional.

It was the first picture I ever had published and boy was I proud. These are porters in the lower hills of the Himalayas in Nepal. On their heads they are carrying tables (!) so rich white people don't have to get dirty sitting on the ground when they have dinner. And they're all either barefoot or wearing simple thongs. These men and women are absolutely incredible.

My wife and I spent a month trekking from Kathmandu to the base of Everest. No porters or yaks to carry our gear, just the two of us and a couple of daypacks. We stayed in little local guesthouses and lived on lentils and rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

With us for just about the entire month was a fantastic couple from Holland - Toine and Elsa. We met them on the first day and got on like a house on fire. It just so happened that Toine was (still is) an editor at Holland's largest daily newspaper - the DeVolkskrant. He wrote a piece on the effects of tourism on the Nepalese environment and culture and voila - I suddenly had a full page picture in a major European newspaper. Not bad for your first published pic!

I love the way the clouds create a beautiful atmosphere, almost spotlighting the porters. The use of a 300mm zoom compresses the perspective to make the mountains appear big and looming and give a sense of scale of the landscape. Nepal was near the end of our year-long trip travelling round SE Asia and just before I arrived the autofocus on my camera died, so everything I shot in Nepal was totally done on manual focus! And with stock standard lenses off the shelf. Just goes to show that you don't need the best and most expensive equipment (or even equipment that works properly!) to get good photos. Love what you're photographing and the quality will come.

Trouble in Tibet

With all my photographs I have a mission. It's quite a simple one really - I want to engage the viewer in such a way that I encourage them to want to know more about the subject of the photo. To want to visit a landscape , to see for themselves how an animal fits within its environment, and to discover personally how certain people live. Call me idealistic but I really do believe that travel photographers and writers can play a small part in breaking down cultural barriers between people and opening up doors to dialogue and understanding.

Which brings me to my first post. I'm a pretty opinionated bastard as most of my friends will happily attest to, but my opinions rarely make it into my photography. My glass is always half full and I like to show the happy side of life. Which makes this image a bit unusual for me but perhaps timely in the current climate.

My wife and I were in Dharamsala (McLeod Ganj) in northern India. A unique part of the world, McLeod Ganj is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-In-Exile and attracts Tibet-freaks, Hollywood actors and genuinely concerned activists from all over the world. It really is an amazing place.

During our visit a number of Free Tibet protestors were staging a hunger strike in New Delhi. As the police moved in to break up the demonstration one elderly Tibetan man by the name of Thubten Ngodup made the sacrificial decision to douse his body in petrol and set himself alight. Graphic images and videos made headline news around the world.

What didn't make the news were the memorials held by those who knew him back home. In Buddhist tradition a candelight vigil is held for someone who has passed away, every seven days for forty nine days. We were in town for 3 weeks and had the honour of visiting three vigils.

In this image I used a technique known as slow-shutter flash. Many cameras now call this 'night portrait mode' but basically what it does is tell the camera to use the proper shutter speed (a slow one) for the ambient light and fire the flash at the same time. Instead of getting a gaping black background and a subject caught like a deer in flash headlights, you get a properly exposed background and a combination blurred (where the subject has moved) and static (where the flash has hit them) person.

In this particular image I feel that it makes the monks look almost ghost-like and adds to the atmosphere of the procession. If I hadn't used the flash everything would have been totally blurred. If I had used normal flash (without the slow shutter speed) you would have just seen the central monk and everything around him would have been black.

The trick with this technique is to shoot a lot of pictures because you never know what you're going to get. Digital makes it a lot easier but you don't want to spend all your time looking at the LCD and missing out on pictures.