The smiling camel

You know that special moment? The one where you click the shutter at just the right instant and you know you've captured a special moment. In this digital era you tend to just look at the LCD, do a bit of chimping and grin in the knowledge that you got it. In the film days, especially for us long-haul travellers, it could be months before you knew what you had. Months of sweating and hoping that you got what you thought you had.

This shot was taken just outside of the little town of Pushkar in the Indian state of Rajasthan. After having been in India for 3 months or so my wife was coming to the end of her tether. Orderly, systematic Japan was no match for out of control, chaotic India and she was just about to strangle any local who looked at her the wrong way! I think she learnt to swear in her best English while we were in India.

Before heading back to New Delhi and a hurried Aeroflot flight out of the country (that's another tale in itself) we decided to take an afternoon camel safari in the surrounding desert. This part of the world is famous for its camel treks and even more famous for its amorous cameleers, who have been known to put the moves on anything female that breathes.

I took this shot during a short rest break, during which time your bum gets a chance to get a bit of feeling back in it before it gets pounded all the way back to your hotel again. One of our camels decided to have a bit of a roll in the sand, and seemed to be smiling at the guilty pleasure of it all. Framing the shot with a wide-angle lens emphasised the curve of the neck and showed his carer in the background.

So was this one of the shots that I sweated on for a month or so until we got back to Bangkok and processed our films? Not at all. In actual fact I can't even remember taking it! I think I was too busy trying to walk straight and cursing my sore rear end. Which goes to show that there are times when you're pretty sure you've captured a great moment, and other times when you've got no bloody idea. I'll take a nice photo either way.

Releasing your inner travel photographer passion

You'll have to excuse the hairy legs - natural sun protection! This is the pose of your typical travel photography junkie- here working hard in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Yesterday I spoke about passion, and how you need it to produce great photography (or art of any nature for that matter.)

Now if your passion is photographing weddings, babies or still lifes then I'm afraid I'm not much good to you. You see while I am married, do have a couple of babies and a collection of vases I'm not really passionate about photographing any of them.

You know the architect who never finishes his or her kitchen? Well I'm the photographer who never really photographs his kids - seriously with the intent of creating art anyway. A waste I know but there you have it.

If your passion is travel photography however, then that I know a little something about. There is a myth about having a passion for travel photography - and here I'm not going to differentiate between amateur or pro because in the creation of art it makes no difference whatsoever.

That myth is that your pictures will suddenly get a lot better if you could get on a plane and visit somewhere much more exciting, interesting, stimulating (insert your own adjective here) than the current 'boredom city' place you call home. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. If anything you're more likely to create nothing but cliches and seen-it-all-before type pictures when you go somewhere exotic because you're not really following your passion.

Travel itself isn't your passion. Your passion lies within the travel genre. It might be architecture, it might be markets, it might be culture, it might just be the lure of the exotic. But the act of travel alone won't bring those passions on. Your passions lie inside. They're the kind of things you enjoy not just photographing, but reading about, watching documentaries on. It might be forms of transport, festivals and ceremonies, wildlife, spectacular landscapes.

But unless you've got a trust fund, the chances are you can't spend 365 days a year traipsing around the world looking for exotic examples of your passion. Maybe you get a couple of weeks a year, maybe a month or more, but your time available to take 'travel' pictures is pretty limited. So you really need to explore those passions to see if there isn't some way you can photograph them closer to home.

Let's say you're fascinated with India. The colours, the religions, the people. Do you need to go all the way to New Delhi to give in to your passion. I live in a small rural community at the end of the earth and we have a couple of Sikh temples and quite a large Indian community. We also have people from Indonesia, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos...you name it we have them. So if my passion was portraits of people from different cultures I would be set. (Now I know we have a lot of readers from India on the blog so you'll have to swap another country in here!)

At the end of the day I'm interested in stories. Many of those stories revolve around travel because I love the exotic. But, realistically speaking, unless you're getting paid to do this you can find lots of exotic things to photograph close to home. You just need to look inside you to find out what might interest you.

Sit yourself down for half an hour or so and write out a list of things that you absolutely love to find out about. Not necessarily do, or watch, but just learn about. Now which of those things could you get access to and photograph? And do you think you would enjoy photographing them? Have you thought about photographing them before? Does your pulse race a bit when you think about the great ways you could bring your own vision to this subject? That's when you know you're getting close to your passion.

When you've worked out a few things you think would be fun to photograph go and find out who you can contact to get permission. And then when you've done a few photo shoots and, if you really enjoyed it, see if that group of people has an affiliate group in an interstate or overseas destination. See where I'm going with this. If you don't want to make this a career but love travel photography with all your heart, then look for places close to home to feed that passion and try and tie it in to your annual overseas trip.

Think locally to follow your passions and use that knowledge as a springboard to help you find your passion when you hop on a plane next. Remember that the act of travel itself most likely isn't the passion, it's certain things that excite you at your destination. Try and find an equivalent subject at home and you can feed your passion every weekend, not just for a couple of weeks a year.

Being above it all

Often a good way to get an unusual angle on something can mean you pull your hair out looking for somewhere different to shoot from.

Sitting on the same river bank next to the masses of other photographers means that you're most likely to come back with something similar.

Don't forget to look up. Sometimes there can be places you can climb up to get a bird's eye view of the scene.

Doing this often help reduce a scene to graphic elements and get rid of a lot of irrelevant details as well.

In this particular photo, taken in Corbett National Park, India. I could see a mahout and his elephant in the river getting ready for a wash. After taking a few photos at eye level I looked up to notice a large water tower protruding out over the river.

This being India and Public Liability being a figment of some Western imagination, the entry gate and walkway to the tower were wide open and I just walked on through. I was really pleased to find that the tower gave me a great view down on the scene below and cut out a lot of clutter.

A nice, simple composition of mahout and elephant complete with the brown water and the mud stirred up by the elephant. Compared to my ground level shots I much prefer this one.

Is reading killing your photography?

Alright, at the risk of decreasing my blog readership by a huge amount here I'm going to go out on a limb here and try to turn you off reading - at least to the extent that it impacts your photography.

I'm as guilty of this as the next photographer. I mean my bookshelf is literally crammed with books on all aspects of photography - from the business side, to the Photoshop bit to the DAM bit and more. And that's not to mention the giant photo books from people such as Steve McCurry, Nomachi Kazuyoshi and other greats.

But in these days of instant access to so much information on this great art, do we spend too much time reading about it and not doing it?

Over 10 years ago now I spent 12 months traipsing around India, Nepal and SE Asia with my now wife. Half way through the trip we were in Agra, India - about 20 paces from the entrance to the Taj Mahal. We were having dinner in our guesthouse - because there was a new scam in town where local restaurants were in kahoots with the local doctors to poison their customers and get a kickback from the hospitals! But I digress. In the guestbook in the hotel there was an entry from a Japanese guy saying that he'd done his Dive Master training in a tiny little town in the Philippines with a Japanese instructor.

So next thing we're hopping a plane to the island of Cebu, then a tiny bus to the even tinier town of Moalboal so my wife could get her Dive Master qualifications. And what was I doing? Well apart from getting dengue fever and spending a week in hospital, I was reading a book on the business of photography .John Shaw's Business of Nature Photography to be exact. (And by way of full disclosure apparently if you click on the link and buy the book then I get a little bit of change but I would recommend it wholeheartedly anyway!)

As I've mentioned before this book changed my life and I read it over and over again the whole month I was in the Philippines. But looking back at it now, I really don't have many photographs from that month. I was too busy reading to take pictures. I will probably never be there again and I don't have much to show I was there even once. No incisive portraits, no stunning sunrises. Not even a shot of my wonderful hospital bed with its cable Aussie TV! My wife took more pictures than me and she spent most of her day underwater - and no she doesn't have an underwater camera.

The amount of time we spend each day reading about some new technique or piece of software or equipment. And let's not even talk about the number of times we read (yet again) about the basics even though we know them like the back of our hand. Wouldn't that time be much more productive spent working on our art?

So in order to get ourselves away from having our noses stuck in a book (or looking at a screen) and back to a viewfinder I think we should all make a promise. We should all vow to spend less time reading about photography and more time doing it. To limit our reading to the stuff that really helps us right now - not at some imaginary point in the future.

So if you're really into off-camera flash at the moment by all means spend a couple of hours on Strobist - but back that time up by going and spending a couple of hours practicing what you learnt about. And even if you think the Strobist stuff is interesting, if you haven't got the gear or the inclination to follow that path at the moment then don't bother reading about it until you're ready to do it. Your time is better spent reading about what you want to do with your photography right now.

For every hour you spend reading about something, spend the same amount of time, if not more, putting that knowledge into practice. Because just reading about it isn't going to make you a better photographer. It's just going to make you a better read photographer. And goodness knows the world has enough of those already!

As for me - I promise not to read my photography books more than 50 times each. :)

Please don't break on me now camera!

The last time I visited Wat Pho, home of the giant golden reclining Buddha, was fifteen years ago. I was on a 12 month journey around South East Asia, India and Nepal. I was about half way through after having initially spent a couple of months in Thailand and then three months in India with my then-girlfriend, now wife.

As I headed into the giant hall to see the Buddha I noticed my camera acting funny. I always turn the beeping sound for my autofocus off, but still check the little light on my viewfinder to make sure it comes on to tell me autofocus has been achieved. That's especially important in dark places.

Anyway that little light suddenly started flashing every time I half pushed the shutter button down. For some reason it wasn't auto-focussing. I took the lens off and re-attached it. No good. Changed lenses. No good. Took the battery out and put it back in. No good. My autofocus was stuffed and I would have to focus manually.

But was what I was seeing through the viewfinder accurate? In other words if I focussed manually would the focus be OK? This was the days of film so I had literally no idea. And I was shooting slide film so there was no real way of checking. Plus we were headed to the Philippines for a month of diving the next day so no time to get it looked at in Bangkok.

So, with 6 months, the Philippines and Nepal still to go I was more than a little worried. I eventually bought a cheap roll of print film in the Philippines and did a bunch of test shots. Everything seemed to be OK so I just kept on using it. My venerable 21st birthday present lasted until the end of that trip with no more problems but I sure gained an appreciation for the guys who worked before the invention of auto-focus!

So as I headed back into Wat Pho fifteen years down the track I was sending a few wishful thoughts out to the big golden Buddha not to let it happen again. He had the same serene smile on his face as last time so I was hopeful. By the time I walked all the way down to his feet and photographed back along the length of the statue, then walked around the other side and out the door I was officially safe. No second time jinx for me!

Of course if my camera had broken it would have given me an excuse to go and buy a shiny new camera. :)

Writing your way to a career in travel photography Part 1

Hi, I'm a travel photographer'. Who wouldn't love to be able to say that, even once! From giant billboards to glossy magazines, travel images are everywhere. If you have a portfolio of terrific photographs then there are customers for your work, but they might not be where you think they are. And they might want more than just your photos.

Although the market for travel photography is virtually unlimited, the market for beginning travel photographers is not nearly so large. Many advertising agencies license their images from stock libraries that can supply tens of thousands of images to choose from. Can you do the same? If a customer came to you for pictures from Japan one day, and then from Tanzania the next could you fill both requests? A client will only keep coming back if they know they can get what they need.

The same goes for assignment work. Sure there are always opportunities for talented up and coming photographers but if a major magazine or tour company has a big job coming up, chances are they'll give it to the tried and true pro. Feeling disillusioned? Don't be, because there's a sure-fire way to get your name and travel photographs seen by thousands of people all around the world, and get paid for it. And all it requires is for you to not just think of yourself as a photographer, but as a photojournalist.

Without a doubt, the best way to get your travel pictures published is to write some words to accompany them. Take a look at the magazines you subscribe to. How many of them use stand-alone photographs, or even a series of images run as a photo essay. Not many I'm sure. If you look closely, all the images are contained within articles. And if you look even closer you'll find that many of those photographs were taken by the author of the article.

Editors love a package. Give them ten stunning photos of India and, although they might love them, they have nowhere to put them. Write a 1500 word piece on that trip to India and again, they might be entranced, but they need some pictures. Give them both the words and the photographs and the editor will love you, and so will your bank manager when you deposit a nice cheque.

The first step on your road to being published is to find some customers. For travel photojournalists customers are anybody who publishes travel articles with photographs. These might range from Sunday travel supplements in your local newspaper to thick, glossy travel magazines. There are literally hundreds of publications in Australia alone that buy freelance travel material and one of the best places to find them is your local newsagent.

Don't just head for the travel section though. Take a browse through some magazines that you may never have opened in your life. Women's magazines, health magazines, 4WD magazines, motorbike magazines. Chances are there is a travel article in every single one of them. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Trade publications, in-house company magazines and motoring body magazines will never find a space on the shelves next to your favourite photography magazine but often publish travel material. How do you find these magazines?

Well for the answer to that one you'll have to tune in tomorrow where I'll continue to talk about how I got started in travel photography - writing.

How I got started in travel photography

Scott in Colombia (via Australia) posted a question on the Flickr group asking if I could do a post on how I got started doing this.

I'm going to preface this post by saying that this is how I stumbled into this profession. Will what I did help you if you do the same thing? I don't know. I kind of doubt it and at the end of the post I'll tell you why.

I sold my first ever photograph in 1998. But by that time I'd already been to about 45 different countries. So I guess my first piece of advice is if you want to be a travel photographer you have to be a traveller first. You have to love travel almost more than you love photography, but at least equally as much.

Anyway back to the beginning of the career. I was trekking in Nepal with my wife. We were coming to the end of a year traipsing around SE Asia, India and Nepal and were spending about a month or so trekking in the Himalayas. Needless to say I was carrying my camera gear and a lot of Velvia slide film.

On our second day we ran into a dutch couple - Toine and Elsa, and we spent the next month or so walking together. We had dinner together every night, hung out, walked, trekked. It was a good time. Coincidentally Toine was a journalist for Holland's largest newspaper, the deVolkskrant, and when he got back home he wrote an article on the damage tourism is doing to Nepal's environment. He wanted a photo to go with it and I got the sale!

But I don't count that as my entree into the world of professional travel photography. That was a lucky break from a good friend and you'd need a lot of those to build a career. Here in Australia to break into the world of travel photography you need to be a writer as well. I figured that out pretty quickly and set to the task of learning to write travel articles. I submitted an article idea - Trekking in Nepal - to the official magazine of the Youth Hostels Australia. Most of the books I had read suggested you send a one page query letter and wait till you get a yay or nay. I wrote the whole article and sent a sheet of duplicate slides.

A couple of months went by and I heard nothing and then one evening I got a phone call - right in the middle of a cyclone! (That's a hurricane for you folks in the northern hemisphere :) ) Outside there were trees flying through the air, the guttering on my carport was banging against the roof where it had come loose in the wind and the phone rings. It was the editor of the magazine. She loved the article and wanted to commission me to write a second piece for the same edition - this one on travel photography.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that there was a cyclone outside and could she possibly call back in a couple of days if the house hadn't blown away. (Did I ever tell you that Janet?) Anyway that began one of the most enjoyable working relationships and we still keep in contact regularly and I've been on many a great assignment with them.

Since that time I've written numerous articles for various magazines here and overseas. Sounds like a perfect way to make a living but here's the problem. It doesn't pay. Well not very well as many travel writers will tell you. The pay rates at most magazines have't gone up in the past 20 years - I kid you not! Publishing travel articles is a great way to break into things but you're not going to be able to pay the mortgage with it. That combined with the fact that some magazines are turning to cheaper stock photo options (iStock, Shutterstock etc) instead of sourcing their pictures from the writer, or getting their pictures for free from the tourism bureaus, means that this market is rapidly disappearing.

So you need something to supplement that income. Many travel photographers turn to stock photography - mainly representation through an agency. I am represented by Lonely Planet Images and also have images on Alamy. Again it's income that you need to think of as a bonus. It's not dependable because you have no control over how much or how little is sold. Because you don't deal directly with a client you have no idea whether any of your pictures are being considered for a project or how much they will be sold for. You just get your quarterly pay cheque and hope that it's not too bad.

But the problem with agencies is that more and more they take very little of what you submit. Some photographers report only having 10% of their submitted images accepted. So what do you do with the other 90%? More and more photographers are turning to companies such as Photoshelter to license their own work.

Personally I see this as the future of travel photography. I find that when I go somewhere for a short period of time and come back with say a few hundred nice images, then those will do well with a stock agency. But for the areas I specialise in, say my local area of far north Queensland or my wife's home stomping ground of Hokkaido, Japan, I actually do better marketing those images myself. And that's where I intend to head in the future.

And again to supplement that income you need to do things like teach photography courses, run weekend workshops and other stuff like that.

The travel photography marketplace is changing so rapidly it's really hard to know where it's headed or whether there will be a viable future for it in the future. We're being pressed on all sides. More and more print magazines are folding. Everything is headed online but nobody is prepared to pay. So yes you can probably get your pictures in an online magazine somewhere but a credit line isn't going to pay the mortgage.

As more and more aspiring professionals get duped into this dream that they can make money off of microstock the quality of images will go up and many markets for traditional travel photographers will dry up. I already see it on a daily basis as traditional clients of mine turn to microstock to save money. And why not? It's business after all. I don't blame the publishers. They'll save heaps of money, the microstock companies themselves will make lots of money and the poor ol' photographers will get their 20c share of the $1 downloads. It'll take a while to make your fortune doing that.

Here in Australia many, many magazines use a lot of free images from tourism boards. Again why not? Those that want to differentiate themselves in the marketplace will continue to use assignment photographers but for many publishers access to free pictures is too tempting. There is a push by the professional group of photographers ACMP to get the federal government to prevent these images being used for free by large corporations who could afford to pay for them, but where this will lead only time will tell.

So where is it all headed? I think for many people it will be best to keep it as a hobby. For those of you, like me, who have it in their blood and can't imagine doing anything else the trick will be to stay afloat and see where the market goes when things settle down. People will always want to travel, and they will always want to see great travel imagery. The question will be whether those images will come from professional photographers, amateurs hoping to make a few extra pennies to support their hobby or tourism boards. Those of you who do this for a living where do you see things going?

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.

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.

The most common question...

a travel photographer gets asked is without a doubt - what's your favourite country? Well how do you compare the vibrancy of India, with the spectacular scenery of Nepal or the exoticism of northern Thailand? I know I can't. I have good friends who go back to Borneo every year. They're infatuated with it. But for me my favourite country is always the one I'm going to next. That's just the wanderlust in me.

However, on those days when I don't really feel like explaining this permanent state of itchy feet I point to the little-known nation of Namibia. Formerly part of South Africa, this incredible country is home to some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife I have ever seen.

And one of its more spectacular sights is the Fish River Canyon. The size beggars belief. Second only to the Grand Canyon it's about 160km long, up to 27km wide and 550 metres deep in places. And when we got there there were a total of zero tourists!

You can see the Fish River, from which the canyon gets its name, all the way at the bottom there. And you can see the path to the bottom in the foreground. By placing the path there I wanted to show that you can actually walk to the bottom. I used a wide-angle lens to give a sense of the incredible scale. Remember that the wide-angle increases the apparent distance between objects (making the far side appear a long, long way away) and the farther something is from the camera the smaller it appears - in this case the tiny bit of water at the bottom.

Ideally I would have liked a photo of someone going down the path, but only four people decided to go down and I was one of them. It was a very long, hard walk down but the swim in the water at the bottom was glorious, as was the view back up to the lip of the canyon. The walk back up was torture though.

The next morning when we got up for breakfast my good friend Gordon couldn't find his wallet. Thinking that he'd left it at the bottom of the canyon we drove out to the lip and he started his long hike all over again. Needless to say we gave him hell when he came back up a couple of hours later to find his wife holding said wallet after finding it in the corner of his tent! Come to think of it I could have taken a photo of him going down the path but I was too busy laughing!

Wedding Crashers

A wedding is the ultimate celebration. A private festival usually only open to family and friends. Unless you're a foreign traveller, in which case you always seem to get invited to the wedding of the cousin of your taxi driver's second niece's daughter...

You get the picture. This particular celebration was the wedding of the daughter of the owner of a lodge in Manali, northern India.

We got invited along, as did every other foreigner in the neighbourhood, and it was great fun. One thing you always want to be careful of at events like this is not to get in the way. Sure you want to get some great shots but at the end of the day that's not the most important thing. So I spent most of my time on the periphery just enjoying the spectacle.

The bride was in one of the rooms of the house decked out in finery and we all went to pay our respects to her. Outside was where the real action was though. Musicians, food, fun and frivolity. And then there were these guys. The Energizer Bunnies of the wedding dancer world. They went continuously for five days straight.

Day and night. Night and day. Did they take a break? I'm guessing they must have but never when I was around! And we could hear them from our room every night, all night for five days straight. :)

By the time we arrived it was late in the afternoon and the sun had already gone behind the mountains. If I had used a flash and a slow shutter speed they would have been too blurred. If I had used a flash and a fast shutter speed the background would have been completely black. Neither seemed like a good option so I walked around looking for some inspiration.

It was then that I noticed the interesting clouds in the sky. I got down low to give a sense of the feet and movement and backlit them. To prevent them from being complete silhouettes I fired a flash to lighten them up a bit. Because they were wearing white it really helped them to stand out. As a result I got to use my flash and a pretty fast shutter speed but still get a nice bright background (the sky).

Don't forget the little details

As travel photographers our task is to tell the stories of the places we visit. But as photographers we tend to get caught up in the vicious circle of trying to create the greatest piece of photography ever seen.

It's pretty hard not to be influenced by all the great imagery we see in our favourite magazines, on websites and on TV.

But as story tellers our job is much more than grabbing the 'wow' shots. We also need to take notice of the little details and show them to our viewers so that they get a full appreciation of the places we visit.

This image here was taken at the Jantar Mantar observatory in Rajasthan, India. The site is home to giant structures used to predict the passage of the stars and I took lots of wide-angle images showing the giant structures. But they were just pictures of large structures that looked very impressive but didn't really tell the story of what their purpose was.

To tell that story I had to look for a place where the sun and shadow met. Where the measurements were taken and used to make their predictions. So I hunted around for a place where the sun showed how the instruments worked. Looking closely at one of the giant sun dials I found a shadow across a set of measured carvings and the Hindi character for one - Ek. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it is - maybe some of our Indian friends can tell us if I'm right.

Anyway this shot says far more about how the instruments would have been used but of itself is not a 'wow' picture. It's just a good story telling one that helps tell the complete tale to the viewer. So before you leave a place after only photographing the big moments, take another walk around and look for some little details that will help you tell a complete travel story.

Sticking to the edges

One thing I realise I don't talk to you all about nearly enough is composition. In this day of auto-everything cameras that will give you the right focus, the right exposure and just about make the right cup of tea for you, composition is the element that can lift your photography from the mundane to the exceptional.

First let me say that any of the rules of composition that I talk about from here on in are more guidelines than rules. You don't need to follow them but you need to understand them to know when you can break them for a special effect.

One of the first rules of photography states that you should never put the subject of your photo right smack bang in the middle of the frame. They call it target shooting and the reason why you should avoid it is because it's a very static way of looking at a picture. Your eye tends to fall on the thing in the middle and not look anywhere else.

So the first really important thing I want you to keep in mind is to keep your subject out of the middle of the frame. So where do you put it? A very popular compositional tool is the rule of thirds. Imagine your viewfinder divided up like a noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) board. Two lines down and two lines across. Where those lines intersect is where you should put your subject. At least that's how the rule goes.

I tend to stick things all the way to edge of the frame, in corners. With the elephant and mahout I wanted to give a sense of them being quite small in this huge landscape of Corbett National Park in India. So I put them all the way in the bottom left hand corner of the frame and left the rest of the frame blank - filled only with endless grass.

I've touched on this before but I like to leave lots of negative space in an image to give a sense of wide open spaces. By having the landscape run out of the frame it leaves you wondering just how far that nothingness goes on for.

By having the elephant and mahout quite small in the frame it really makes them look insignificant, which is ironic because we all know how big elephants really are.

So if you live in an area with lots of wide open spaces try taking a photographic subject and putting them towards the edge of the frame and have them surrounded by nothing to really emphasise the space.

Buying a tripod

Now here's a photo that I have to admit I never, ever in my wildest dreams thought would ever get published! Just to the right hand side of the far left hand tripod leg is Mt Everest. At the bottom of the tripod is an el cheapo shoulder camera bag that I bought in Kathmandu and just survived a month walking in the Himalayas before I ditched it.

And the star of the show is my trusty Manfrotto tripod Model 190. (I had to just look at that because I had no idea of the model number!) Hanging down just above the camera bag you can see the blue strap that I've talked about before - the one I use to carry my tripod over my shoulder.

So what do you need to look for? The first thing is it has to be portable. You don't want something that's so heavy that you're not going to want to carry it, because as soon as it becomes more of a burden than it needs to be you'll leave it in the hotel room. But at the other end of the scale you don't want something that's so flimsy that every time you put your camera on it it wobbles. A good way to test the strength of a tripod is to put both hands on the tripod head and push down. If the legs bend or flex then forget it.

Once you have one that seems sturdy enough and not too heavy (carbon fibre tripods are expensive but highly recommended) you need to find one that is the right height. No one tripod works for all people. You need a tripod that, when you put your camera on top, the viewfinder is pretty much level with your eye while standing up. In other words you're not bending down to look through the camera. If your tripod is too short you'll wind up spending your whole day stooped forward and put your back out. I have a good friend who is over 2 metres tall and his tripod is taller than me!

Another thing you might want to think about is how low your tripod will go. If you're into photographing flowers and other plants low to the ground you'll want a tripod with legs that will bend out far enough to get you close to the ground. Often you'll find that those with leg supports (metal strips that run from the legs of the tripod to the middle column) don't let the legs open up very wide at all meaning the lowest you can go is the tripod at its minimum length. Some tripods let you attach your camera to the bottom part of the centre column which is a great way of getting low.

On top of the tripod you have the option of various heads. You can get three-way pan and tilt heads - which use three handles to control the various movements of the tripod head. You can also get ball heads which lock or loosen with a simple knob to allow you maximum flexibility. And you can also get a pistol grip head which works the same as a ball head but looks like a video game joystick.

I used to have a pan and tilt head but got sick of having to turn multiple knobs to lock the camera into position. I lost one of the knobs in India (if you're in Manali keep an eye out for it!) and swapped to a pistol grip head made by Manfrotto. I'm pretty happy with it, although if I had one gripe it's that it's awkward turning the camera vertically because the pistol grip head sticks out so far.

I don't really want to recommend any one particular brand but I've had my trusty Manfrotto tripod for nearly 15 years and it's been all round the world a number of times and never let me down. Manfrotto goes by the name of Bogen in the US. I also hear fantastic things about Gitzo tripods but personally don't have any experience with them. For the ultimate in flexibility a lot of nature photographers recommend Benbo tripods.

And that's about it for our mini tripod feature. I hope I've convinced you to rush out and buy one, or if you already have one to use it more often. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if there's any one accessory that can improve your photography a million percent it's a tripod.

Next time we'll return to our regular broadcast. :)

How long does it take for a travel photo to date?

Some kinds of photography date pretty quickly. How many of us are still wearing flared corduroys with fat paisley ties? But travel photography, in particular nature based travel photography, isn't one of them. After all, places like Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) in central Australia have looked exactly the same for hundreds of thousands of years. Even if your picture was taken 100 years ago chances are you wouldn't be able to pick it.

Which becomes a bit of a problem with digital photography and publication. Because magazines always like to think they're getting the most recent pictures of everything. Which, when the subject of the photo may change rapidly like a city skyline etc, is quite reasonable.

But what about when the subject of the picture is something that just hasn't changed. Is timeless. Like a close-up of a fern, or a giant redwood, or a wild deer. In that case does anybody need to know when the picture was taken? I would say no. As long as the photographer is sure that the capture date is irrelevant then it's nobody's business but themselves.

A few years ago I had an editor came to me for pictures of a certain national park. Unfortunately I hadn't been there since I was in university (believe me that's a long time ago now!). But I had some images that were timeless. Nature shots, scenic views. That sort of thing. Because the editor was a friend I let him know when the pictures were taken and he didn't mind in the least. They were taken in the park and if somebody had gone there the very next day they could have seen exactly the same thing.

In the last two months I have licensed an image I took in India more than ten years ago three times for a total of close to $1000 US. A generic shot of spinning prayer wheels. Did the client care when they were taken? Not a bit.

So before you go throwing out all your old pictures because you think they don't have any value any more, or don't want to put them out for sale because you think they're too old. Go back and have a second look. Some pictures really are timeless and can continue to bring in income long after you pushed the shutter.

Seeing with a telephoto lens

One of the most difficult things I found about photography when I first started was being able to picture how a scene would look when I used a particular lens.

I would have an idea of what I wanted to capture but not know which lens I needed to bring my mind's image to life. So I would stick a lens on, zoom in and out, swap it for another lens and zoom in and out again until I got what I was looking for.

As I got used to the effect of different focal lengths I found that I got to the stage where I could instinctively reach for the lens I wanted to create the effect I could see in my mind.

One of the best ways I found to help me pre-visualise the effect of a lens was to put the lens on the camera and actually look through the viewfinder. Sounds pretty obvious doesn't it but it didn't seem so at the time. I found it worked the best with a telephoto lens. Rather than squinting at the horizon trying to see if there was anything to photograph I would stick a long lens on and scan the distance looking for interesting subjects.

The image above is one such example. It was taken in the tiny pilgrimage town of Pushkar in the state of Rajasthan in India. I was having dinner in a cafe and looked out to see this lovely light. I didn't want to let this light go to waste but couldn't see anything to photograph. So I put the 300mm lens on and started looking around. My eyes settled on the domes of this lovely building spotlit by the afternoon sun and the stunning mountains in the background. The bird flying past was a lucky fluke. :)

Try it yourself. Get yourself into a position where you've got a good view all around you. Tops of mountains or buildings are great choices. Put your longest telephoto lens on and just scan around. Hopefully you won't get arrested for being a pervert and spying on the person sunbaking naked in their back yard, and you'll come away with some interesting compositions and a new understanding of how your telephoto lens sees the world.

Monday's link on Tuesday

Well seeing as yesterday was a public holiday for those of us here down under - Australia Day, I had the day off to play with the kids. So it's a Tuesday link.

I'm sure it's the same for many people starting photography. You see an image that simply amazes you. An art form that you may have never considered before suddenly seems to be something so incredibly powerful that you feel inspired to try it yourself. To emulate the work of a great photographer.

And for each of us that photographer is going to be a different person. For me that first great inspiration, and a continuing gauge for how I see my own work is Steve McCurry. For some of you the name might not be familiar, but I'm sure his most famous image is.

Remember the Afghan girl on the cover of National Geographic? The one with the incredible green eyes, harrowed look on her face and her torn shawl. That's his.

And can I let you in on a little secret? I don't really like his portrait stuff as much as I love his street documentary work where he shows how people live. He mostly works in South Asia - India, Pakistan and Afghanistan - but has recently been working on a body of work photographing Buddhism around the world.

I have always been fascinated by Buddhist culture and feel a great affinity for its practitioners wherever I go so that's probably one reason I love his work so much. Another is his use of natural light and a simple colour palette. The man is a true artist and as long as he keeps on putting out big glossy books Amazon will be getting my dosh! (money for those non-Australians)

If you get just one book of his get South By South East - you will love it.

The financial logistics of travel photography

Let me preface this post by saying that if your main concern when you decide to hang your shingle out as a travel photographer is money than you'd be better to go into real estate! Becoming rich is most likely not going to happen. Having a very cool life that presents opportunities you would never get in a 9 to 5 office job is pretty much a guarantee. The trick is getting enough work to make as much money as you would at your 9 to 5 - including all the benefits that your job pays like superannuation, health care (in the US) and other perks.

I can't tell you how to get yourself in a position where you can do that. I can't even tell you what kind of clients you need to aim for. That kind of advice is totally personal and will vary greatly depending on where you live, what kind of car you want to drive, what kind of a salary you want to pay yourself. The answers are as numerous as there are photographers.

What I can tell you is the things you need to take into consideration to come up with the numbers you need and how to work them out. The logistics, both financial and physical, of travel photography differ from the wedding/portrait studio down the street, just as do the clients and subject matter.

The first point - which may seem obvious - is that you need to travel. Kind of seems like a silly statement I know but a lot of people not in the industry just assume that glossy magazines will pay you a day rate and cover luxurious expenses when they send you out on assignment for weeks at a time. Believe me, this is so far from the truth it's not funny.

Here in Australia, and I imagine North America,the UK and just about everywhere else as well, that only happens at the very top of the travel photography tree. We're talking major publications with huge budgets, and often matching huge rights grabs (more of that in a later post). To get to that stage, if that's your aim, you will have to work your way through local and regional magazines. Many of these barely have a budget to pay you for what you submit, let alone send you on assignment.

So you'd better get used to the fact that you're going to have to pay your own way and hope to cover expenses some point down the track. This should immediately tell you that you're going to have better luck covering costs if you start locally. Fly half way around the world to India and you've already shelled out 3 or more articles worth of airline ticket before you even leave your front door.

So in your yearly expenses that you need to recoup your first thing is travel - and that's a big one! I did a lot of travel before I even licensed my first picture. I worked in supermarkets, duty free stores and as a tour guide during my university days to save up enough money to feed the travel passion. Anything I could do to get me back on the road again - all the while building up a portfolio of images. It's a lot easier to do this before you quit your day job.

Many of the other expenses are the same as other photographers - rent, equipment, insurance (don't forget travel insurance doesn't usually cover camera gear used for work), telephone, website. Yada, yada, yada. You need to calculate all the costs associated with your business, including things like utilities etc. Doesn't matter if you work from home (I do) all those costs push up your cost of living. When you've added up all those costs you then need to tack on your salary. Your salary is a cost to your business - it doesn't come out of your profit.

If you add all those things up I guarantee you'll just about fall off your chair at the final tally. Looks pretty big doesn't it? Now just think that you have to make that money in roughly 100 days. What? Don't I get 365? No you don't.

All through the year you have to do things like: submit assignment proposals, do your books, your taxes, go to the store to buy new computer ink/CF cards/paper for your printer, reply to emails, write your blog, update your twitter, have portfolio showings, meet clients, prepare images for gallery shows/submission to stock agencies etc. There are lots of things you have to do when you run a travel photography business that have nothing at all to do with taking pictures. And, unlike other photography fields, you have to travel as well.

The ironic thing is that you don't get paid to travel. Sure you make money from the pictures you take while travelling, but nobody is paying you to travel. Time on the road is time away from the money-making side of things. Sure you need to be away to photograph but while you're away from home base you're not: contacting clients, licensing images, getting images on-line. In other words the pictures you take are worth nothing until you come back and put metadata in them and get them out where somebody can see them.

So for every day that you're doing something that isn't making you money (and that's most of them!) you have to make it up on the days you are. Which is why you have to figure out how much you need to make on each of those 100 days you're working.

So let's say that, for the sake of argument, you have overhead of a nice round figure of $20,000. Sounds like a lot of money? That's not many plane trips or new 1TB hard drives in there. Pretty easy to rack up this kind of expenditure without doing anything. And let's say you want to pay yourself a wage of $40,000. Again, not enough to feed a family but you might get by if you're single and living in a share house!

So your total yearly overhead is $60,000. There's no profit in there, that's just what you need to keep off the poverty line. On top of that you need to add a profit - the money you use to re-invest in your business to propel it forward. So let's stick on a $2,000 profit. Again not a lot of money but 10% of expenses sounds like a good place to start. So our grand total is $62,000 - and you need to make that in roughly 100 days. So let's say $620 a day.

Now, just to clarify here. I'm not talking about assignment travel - ie getting paid to go on assignment. I'm talking about the majority of travel photographers who pay their own way. For every day you're travelling, assuming that you're away for 100 days a year, you need to take $620 worth of photographs.

My last post talked about breaking into the industry via submitting work for magazines and newspapers. Here in Australia the pay rate for an article in this range is roughly $500 to $800 give or take a few pennies. So that means that if you go away for one week (7 days) you have to produce roughly nine articles to even have a chance of covering your expenses. Doesn't sound too easy does it? A good friend of mine who has been doing this for years remarked the other day that it is getting harder and harder to pay for the big trips.

And don't forget that many of those picture won't pay for themselves for months if not years down the track. Once you've submitted an idea to a magazine you can expect them to take a month or so to get back to you, then it might take you a couple of weeks to write the piece and submit it. Then they might not fit it into the publication (and thus pay you) for six or more months down the track. Remember that you don't get paid until you get published with many magazines.

Of course the higher the pay rate, the less articles you have to sell.

How about stock photography then? Well if you're selling your pictures using the Rights Managed scheme and hopefully getting $60 to $100 per license then you need to have at least 10 marketable pictures per day. If you're licensing using the Microstock system at pennies a pop...well you're going to have to take a LOT of marketable pictures every day you're away. And even then those pictures might not make you a red cent for a long time after you get them on-line. Who's paying the bills while you wait to get paid?

Granted this is a pretty rough overview but I wanted to show some things you need to take into consideration to keep your head above water in this game. In my next post I'll talk a little about what happens when you move up to markets that pay you to go on assignment, and different avenues of assistance you can reach out to to help subsidise your travel.

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.

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.