Nomadic Vision

Archive for the ‘Travel Advice’ Category

I love traveling. So much so that I’ve never been somewhere that I thought was a complete waste of time. There are some places that I’m happy to have seen once. Others, I’ve vowed to visit again. There is also a third category – places I would love to live.

Chiang Mai, Thailand’s culture and art capital is one of those places. There is something about the city, the culture and climate that appeals to me. I spent a week in Chiang Mai and even though it was a completely foreign city, it felt like home.

A big contributing factor to the overall feel of the city is the religion. In many places I’ve visited, the dominant religion has felt unhappy and oppressive. In Chiang Mai, I was allowed into the temples at any time and nobody stopped me from taking photos.

When you’re in charge of a religion and you welcome foreign photographers into your sites, you get free publicity – a great idea in my opinion.

Before we visit a new country, one item that we always buy is a guide book. In general, they cost between £10 and £15 which, if you follow the tips in the guidebook, you should save on your first day traveling. We’ve tried a few different brands and seem to have settled on Lonely Planet. They are packed with useful information and generally give great advice regarding places to stay and where to eat. Lonely Planet guidebooks do have two weaknesses though.

Firstly, there is a strong emphasis on museums, galleries and religious buildings as attractions. I have nothing against them, I just feel that most people don’t travel to see museums, galleries and religious buildings. There are times that they are genuine attractions, like Angkor in Cambodia, the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London – but generally, they are not the reason people travel to a country. I wish the guidebooks included more natural attractions or cultural experiences.

The second weakness is the lack of photographs. Lonely Planet guide books are packed with information. The drawback of all this information is that there is very little room left over for photographs.

As a photographer, I enjoy seeing photographs of a location before I visit as it helps me plan my day around the photo-genic attractions. As such, we have a section on this blog that serves as a photo guide to the different places that we’ve visit. The information behind where the photo was taken can be access by double clicking on the picture you are interested in. This page serves as an index to our country guides. Unfortunately, it only shows the places we have visited, but we aim to keep added to this index as we visit more places.

Over the last four years, Tina and I have written photography related articles for Pix magazine – South Africa’s most successful photography magazine. In doing so, we’ve collected over 20 articles related to travel photography. I’ve converted some of the articles into blog posts, but I’ve realized that a blog post is not the ideal vehicle for articles. Blog posts generally work best when they are short. As such, I am creating a section in this blog for articles. These will be the full Pix articles published here a few months after they are published in the magazine.

A have to apologise to friends and family in the design business – I’m responsible for the layout of these aticles (it is not how they appear in Pix) and I am a complete novice when it comes to magazine design and layout.

The articles section will be posted once I have a few articles ready, but for now, here is a taster (click on the show to view the full screen version)…

A padestrain bridge leads to the Salzburg old town, revealing the Salzburg castle in the distant left.

Over the holidays we went for a skiing trip to Austria. Whilst there, we took the opportunity to explore Salzburg. The city has the most beautiful setting I have ever seen. It is surrounded on three sides by mountains. These mountains are no ordinary mountains either. They seem to rise up from nowhere and tower dramatically over the city.

With this picture perfect setting, it should come as no surprise that the city of Salzburg is a remarkably beautiful city. The prominent architecture of the city centre is baroque with a few Gothic styled buildings to break up the uniformity. The centre is one of the best preserved centers north of the Alps and is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.

A gothic styled church towers over the baroque architecture of the Salzberg old town.

From almost anywhere in the city, the most notable feature is a large castle overlooking the city. This castle is known as the Hohensalzburg Castle and is one of the largest medieval castles in Europe. The castle has never been conquered in battle, only changing hands when it was surrendered without a fight to Napoleon.

As photographers, the best photo opportunities we found were from the top of the castle overlooking the Salzburg old town. The combination of mountain scenery, classic architecture, snow and atmospheric conditions was one of the most visually inspiring scenes I have ever witnessed.

Mountains, sun-rays and snow combine to create a magical scene over Salzburg.

Another great view for photographers is from the pedestrian bridge leading to the old town centre. When the blue hour descends, the old town is lit up and is reflected by the Salzach River (the opening photograph).

The city has two high seasons – predictability, over July and August for the European summer months and also in January/February as a base for skiing. I highly recommend a visit to Salzburg – reserving at least 3 days to experience the city in the best possible lighting conditions.

If you’ve never ventured into travel photography, you may not have realized that travel photography is one of the most difficult photography genres in which to make a living. We’ve been traveling for two years but what you probably haven’t realized is that all of our trips are self funded. Even though we sell some of our work to magazines and occasionally companies, the income we receive is a fraction of our total expense.

So why do I do it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tina exploring the Greek island of Kefalonia in the best way possible.

I’ve figured that there are two types of people interested in this blog. The first type is friends and family interested in us and where we’ve traveled to. The second is other photographers/travelers, using our images and stories to help plan their own trips.

Up until now, our portfolio has been the best place to see our travel photography but it is limiting. Our travel photography portfolio represents the best of our images but you may have noticed that it does not get updated very often and it is not very comprehensive – we’ve limited the portfolio to a maximum of 15 images per category (the maximum amount most people look at before losing concentration).

I’ve been trying to work out how I can keep our portfolio current and comprehensive. The solution came to me with the help of a friend and amazing web designer, Shane Rielly. He showed me how to incorporate a flickr gallery into a wordpress blog. I went about setting up different galleries, using the flickr engine and now every time I upload pictures to flickr, it will automatically be added to our portfolio, including the photo information.

So here is an up to date, comprehensive portfolio of places that we’ve visited. You may notice that Kefalonia and Croatia are quite sparse. This will change as I get to process the images and upload them to flickr. In time, we will be adding video content and related travel posts.

So if you ever need help planning a trip or you’re interested in our travels, bookmark this page.

A slow shutter speed conveys a sense of peace in the Cabo de Gata Natural Park in Spain that only the movement in the clouds betrays.

As we travel and photograph different locations around the world, we’re starting to build up a comprehensive photo guide to different locations.

This guide is now available at the following location and will be updated every time we visit a different location.

Please add any suggestions in the comment field of the page – whether it be suggestions for improving the page or suggestions for places to visit.

We’re off to Spain for 3 weeks tomorrow, starting off in the far south, past Andalusia and ending up 1600kms north in Barcelona. It promises to be a photographic adventure of note, so check back in 3 weeks.

I was hoping to get a decent, interesting article in before we left, but, well, I got a bit lazy.

If you need to be reading travel photography articles, click on one of the links or check some of these older posts:

• Paris Street Photography
• Natural vs. Artificial Light
• Buying a New Camera

Cheers