Category Archives: photography

Decade in review: 2007

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Decade in review: 2006

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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.

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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:

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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:

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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.

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Decade in review: 2005

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Decade in review: 2004

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

I attended my first SATW Annual Convention in 2004 in St. Moritz, Switzerland. It was an absolutely amazing trip. A highlight during the convention was a sunrise shoot from the peak of Mt. Pers in the Bernina Alps. A small group of us took the cable car up to the ski area at Diavolezza the evening before. There were some dormitories there where we spent the night, rising well before dawn to hike the rest of the way to the peak. With only LED headlamps to see by, we followed our guide up a steep, narrow and rocky trail. It was almost total blackness. I regretted taking my full pack with me immediately.

We arrived at the summit just as the horizon began to glow. I shot like a maniac for what seemed like only minutes but was probably more like an hour and a half. The shot above is one of the later images when the sun had risen and was beginning to send beams down through the fog in the valleys.

When it was time to head back to the lift, I finally noticed the trail we had come up on. It was a treacherously thin line snaking down an incredibly steep incline of sharp, loose rock with a sheer drop to one side. I was glad I hadn’t been able to see where I had been going on the way up. Once back at the cable car deck, there was another surprise — it had broken down. After some phone calls the decision was made that a rescue helicopter would be sent up for us. A great morning just got better!

When the helicopter arrived, we were divided into groups of three for our trips down the mountain. On my flight I got the distinct impression that the young pilot was trying to frighten the “tourists” by buzzing low over the mountain tops and descending quickly at a dizzying angle to the valleys below. I absolutely loved it.

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After the convention, I spent a few days in Lucerne before continuing south into the Ticino. I stayed at the Art Deco Hotel Montana within walking distance of the old town and its famous covered bridges. The hotel had its own funicular that would take you up the steep hillside from the lake and right to the lobby. My room had a balcony overlooking the old town — basically the reverse of the scene you see here as the hotel is on the near hillside in the center of this photo.

I had an unlimited rail pass for 10 days and made use of it to cross the Alps and spend one last week in the Ticino — the southern, Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. This area is very different from most people’s idea of Switzerland. The Italian influence is everywhere and the climate is more tropical.

I remember having difficulty in planning for this trip in choosing between staying in Lugano or Locarno. Both are in the same region and I was really looking for a town that would be walkable and very distinctive. My thought process was that I had shot many of the iconic Swiss scenes in Zurich, St. Moritz and Lucerne — I wanted this last week to focus on a side of Switzerland that would be entirely different and visually unique. I also felt that the Ticino was less well-covered in the stock world so images might have more value.

In the end I chose Lugano and just made a day trip to Locarno. I feel that Lugano was definitely the right decision and had the picturesque setting that I had hoped for. On the shore of Lake Lugano and surrounded by mountains, my rail pass also gave me free access to excursion boats to more remote towns like Morcote and Ghandria (seen here).

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It was a great trip and I came away with a lot of images for the stock files. The only downside was a cold or sinus infection that I came down with while in Lucerne. Upon arrival in Lugano I visited a small pharmacy in amidst the butchers and grocers of the local market. I pantomimed my symptoms to the non-English-speaking pharmacist and was given something called “Retard”. To this day I’m not sure what it was but I felt nearly perfect within hours.

Decade in review: 2002

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In 2002 I made my last major trip with with film — to Ireland. By this time I was shooting with a Nikon F100 and was just dabbling in digital with a Coolpix 990 (I’d actually had an Apple Quicktake earlier but never really found a way to use it professionally). I took around 250 or 300 rolls of film on this trip and — in those early post-9/11 days — begged for handchecks in Kansas City and again in Chicago to avoid x-ray exposure. I had already removed all of the film from their boxes but they were still in their transparent plastic canisters and kept together in a giant transparent ziplock bag. The handchecks involved taking each roll of film out of its canister and swabbing it before moving on to the next one. Repeat this process a couple hundred times and you’ll nearly miss your connection.

This was also my first international press trip (although still as a “spouse” to my writer-wife) and it was a whirlwind. We had left our home around 4:00 in the morning to catch our flight from KC to Chicago, then had an overnight flight to Dublin but neither of us were able to get any sleep on the plane. If I’m not mistaken, we were in the last row, center section, where the seats won’t recline because of the bulkhead that separates the cabin from the bathrooms. We landed around 7:00 a.m. and were picked up at the airport for a full day of touring. We ended up in Belfast that night, finally checking into our hotel around 11:30 p.m.

Thirty minutes later (and you can bet I was already sleeping) the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the hotel. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. The next morning we found out that the alarm had been triggered by a member of our group smoking a cigar in their room. They never came forward to identify themselves so the rest of the trip became like one of those murder-mystery trips with everyone trying to figure out who was on floor 7 and who had been seen with a lighter, etc., etc.

It was a brutal schedule but we were rewarded with scenes like this:

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I shot this across the road from our hotel while everyone else was getting their luggage loaded on the bus. Or maybe we were getting off the bus and checking in — I don’t know. I just remember running across a pasture to stand on a fence and get this shot before the fire went out of the sky. One thing about press trips: you can always be certain that the best light will occur while you’re either on a bus or inside a restaurant. If you want to be out shooting in that light, you have to be quick. (I also learned on a later trip that you should always stay by the bus until you’ve seen your own suitcase get loaded… but that’s another story.)

I loved Ireland and we had pretty decent weather during the whole trip. We went into Northern Ireland, up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway, and then cut across the island to the southwest to the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. I’ll leave you with a shot from the Dingle Peninsula. This is nice and saturated on it’s original Velvia but I thought I’d knock the color back a little this time and go for something a little more subtle. It’s nice to have that flexibility now, not only with digitally captured images but also with scans from old film shots.

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Decade in review: 2001

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2001 slipped past me with no international travel. I’d had another Canadian trip in late 2000 and would go to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in early 2002, but the 12 month period that was 2001 was all US travel. The shots on this page came from a fall trip to New Mexico. The one at the top of the post is from Acoma Pueblo and has long been a favorite of mine. I went back to Acoma last year and it was very different. A large interpretation center has been built and many of the buildings on the mesa had been spruced up. Most of these ladders had been freshly painted white and the timeless feeling that I had loved from my first visit had eroded away a little. I’m glad I’d had the opportunity to see “Sky City” in 2001 while it was still a little more rustic.

I also remember another fall shoot in 2001, in the Great Lakes area just after 9/11. It was during the time that all of the flights were grounded and it struck me as I photographed Lake Michigan from the beach near Charlevoix that there were no contrails crossing the sky from planes coming out of O’Hare. A noticeable difference from previous trips to that spot.

On my return home from that Michigan trip, I stopped and shot a little in Pella, Iowa. One image in particular that I remember making may have been the last 4×5 transparency that I shot. It was a twilight scene in a new mixed-use development that had just been built downtown. The buildings were all designed to reflect the Dutch style (Pella has a big tulip festival every year) with a canal flowing through the courtyard. I was using my Tachihara field 4×5, correcting for perspective distortion with its bellows.

The fact that I can’t come up with a digital version of that shot to post here goes to show how much has changed in the last 8 years. I have the transparency, but I no longer have a way of scanning large format film here in the office. I used to use a backlit flatbed scanner — which didn’t give very good results — or I would send images out for commercial scans. This particular image was never scanned for my stock files so it languishes in the “dead film” cabinet. The following year would pretty much see the end of my use of film and everything would change.

Petroglyphs, Santa Fe County, New Mexico, USA

Here’s another New Mexico shot — some petroglyphs near Santa Fe. The New Mexico light was always a great fit for film. I shot a lot of Velvia at that time, along with some Provia when I didn’t want the saturation to be quite so strong. It’s funny, I loved that super-saturated look that I would get with Velvia, but when I try and mimic the look using digital techniques, it looks artificial to me. Obviously, it was artificial on film, too. But somehow it was easier to accept film altering a scene than doing it purposefully in digital. The film choice was purposeful, too, but it seemed somehow more honest than cranking the saturation slider in Photoshop. As time moves forward, I’m becoming more adventurous with pushing reality digitally, though. Something we’ll probably see over the next few posts.

Looking through these images from 9 and 10 years ago is making me realize that, at that time, I was really more of a landscape photographer. My mentors at the time were landscape shooters and it was a gradual transition for me to go from landscape to what I now consider “travel” which is a broader description that can include architecture, interiors, action, people and even food. I’m now shooting fewer pristine landscapes and am incorporating a lot more of the man-made world. It’s a reflection of both what interests me and what is needed in the marketplace.

Decade in review: 2000

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Happy New Year everyone! This time of year always makes one reflect on the past and I’ve been doing my share. I’ve also realized that this year is a landmark of sorts for me — it marks my first decade as a travel photographer.

Well… that’s not entirely true. I’ve actually been shooting and selling to travel publications for much longer than that but it was more of a side business that I had outside of my full time job. I also shot mostly close to home. All through the ’90s I had been building a very complete library of Kansas stock and in the latter half of that decade (mostly after I quit my job in ’97 and went full-time freelance), I had been steadily expanding my coverage into Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and the Great Lakes region. But the year 2000 marked a shift — Sally joined Midwest Travel Writers Association and we attended their conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. That organization didn’t allow photographer members but I could attend as the spouse of a writer-member.

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This wasn’t my first international trip, but it was the first international trip I took specifically to shoot travel. It was also my first experience with a travel writers conference which, in some ways, is similar to a press tour. A great first experience. And I ended up with a lot of useful stock as well as a bunch of contacts and new friends. Until this point, I only knew a couple of other stock shooters and they had fairly different areas of interest than mine. It was a huge help to begin to develop a network of other travel shooters and to share ideas and experiences with them. A couple of years later I would join the Society of American Travel Writers (which does have a photographer member category) to continue to broaden that network.

To commemorate the past 10 years, I thought I might share a shot or two from each year here over the next few weeks. Not necessarily my “best shot” from that year, but something showing where that year took me. It’s also a great opportunity for me to re-visit some of my older files and see if they can be re-interpreted a bit with more modern post-processing. These two photos from that trip in 2000 were taken with (I believe) my old Olympus OM-4 and I’m guessing it was on Velvia. I probably used my old work-horse Tamron 28-80 zoom although the dock could have been my Zuiko 24mm lens. The first shot is of Qualicum Falls on Vancouver Island and the second is Saturna Island in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. The meeting had been held in the city of Vancouver with a post-tour option on Saturna Island. We had driven so we tagged on some exploration of Vancouver Island on our own afterward. A really amazing trip. Standing on the edge of the small car ferry to Saturna and watching the Orcas swimming along just feet away is something I’ll always remember (I still carry that ferry pass in my car for sentimental reasons).

Trash

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The Blizzard of 2009 pretty much shut things down around here and we were basically house-bound for four days. The good side is that I made an incredible amount of progress on my image files – a DVD full of Mexico sent off to one stock agency, almost 900 shots of Egypt uploaded to Alamy (that alone took most of three days) and another 650 or so images of China prepped for submission.

While processing the China shots, I ran across this one that I’ve intended to blog about for awhile now. It’s a basket of trash that had just been swept up at the Master of Nets Garden in Suzhou. What strikes me about this is that I was compelled to photograph someone’s trash. Had I shot this in the US, you’d most likely be looking at a bulging plastic bag sitting on some cracked concrete. But there’s something beautiful about this trash. Sure, it’s just leaves and not discarded paper and junk, but it’s also being kept in an honest basket with a useful but colorful handle. The pavement is rough and stained but it’s real materials and carefully laid. I don’t know. It just says something to me. Makes me wish for less plastic and paper in the world and that all of our trash could be this beautiful.