Since I’ll be on the road for the next couple of weeks, and my ability to post may be hindered, I hated to leave you staring at a photo of my feet. Instead, I’ll leave you with the first sign of Spring in our backyard — the Witch Hazels that we planted last summer are blooming.

See you all soon!

Sometimes that little bit of extra leg room makes all the difference.

My travel schedule is just about to shift into high gear. I leave for Thailand in a few hours with a short stop in Dubai along the way. I’ve been busily making preparations for weeks: getting photography permits, researching locations, etc., etc. But it’s the air travel that will define a large portion of this trip. In just over two weeks, I’ll have a dozen flights. Everything has been booked and a few days ago I logged in to the airline websites to check my seat assignments.

This is where the real strategy begins. I have a couple of long, overnight flights — around 13 hours each — and seating decisions can make the difference between arriving rested or arriving cramped and in a sleep-deprived haze. Being able to make seat selections online is great. Airlines’ sites are getting better and there are sites like SeatGuru that give all kinds of information by airline and plane type regarding location of power outlets, seats with extra legroom, less under-seat storage, etc. It’s great. Almost too great because now your seat assignment is your decision and not something you have to leave up to the fates and the person behind the gate counter.

So back to those long flights. Here’s the conundrum: window seat (where you can lean on the side of the plane to sleep but you’re trapped by your seat mate if you need to get up), aisle seat (where you have elbow room on one side and easy access to move around whenever you want but you have to constantly let your seat mate out), or the dreaded middle seats (where you can be pinned in on each side by your fellow flyers — no space and no freedom of movement).

Then you have to think about the other empty seats. Do you take a window seat in a two-seat row in hopes that no one will take the seat next to you so that you can spread out a little? Or do you take the bigger risk of going for an empty 5-seat center section? You run the risk of other seats filling after you book and being stuck shoulder to shoulder but — if you can pull it off — you can flip up all the armrests and practically have a bed to sleep in (albeit a bed with seatbelt buckles that like to find the small of your back in the middle of the night). This is the holy grail of economy class long distance flight but it doesn’t come easy. Others will spot you in-flight and you may need to protect your turf. After all, who are YOU to get 5 seats all to yourself? Feigning a drooling sleep will ward them off for a while but beware when you sit up to eat or make a bathroom run. It’s every man for himself.

I’ve gone with a hybrid strategy. Traveling to Thailand, I’ll stop in Dubai for two nights so I’ll arrive in Dubai in the evening and can get a good night’s sleep. Arriving in Bangkok two evenings later, I’ll get another good night’s sleep. Since sleeping on the plane won’t be so critical, I’m going for a window seat in a two seat row — currently there’s an empty seat beside me. Hopefully I’ll get to spread out a little and maybe I’ll be able to get a shot or two of the palm islands upon approach to Dubai (I made sure I wasn’t seated over the wing).

Flying home, I’ll have about 27 hours of nearly-continuous flying time in four legs with brief connections. I’ll want to sleep on this one so I’m taking a gamble on a 5-seat center section. I took the aisle so that, if it fills up, I’ll still have elbow room on one side but maybe I’ll get lucky and get the whole row. That would be pretty sweet.

Sorry. Bad pun. I’m posting a couple of photos from Chile today since there’s been so much in the news since the earthquake last week. The shot above is from Valparaiso, on the coast west of Santiago. It and the following shot are from a trip I took to Chile a couple of years ago. If you want to see coverage post-earthquake, check out The Boston Globe’s Big Picture here and here. The following shot is of a more modern side of Chile in the bustling capital city of Santiago.

Chile has also lately been appearing on television in the Amazing Race 16. This show is a guilty pleasure of mine as I love to see the contestants panic when thrown into the various situations that so often come with travel. I had to laugh when the cowboys changed their money for “Brazilian” when they heard they would be flying to Santiago. Obviously, that didn’t work out so well for them upon arrival in Chile, but they’ve been doing much better ever since.

Valparaiso was also the scene of a challenge when team members had to “wire walk” across a deep valley in that very hilly city. I knew exactly where this challenge took place and can say that I would not have wanted to participate myself. In fact, there are few of the challenges that I would want to participate in but I would love to be on the crew of this show and travel to all of the exotic destinations. Maybe be the camera guy that travels with the host, Phil. I imagine they get to stay and eat in the nicer places.

If you haven’t seen the show, check it out this Sunday. I think the cowboys might take the million dollars this year.

Oh, and back to my pun… it IS getting warmer. Finally! The last couple of days it has reached the 60s after three months of deep freeze temps and repeated ice and snow storms. There’s still ice in some areas of our yard but it shouldn’t last long now. I’ll be leaving in a week for even warmer temperatures but more on that later.

I had thought about a catchy title for this post like “shooting dead relatives” but decided that it might get me some strange Google hits.

Winter grinds on in these parts and I haven’t had any travel for the last few months. Instead I’ve been getting caught up on indoor work that includes updating my files with stock agencies, organizing the chaos that developed over the course of the last year in my office and doing lots of tabletop studio shoots. I don’t do a lot of studio work but I do have a few clients that need the occasional product shot. This past couple of weeks I’ve been shooting a lot of architectural glass and mirror samples. While I had the small studio area set up for this, I decided to copy some old family photos.

Some of these photos appear to be daguerrotypes. These images are tricky to photograph because they have a mirror-like surface and at most viewing angles they actually appear as a negative — almost like an etched piece of silver.

To see the image properly, you have to look straight-on so that something dark is reflected on the surface. Reflections of any other kind would be a big problem when re-photographing these portraits so I built a box out of foam core. The bottom was a piece of black foam core so that it doesn’t reflect onto the lower portion of the daguerrotype. The sides and back were white to bounce as much light around as possible and I draped a piece of thin foam packing material over the top to soften and distribute the light that came into the box. That light came from two hot lights that I had shooting up at the ceiling and bouncing down into the box.

To eliminate reflection from the surface of the image, I draped a piece of matte black cloth from a background stand across the front of the box. Think of the box as a puppet theater and the black cloth is the front curtain. I could stick the lens of my camera through the curtain and let the cloth drape over the lens to block any reflection from the markings on the camera itself. I used my Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 60mm macro lens to be able to get the close focus that I needed.

The system worked pretty well but there is some pitting in the surface of the glass covering the portraits that was accentuated in the copies. For the tighter shots that I made, where the frames are cropped out, I’ll need to do some significant spotting in Photoshop. I like the wider shots warts-and-all, though. The wear on the cases and the pitting of the glass show the age of these images which were likely made between 1840 and 1860.

In my last post, I talked about my desire not to look back on a year and see time wasted. In a funny coincidence I was alerted days later to one of my images appearing as a double-page spread in the new book, “Make the Most of Your Time On Earth” published by Rough Guides:

It’s a shot I took of some monks at Haeinsa Temple in South Korea. The temple stay program there is featured as one of Rough Guides’ 1000 must-do experiences. It’s an interesting book with tons of ideas for adventurous travel. Some of them I’ve already experienced but so many more of them I have not. So much to do, so little time. Anyway, I thought it was interesting that this particular usage would pop up just as I was having thoughts of making the most of my own time on earth.

I’ve been busy planning upcoming trips and trying to get my stock files fed at various agencies. Good work to do when it’s cold and snowy out. More on the upcoming travel plans later but, for any cat people out there, I’ll leave you with an update on our broken-legged cat. You may remember that Caper fell from an upstairs bannister and broke his leg around Thanksgiving. After two surgeries and weeks of seclusion in a room emptied of anything he might jump on, Caper has finally been cleared to resume all cat duties. He’s still hesitant to make the big jumps but he’s getting around really well. Here he’s enjoying watching the snow fall:

I had brought the camera to the living room window to shoot the snow-covered redbud tree in the front yard. As I was framing the shot, an SUV came sliding down the street, out of control. I instinctively tracked the car’s path with my Nikon and fired off a burst of shots just as it slammed into the neighbor’s mailbox across the street. The driver then left without so much as a “sorry ’bout that”. I jotted down the license number as they drove away and reported the incident to our local police, following up with an email that included the series of photos along with one enlargement of the car’s plates. Needless to say, the neighbors were quite pleased.

Winding up my review of the the past decade…

My first trip of 2009 was to Egypt — a few days in Cairo, a flight to Abu Simbel and then a Nile cruise from Aswan to Luxor. Egypt is one of those places I had wanted to go to since childhood. I was a kid when they were moving the temples at Abu Simbel to get them above the rising waters of the Aswan dam. The King Tut treasures always seemed to be in the news as well. I remember making drawings of that golden mask over and over again.

Sometimes places live up to our childhood imagination and sometimes they don’t. Cairo was a lot to take in at first. Big and bustling. The pyramids were astounding but hard to really experience amidst all the tourists and people selling everything from postcards to camel rides. Access to the Sphinx was very limited, allowing only a few angles for photography. If I were visiting as a tourist, I’m sure I would have had a very different experience but, as a photographer, I found it difficult.

Once I was out of the city, the Egypt of my childhood imagination reappeared. Crowds were fewer or gone altogether and the monumental temples and sculptures were more accessible. It was easier to lose yourself in the place. If I were to give anyone planning a trip to Egypt some advice, I’d say to check Cairo and the pyramids out, but be sure to visit some sites further afield. For me, that’s where the magic was. Again, I’ve posted on this Egypt trip before so enter “Egypt” in the search at the top right for more.

I had a couple of opportunities to get out on the Nile in felucca boats. But it was the temple architecture that really caught hold of me.

Oh, and that hot air balloon ride was a highlight, too. That was near the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Luxor. Walking down into the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and seeing the wall paintings still bright with their original color was something else. That was definitely another crowded spot, though. We were granted special permission for interior photography, then it was quickly taken away when tourists saw us and starting snapping away themselves. But temples like the one below in Dendarra were almost deserted. You could walk around and feel like you were discovering it for yourself (although someone had come along before you to install some fluorescent lighting).

I must have been making up for the cold weather of Banff the year before but 2009 was mostly hot destinations. My last international trip of ‘09 was to Mexico — Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara.

I’m not a hot weather guy and it was HOT. Beautiful and hot, but hot. Steamy, too. I would walk out of my hotel room and find a chair where I could sit for the 15 or 20 minutes that it would take for my lenses to clear up.

On my last day in Guadalajara, a friend had asked me if I would like to accompany her to some restoration shops run by the local car club members. Shiny objects are always of interest and vintage shiny object especially so. To make things even better, one of the car club guys picked us up in a restored 1941 Packard convertible. We were rollin’ Guadalajara in style.

But you know the grungy parts of the shops were my favorite:

Thanks for tagging along as I’ve meandered the backroads of my last 10 years as a travel photographer. It’s been fun for me. I’ve learned a lot by looking at where I was in 2000 and where I am now. In some ways I feel I’ve improved. There are also some things that I think I used to do better. In the early years I was much more in control over where I went and what I shot. As I started making a conscious effort to build my international stock, I started looking for opportunities to travel affordably and then worked out a plan from there. I needed to shoot a little of everything so I would go anywhere. Now I’m beginning to feel like I’ve covered a lot of bases. I have stock from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I’ve begun working with more agencies so that I can focus more on shooting and less on marketing and sales. When I sold directly, I had to be more focused and niche oriented. Now I can put just a few images of a place with an agency and they will still be found by buyers. I don’t have to be “the Egypt guy” to sell an Egypt photo.

I’m now reaching the point where I feel I would benefit from becoming more focused again. I want to start planning trips that are of particular interest to me rather than taking whatever comes along and seeing what I can make of it. I want to develop some themes and explore them more deeply. It’s a little bit about slowing down, but it’s also about being more productive. It will be a steady transition — I already have multiple international trips lined up for the next two years — but it’s something I want to start working toward.

One more thing I’ve learned from researching these last 10 posts is that I want to look back at every year and wonder how I managed to get so much done. I don’t want to look back at a year of my life and wonder what I did with it. We don’t get many years and we need to make each one count.

Continuing my review of the the past decade…

More adventures in Canada in early 2008. This time it was a winter trip to Banff and Jasper in the Canadian Rockies. I had visited this area briefly in 2000 on my way to Vancouver. It had been in the spring of that year and a completely different experience. This is grand country but I think it shows itself best in the winter. Still, I’d like to go back in the summer to see the green waters of Lake Louise.

Snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking on frozen lakes — I added a whole repertoire of ways I’ve traveled to get a shot. Perhaps my favorite part of this trip was a moonlit hike up the Maligne Canyon. You strap some steel spikes onto the soles of your boots and start walking up a frozen river at night while the canyon walls climb around you and stars shine in the narrow streak of sky above. At frozen waterfalls, your guide can shine his powerful flashlight behind the ice to illuminate the intense blue and green colors. Slippery, cold and dark… but a great experience.

2008 was another extremely busy year in terms of domestic travel. Michigan, Kentucky, Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico and more. All while buying a new house and moving. It was a crazy year. I remember spending election night in a cabin in the woods in Arkansas and going down the mountain to check email at the nearest wifi hotspot. I had received a last-minute invitation to go to China in less than two weeks. I needed to send my passport in for my visa and luckily I had it with me. The next day was filled with driving back and forth across Arkansas visiting various Post Offices in different towns trying to find where I could get additional passport photos taken and get my package over-nighted to Chicago. No one Post Office seemed to be able to do both of these things but by splitting the chore between two (I believe in Harrison and Fayetteville), it got done. Ten days later, I was in Shanghai.

I’ve posted about the China trip on this blog before — you can enter “China” into the search box at top-right to find more. The trip started in Shanghai and then went up the Yangtze to several water towns with historic districts built on canals. The colors were phenomenal.

Those last two shots were from an open-air performance in Zhouzhuang. It was spectacular.

The architecture was also fun to shoot. Pagodas were everywhere, including the world’s tallest in Changzhou that had opened just a year before. Over 500 feet tall, it appears through the glow of the morning sun in this shot on the left:

The pagoda on the right is from Zhouzhuang. I hope to return to China again soon. It’s a big country and there are so many more things I want to see. But that’s the way it is with the whole world, isn’t it? So many things to see, so little time. I’ll continue to do my best to see and photograph as much of it as possible, for as long as possible.

Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In addition to a plethora of US trips, 2007 had me returning to Canada once again. Canada has always been a favorite destination of mine. The weather suits me, the people are great, and the country offers such a wide variety of locations to photograph.

I had whet my appetite on Eastern Canada in 2004 when we drove across the Gaspe peninsula and down (er… up?) the St. Lawrence. In 2007 I had a chance to do a similar trip again — but this time in reverse and largely by train. I started in Montreal. I had only spent a few hours here in 2004 so I enjoyed having an opportunity to dig a little deeper. It’s a great city and one that Sally’s family has historic ties to so I’m sure I’ll be back again.

From Montreal, I took the train to Quebec City and enjoyed a stay in the famous Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac — without a doubt the most recognizable building on the Quebec skyline with its green copper mansard roofs. I spent most of my time wandering the old town. The weather was damp but it did nothing to detract from the beauty of the place.

A few days later it was back on the train, following the St. Lawrence toward the Atlantic. Around Mont-Joli, the train crossed the Gaspe peninsula through the same valley I had driven three years before. Much of the journey had been at night but dawn broke as we approached Chaleur Bay and I was able to enjoy the view from the large window in my tiny room as we followed the coastline to the tip of the peninsula at Gaspe.

I took a whale watching boat out one morning and got to see the fluke of a humpback rise from the water as she dove away from our boat with her baby at her side. I made a rookie mistake while trying to steady myself on the violently rocking boat to get a shot and the autofocus caught the coastline behind the whale instead of the whale itself. You’ll just have to trust me that it was a spectacular sight.

Perce Rock is another landmark that I thoroughly enjoyed shooting on this trip. Maybe it’s because I’m a Kansan, but put a big huge rock in front of me with some nice light and I am one happy camper. I spend a great evening exploring the endless variety of ways to shoot this hunk of geology until the light was gone and I celebrated with one of the better bowls of seafood chowder that I’ve had in my life.

Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2006 kicked off with a trip to South Korea. Traveling with a group of American journalists, we caught the attention of school kids everywhere we went. They would rush over and want to practice their english on us. The reception was warm and welcoming. Anyone in our group with blonde hair and blue eyes was especially popular. We had our own paparazzi, too. Korean journalists following the American journalists everywhere. One night we saw an on-the-street interview with a member of our group on the nightly news, dubbed in Korean. Americans seemed to be truly loved in South Korea. It was a feeling that I hadn’t experienced abroad so strongly for several years.

The street markets in Korea were a favorite of mine. Always colorful and always full of the smells of street food. Some of that yellow twine in the top photo has been wrapped around the handle of my suitcase ever since this trip. It makes for an easy way to identify my bag on the airport carousel — even though it’s showing the wear of many thousands of miles of transport.

One of the more memorable events from this trip was an overnight visit to a buddhist temple. We dined with the monks, took tea, made paper lotus lanterns and were schooled in buddhist philosophy. I’ve written about the dining experience on this blog before so I won’t go into it again here. Suffice it to say that I’ll remember that night for a long, long time.

There were several US trips in 2006 as well, including a post-Katrina visit to New Orleans. Then, in the Fall, I got to experience Spring again by crossing the equator and visiting Chile. Here’s a shot from a great old neighborhood in Santiago:

I spent a day in the port city of Valparaiso as well. It’s a picturesque town that spills down mountainsides in a riot of color. Funiculars take you up many of the hillsides but I generally preferred to walk. After many hundred steps up the side of one mount, I followed the sound of some odd music to find this fellow with his parakeet selling toys from his music box:

Santiago is one of two places from which you can fly to Easter Island (the other being Tahiti). One of the most remote inhabited places on earth, I had always wanted to visit it to see the stone heads, or Moai. The flight was about 5 hours straight west over the Pacific. There was a little screen in the seatback in front of me where I could watch the image of a tiny plane as it neared the Chilean coast, then headed out into the blue. The screen remained simply blue with that little plane pointed forward until, more than 2000 miles later, we miraculously landed on the tiny island. For four days I explored the nearly treeless landscape that strangely reminded me of the Flint Hills 60 miles west of my home back in Kansas. Except these hills were surrounded by ocean and were inhabited by those mysterious heads.

Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2005 was a year of assignments throughout the Midwest for me. I like to take driving trips when it makes sense. I enjoy driving and like to be able to arrive at a place gradually, to know what is between here and there, and to have some sense of distance. When you fly, you get dropped into a new place with no bearings. You don’t have a sense of scale for how far you’ve traveled. You don’t know how the landscape unraveled between here and there. And, for me at least, it’s more difficult to get a feel for directions. If I drove in from the east, then I arrive knowing east from west, north from south. When arriving by air, I need to depend more on maps and make a conscious effort to pay attention to sun angles, etc. Obviously, flying is often necessary, either for speed, efficiency, or to just plain get somewhere that you can’t drive to.

The first two shots in this post are from a prairie burn and related festival that I shot in the spring of 2005. I live near some of the largest remaining sections of tallgrass prairie in North America. Ranchers who graze cattle on this land have learned that a controlled burn in the spring will help new grass grow that will better fatten their livestock. These burns are often done at night while winds are low and it’s an amazing experience when driving across the prairie to see lines of fire in the distance and smell the sweet scent of burning grass.

Other assignments required far more driving than this one did. 2005 seems to have been the Year of the Roundup. In magazine-speak, a roundup is a story that bundles several locations together by theme. You’ve seen them: Best Places to See Fall Color in the Great Lakes, Children’s Museums of the Midwest, Ten Places You Can Still Find a Real Soda Fountain. That sort of thing. For several years we would shoot an annual story on the Best Christmas Shopping in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis and Des Moines.

These are difficult trips to make work financially. A roundup may not pay more than a story on a single destination but, if the publication doesn’t pay expenses, you can see where the costs would add up when you need to visit several cities over several days. I’ve always tried to combine as many assignments or stock opportunities into each trip as possible. I’ll let art directors I work with often know where I’m going to be to see if they have something else in the area that I can tag on or I’ll look for iconic or unusual scenes in the area that I can use in my stock files. It works but it requires a lot of planning and a lot of driving.

I’m located about as close to the center of the US as you can get but in 2004 and 2005 I drove to both coasts in addition to several trips to the Great Lakes region and various other places around the Midwest and Western US. In 2004, we drove to Portland, Maine for an MTWA meeting, took the ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, drove up across the Gaspe to the St. Lawrence and then back home through Quebec, Montreal and Toronto.

In 2005 we drove to the west coast for a different reason. We had decided to take a serious look at relocating. We’d lived in the same house for nearly 20 years and had outgrown it when we both began working from home in the late 90s. In 2003 we leased office space downtown to have some more room. It worked for awhile but we realized we were more efficient when we had a home office. We decided to look for some place large enough to accommodate our home and office and we decided that, if we were moving, maybe we should make a big move.

We made a list of things we would want from a new home and a cool, but not cold climate was high on the list. From our travels, we decided that the Pacific Northwest was our best option. We researched towns and put together a driving circuit that would take us through several places that we thought had great potential, mostly along the Oregon and Washington coasts. We threw in some towns in Wyoming and Idaho for the trips out and back as well. The panorama above was taken near our first stop: Laramie, Wyoming.

Port Angeles, Washington, was high on our list based on the experiences we’d had there on a previous trip in 1997. What we learned by our second visit to this town — and actually from this entire experiment — was that you need to look at a town completely differently if you are planning on visiting as a tourist or moving there permanently. The things we loved about Port Angeles were quickly overshadowed by things that now seemed unworkable for us in terms of a home. In general, all of the places we looked at had much higher property values than what we currently had in Kansas (this was before the real estate bubble burst but we could see that coming and didn’t want to get caught up in it). We liked the smaller coastal towns but were concerned about being further from international airports and having mountain roads between us and larger cities.

In the end, we decided to move just 30 miles east of our old home to Lawrence, Kansas. It’s a university town so it has a lot of diversity and a vibrant arts community. It’s 30 minutes closer to our international airport in Kansas City. And it’s incredibly affordable compared to the west coast. You can get a 3000 sq. ft. house here for what a double-wide might cost you on the west coast. It has worked out great for us and we’re very happy with our choice.