Nomadic Vision

In trying to craft up the usual “best of” photo list for the year that just past, I found myself reminiscing over great travel experiences, rather than actual images. As such, I thought it would be better to create a list of our favourite travel experiences from 2011.

The travel year for us started with a trip to Prague in February. It was the coldest weather Tina and I have ever experienced, but the cold weather helped kept the crowds away. The weather also complimented the atmospheric city perfectly. In a week full of highlights, our best experience was the day trip to Kutna Hora. The old town had many silver mines and once competed with Prague. The town has “former glory” written everywhere and is a fantastically atmospheric, haunted town.

Our next trip was a short drive to the university town of Cambridge. Almost anyone who has visited the town would recommend a punting tour along the river. We had a student from South Africa guiding our boat and he was full of humorous information about the town and its’ university.

April began with a 18 day trip through Italy. Despite facing stiff competition from Tuscanny, Lake Como and Venice, our favourite Italian experience had to be staying in Vernazza in the Cinque Terra. Arguably the most picturesque of the Cinque Terra villages, Vernazza oozes rural Italian charm with its colourful houses built impossibly into the side of the cliff.

After a two month break from travel, July started off with a trip to Iceland. This was another trip full of highlights, but topping it off was an hour of mind blowing light over Jökulsárlón, the famed Ice Lagoon. For most of the hour, our only company was a group of seals swimming up and down the lagoon. Surrounded by ice, black sand beaches, mountains, 5 glaciers and magical light made for one of the most memorable scenes of my life.

From Iceland we flew to Slovenia. The country is possibly Europe’s most under rated travel destinations and is a good blend of Italy, Austria and Switzerland. Lake Bohinj in the Julian Alps is the perfect location to make the most of the summer heat. The shoreline could easily be mistaken for Thailand, with the exception of the magnificent view of the Julian Alps in the background. As the rivers feeding the lake from snow runoff, the summer mornings are characterized my misty sunrises, creating a mystical light display.

We took a train from Slovenia to Venice where the 40+ degree heat was almost unbearable. At the very end of the Venice trip we experienced an often overlooked island – Burano. Known for its colourful homes and lacework, the island draws fewer crowds then Venice but is every bit as charming.

Back home in London, an Indian summer during the “should have been much colder” autumn reminded us that some of the best travel experiences can happen on your front door. An afternoon of street photography along the South Bank spent with Warren Scott showed why London is still one of the most interesting cities in the world and provided the inspiration for a photo project that would keep me busy for the reminder of the year.

To make the most of the autumn colour, we took a one week holiday around the fjords of Norway. It’s rare that a physical activity should be a highlight, but the hike up to Pulpit Rock and back surpassed all our expectations.

In December, we reached Koh Samui after 30 hours of travelling. After taking a day to recover from the flight and the jet lag, we were surprised to find the markets of Koh Samui to be so enjoyable, especially when expecting a relaxing week on a tropical beach. The Fisherman Village in Boput providing us with the most memorable food and drinks we’ve had whilst traveling.

I'm still processing pictures from Thailand and haven't prepared any from the Fisherman's Village. Instead, here is a picture of Tina enjoying Lamai Beach in Koh Samui.

From Koh Samui we flew to Thailand’s cultural capital, Chiang Mai. In a city that kept us permanently busy and entertained, it’s difficult to choose a highlight but if pressed, I would say the craziness of New Years eve with the many different fireworks randomly going off across crowds of people coupled with thousands of floating lanterns would be hard to beat.

So after a memorable year of travel in 2011, I look forward to what this year brings. We start with a trip to Provence, France in February then South Africa in April. Our entire summer looks like it will be spent in Canada. We have a loose plan to tour Vietnam over Christmas. Apart from those destinations, our travel plans are wide open.

“Local is lekker”, a popular phrase in South Africa is well worth embracing. To give you an idea of the meaning, the Afrikaans word for a sweet (candy) is lekker. So basically, local is sweet!

This weekend in London was one of the warmest in 100 years, perfect for a stroll along the Thames. Walking through London reminded me how sometimes the best travel locations are often in your own back yard. Local truly is lekker…

Also, check out Warren’s post from the same shoot.

Although this post serves to let you know update the site update, I thought it would be a good place to talk about mentors. I have many photography mentors, most of them don’t know it yet. Through blogs, rss feeds and photo sharing sites, I follow closely some of my photography hero’s. Some of my mentors include:

• Michael Anderson
• Lucy Debelkova
• Mitchel Kanashkevich
• Adam Barker

It’s quite easy to have a mentor who doesn’t know you exist. It is quite another matter to have a mentor who you approach for advice and whose advice you follow. Recently, I contacted Julian Love. Out of all the travel photographers who influence me, Julian’s work best represents what I would love to create. Julian was kind enough to critique my site and gave me the following pointers, which I’m sharing as they may help some of you:

• Have less categories.
• Edit hard (in other words, cut out mediocre pictures).
• Give the categories easier names to follow.
• Cut out black and white work or give it a separate category.

I’ve now redone our site with the first 3 of those points in mind. Slowly, I’ll be replacing the black and white pictures with colour versions of the same.

If you have a moment, check it out. The load time for the pictures may seem quite long, but this is enables you to zoom in by clicking on the picture. If there are any pictures that you feel don’t measure up to the rest of our portfolio, please let me know, either in the comments, through email or if you’re reading this on facebook, in the facebook comments.

A well known strategy for getting great shots is to work with golden light – that magic time of day when the sun is rising or setting. In an ideal world, I would photograph a location during both the sunrise and sunset, but as a travel photographer, I usually only have the opportunity for one or the other.  So which is better?

I struggle to get up early in the morning. I will milk every minute of extra sleep I can get in the morning. I also stay up far later than I should. All of this indicates that I should prefer sunset. The early morning alarm clock is a big con against shooting a sunrise, but as you will see a bit later, it is actually a pro.

Golden light is golden light, whether during sunrise or sunset. Sure, the direction will be different, but the colour and quality of the light should be the same. The appeal of working during the sunrise are the atmospheric conditions.

We recently spent a few days at Lake Bohinj in Slovenia. Conditions were perfect for a holiday, but the cloudless skies meant photography conditions were less than ideal. On our last night I shot during the sunset, lamenting the lack of clouds and dreaming of all the possibilities if I had a better sky. It was the end of a long trip and I was dead tired. I remembered reading that Bohinj is well known for morning mist, so in spite of a month of little sleep, I woke for the sunrise.

I shot in the same location as the sunset and had one the most productive sessions of the trip. The sun tried to break through the fog on numerous occasions without any success, causing a magnificent display of colour and light. Ordinary subjects looked magical under these conditions – I could point my camera anywhere and make a decent picture. Compared to my experience the previous evening, it was a different world.

The atmospheric conditions so often around during sunrise are almost never around during sunset. For that reason alone, I prefer working during a sunrise, but here are two more cases for the sunrise:

1. Most other people also enjoy their sleep which means you can experience a scene without any other tourists.
2. Early morning light is said to put people in a good mood (seriously, google it). Have you ever seen an angry jogger in the morning?

Sometimes successful photography means being prepared to work a bit harder than everyone else which unfortunately means facing the early morning alarm clock.

As street photography continues to grow and flourish, London offers the perfect backdrop to practice capturing the “decisive moment”.

One photographer whose London street photography I admire is Warren Scott. Check out his weekly photo share here.

You may have noticed things have been a bit quiet here lately. Part of the problem I have being a travel photography blogger is that I travel. August is usually the busiest time for me travel wise, which explains the lack of posts. Our next trip (Norway) is only in October, so in between sorting, editing and processing the 5000+ images from our trip, I predict frequent posts.

During this recent trip we revisited Iceland and got blessed with great light almost every day – a far cry from the 17 days of rain we experienced the previous year.

The beauty and drama of the Ice Lagoon

We searched to no avail for blue eyed ponies during our first trip, only to find two of them during our second trip

After Iceland we visited Slovenia, spending most of our time at the lakes and ending at a coastal town called Piran. Slovenia exceeded all my expectations and must surely rank as one of Europe’s most beautiful countries. I cannot wait to go back, especially to the lakes.

Lake Bohinj is the wilder of the two lakes and has a reputation for morning fog, perfect for photography.

A magical island church and adventure sports are Lake Bled's claim to fame.

Being so close to Venice gives Piran a Venetian flavour in both food and architecture.

Piran lies opposite Venice making it a quick two hour trip to Venice via train. Due to its proximity, we decided to end in Venice which proved to be the perfect ending for a great trip, topped off by a visit to Burano, a colourful Venetian island.

Colourful Burano is a visual assault in all the right ways.

When in Venice, visit the Rialto Bridge, my personal favourite Venice spot.

We got to see the fascinating glass sculpturing process in Murano, another Venetian island.

Thanks for checking back here – I hope to have a few informative, lengthy posts up soon.

Most photographs take the majority of their images using automatic or semi automatic exposure mode (aperture priority). Even those using manual exposure mode use the built in camera meter to get a base exposure. The problem with using any of these modes is that the camera averages the exposure for medium grey. In other words, if the scene was converted to black and white and completely blurred, it would look similar to the image above – perfectly between black and white.

This trend is made even more pronounced in post production where we try bring out as much detail as possible in an image, flattening out highlights and shadows.

Whilst the medium grey approach provides a good starting point for exposures – I recently discovered the value of moving away from medium grey. Compare the following two images:

I created the first image a year ago where I was under the impression that more detail is better. Notice how much brighter the foreground image in the top photo is in comparison the the bottom image. Although the top half of both images have roughly the same exposure value, the darker foreground of the bottom image helps bring out depth, contrast and colour, making it a far more appealing image. The top image is closer to the original exposure where I’ve deliberately darkened the foreground of the lower image – making the image “imperfect” in order to make it more visually pleasing.

We’re off to Iceland and Slovenia for a month – I’m going to be looking very carefully at the way I exposure and process the images.

By the way, I’ve joined 500px. If you’re keen on adding me as a contact, here is my profile.

HDR is a process by which multiple exposures are merged together to flatten out contrast and thereby extending the amount of detail that can be shown in a photograph. It is a process that has been used (and abused) by photographers to create images with a distinctive look. Part of the reason HDR is popular is that the general public is not used to seeing “HDR” type images and therefore the images create quite a stir.

This scene demonstrates a common problem. I could clearly see detail in the cliffs and in the water, but when I took the image, I had to choose between underexposing the cliffs and correctly exposing the water or over exposing the water and correctly exposing the cliffs. Our eyes see a lot more detail then a camera can.

Photographers have long been frustrated by the dynamic range captured by film and digital devices. In short, because our eyes are capable of seeing a far greater range of tones then a camera, the results from a camera can be disappointing. For example, a sunset scene can look amazing in person, but often a photograph will either a great sky and silhouetted subject matter or great subject matter but a completely white sky.

There are many tools available to photographers to help them “extend” the dynamic range of a scene. Here are some that I use regularly:

• I use graduated filters to make the brightness level of the sky similar to that of the foreground.
• I use lighting, like flash, to brighten the foreground to make it similar to the brightness of the sky.
• I use lightroom tools like fill light and recovery to bring back detail in shadows and highlights.
• I use Nik Viveza to selectively brighten and darken areas of an image.

When I took this image, the sky was alot brighter then the land. By using a graduated filter to darken then sky, I made the photograph look like what the scene looked like to the naked eye.

These techniques help to compress the dynamic range of a photograph in a way that represents what I saw when I took the image. If you had to return to the scene under similar lighting, you would see something very close to my photograph.

I’ve never enjoyed the HDR method of compressing dynamic range. To clarify, this method takes multiple exposures and blends them together using some algorithm, leaving you with an image that has detail in both the shadows and highlights. Popular HDR software titles include Photomatix and Nik Hdr Efex. If you would like a visual reference, go to google images and type Photomatix HDR.

Until a few moments ago, I’ve never understood why I don’t like the method. It gets plenty of attention from the general public and would be a great way to get my pictures noticed, yet I’ve never been tempted by the look. After analysing a few HDR image, I realised it was the very detail that HDR attempts to rescue that made me not enjoy the look.

Photography differs from painting in that a painter starts with a blank canvas and adds to the canvas. A photographer starts with a complex scene and takes away from the scene through careful framing and composition. A constant problem photographers encounter is trying to fit too much information in a scene. Photographers who have mastered their craft are excellent at simplifying a scene to just the essential components, leaving the viewer craving for more rather then overwhelmed.

A rare moment where I was able to simplify.

This is an image of mine that shows a lot of texture and detail. Compare the above two images, looking at only aesthetics, which would you rather hang on your wall?

HDR introduces detail and texture to almost all regions of a picture. Skies take on a dramatic, doomsday effect. Brickwork looks three dimensional and shiny. Branches glow against a dark sky. It is all very impressive and dramatic, but it is all a bit too much. Whilst HDR is massively popular on the Internet, it has never taken hold of the commercial and print world. In my opinion, it is because of all the artificial detail present in HDR images.

As a caveat to the above, I have seen HDR done realistically, without introducing artificial detail and textures. If the artist did not mention that HDR was used, I would have never known. Which leaves the question, what is the point of HDR if realism is the final goal?