Category Archives: travel

I like my water clear, thank you

Adjusting this photo from Saturday’s NE Kansas excursion was a little more work than it needed to be. This is the Buffalo Soldier Memorial at Fort Leavenworth and apparently someone thinks the water looks better dyed an unnatural blue/green color. That, or it’s been this way since St. Patty’s day. Maybe there is some other perfectly reasonable explanation for the water’s color, but it looked really, really strange in the falls below the sculpture. You can see for yourself in the un-fixed horizontal version below:

Note to all fountain owners — green water doesn’t look better! In Lightroom, I had to go through a whole process of selectively desaturating the aqua range of the color spectrum and painting in with the adjustment brush a combination of increased contrast and desaturation until things were looking somewhat natural again. Whew.

By the way, I was also putting a new camera bag through its paces on Saturday. For my upcoming Fiji trip in just a few days, I picked up a new Think Tank Sling-O-Matic. Here’s a photo of it from their site:

I had originally planned on getting the smaller Sling-O-Matic 10 but it wasn’t in stock locally and upon seeing the size of the 20, thought it might better fit my gear. This bag is slightly smaller than my Think Tank Airport Ultralight and is a sling-bag instead of a full backpack. While I’ll miss the distribution of the weight across both shoulders, I welcome the ability to swing the bag around to access lenses without taking the bag off.

The bag worked great on Sunday and I look forward to seeing how it does on a longer trip. My Ultralight fit nearly every overhead compartment I encountered although it was a bit tight in some. This one should slide right in, but the laptop will have to be carried separately in its own sleeve. There is a side pocket that will take the laptop on the Sling, but an inch or so sticks out and I’d be a little nervous that it might work its way out while out of my view on my back (the way the pockets work is that they’re top-opening when you sling the bag ’round front, but are side-opening when worn on the back).

I’ll report back after the Sling has logged a few air miles.

Red barn

Taking advantage of a nice Spring day, I rode along with my buddy, Doug Stremel, as he scouted a Kansas Byways project he’s working on. We covered a good portion of the northeast corner of the state and ran across some great locations like this amazing red barn. I think I’ll be coming back here once the crops are in — and I won’t be surprised if I run into Doug there when I do.

New project: Away.com

I’ve recently started working with Away.com, contributing slideshows on a variety of destinations for their travel website. I’ve delivered the first five, two of which have now been posted. This will be an ongoing project and I hope to continue to contribute many, many more. The image above is from the first to be posted. It’s a shot from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. A gallery from the Greek island of Mykonos is also now online. To find a directory of my slideshows as they are posted, check out my bio page at Away.com. And — what the heck — book yourself a vacation while you’re there (but don’t expect me to pay for it!).

So long, old friends

I’m saying goodbye to two fine traveling companions — my Nikon D200 and D300. They’ve served me well and we’ve had a great many adventures together.


Easter Island, shot with the Nikon D200 in 2006.

I picked up the D200 in 2006 just prior to a trip to Chile and Easter Island. What a way to start. It was almost literally like going to the ends of the earth. The D200 was my main body for a couple of years and never gave me a bit of trouble. In 2008, I borrowed my brother’s D300 for a back-up body when a trip to China suddenly came up. Upon returning home, I bought it from him.


A low-light shot from China, taken with the Nikon D300 in 2008.

The two traveled well together but the D200 was semi-retired in early 2009 when I added a D700 to once again have a full-frame body. I like to carry two bodies both for back-up purposes and to have two lens options quickly available at all times, but carrying three is too much for me. Still, I hung onto the D200, thinking that I might convert it to infrared. It was tempting but I never got around to it — partly because I didn’t know how much use I’d get out of it and I didn’t want to have the extra weight in the bag at all times. If it’s not with you, you won’t use it, right? So… it never happened.

The D300 and D700 have accompanied me to Egypt, Canada, Dubai, Thailand, Jamaica, Germany and other exotic and not-so-exotic places but the time has come to make a change in the lineup again. I’ve been feeling the need to add more video capabilities and the new DSLRs that shoot video would allow me to do that without carrying much extra gear. So, I’ve ordered a Nikon D7000 to become the new traveling companion for my D700. I’ll fill you in more when it arrives.

Return from the sun

Freshly home from San Diego, California, where it was sunny and 70 to 80 degrees every day. Palm trees, t-shirts & shorts, sun, sun and more sun. Lest you feel envious, I was barely able to find the car in the airport lot when I got home due to several inches of snow that fell the day before:

Back to reality.

Year in Review: 2010

2010 was a year of contrasts for me when it came to travel. I started off with a quick stop in Dubai on my way to Thailand. Dubai is absolutely incredible. The amount of construction going on is mind-numbing — dozens of new skyscrapers going up simultaneously, each trying to outdo the others in terms of whimsical and ground-breaking design. And of course, no trip to Dubai these days would be complete without a stop at the current world’s tallest building, seen above through a bus window as I was on my way to the indoor snow skiing slopes. That’s right. Indoor snow skiing slopes. Dubai was a trip.

But the trip wasn’t over by a long shot. Next came Thailand.



Thailand is one of those places that sticks with you. The longer it’s been since I was there, the more I seem to think about it. I have a feeling I’ll be back.

Next, a quick trip to Jamaica:

The highlight of which may have been this night visit to the bioluminescent bay. Organisms in the water cause it to glow when the water is disturbed — as it was here when a couple of people from my boat took a swim:

Tough to shoot, but a fun experience.

There were several US trips that I won’t take the time to list here, and a Fall drive up the North Shore of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Canada.


On the heels of that trip, I was off to Germany:

Crossing the bridge in that first shot, I actually set foot in Austria, too.

2010 was a great year for me in terms of travel. I enjoyed each and every place I visited and would eagerly return to any of them. 2011 is already shaping up to be another busy one, however. I have one more year to serve as the Chair of the Freelance Council of the Society of American Travel Writers and already have a fair number of SATW meetings on my calendar including one in San Diego this week. Fiji and New Zealand are also on the agenda for 2011 and I’m sure there will be some surprises as well. Stay tuned…

Changing perspective

Reality and truth are concepts often discussed when it comes to photography these days. With the rise of Photoshop, people question what’s real — or perhaps they don’t question it enough. When I’m shooting for editorial use, I try to be “truthful” and show the “reality” of the place I’m photographing, but that doesn’t mean that some interpretation doesn’t creep into the images. In fact, it’s often my intention to boil an image down to focus on one single concept rather than to convey an entire, complicated reality.

There are often many truths and many ways of expressing them. Take these shots of downtown Mobile, Alabama. The one above gives the impression that the city is historic and shares much of the character that one thinks of when one thinks of New Orleans – brick buildings and ornate cast iron balconies. I would say that this is true of Mobile and it’s an accurate representation.

Then there’s this shot taken of the same block but from a higher vantage point. The same brick building can be seen in the lower foreground but this time it is minimized by the office towers looming above. Now Mobile appears to be a progressive city, a growing urban center.

Taken just a few blocks away, this photo shows yet another side of Mobile — one of a city that is struggling. Empty storefronts are emphasized by the camera viewpoint being moved back inside a shop entrance with vacant display windows. The vibrant shopping area that actually flanks this particular shop is hidden from view, giving the impression that this is a neighborhood in decline.

None of these images have been manipulated in Photoshop to give a false impression. The three sides of this city are conveyed simply by camera position and the choices made in composition. Is one shot more real than the others? I feel that they all represent my reaction to the city I was exploring. They do, however, contain my own personal point of view and reactions. Put a dozen photographers in Mobile for a day and you’ll have a dozen different perspectives. Maybe a dozen different truths?

Steel here

No, I haven’t dropped off of the face of the planet. I’ve just been a little closer to the planet’s equator. It seemed like a good idea to take assignments that would land us along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi this time of year. Truth be told, we seem to have taken the cold with us. All last week we were wishing we’d packed gloves as we “braved” temperatures 20 degrees and more below the South’s usuals for December. Oh, well. The food was good. And we came back with plenty of stories.

More later, but I’ll start off by sharing this image from the Vulcan Center in Birmingham, Alabama. An homage to the city’s steel heritage.

Rainy day options

I talked a little bit yesterday about how to best handle less than ideal weather situations. My day in Passau was white-skied and a tad dreary. I actually like that kind of weather and think some great shots can be made when there’s a little more “atmosphere” than usual. Unfortunately, from a business sense, my likes are trumped by what sells. I’ll still shoot for myself and make the shots available to publishers, but they’ll typically take those dramatic sunsets or clear blue skies over this:

That’s the Passau I saw last month. Beautiful city, actually. And I had a great time wandering its streets finding incredible vantage point after more incredible vantage point. But… reality sets in and you need to make some photos that will sell, too. Heading inside is one option as seen by the church interior at the top of this post. The softened light from the overcast skies didn’t give those dramatic shafts of light that you might sometimes see streaming through the windows but — with an interior as bright and white as this one — you don’t really need them. The soft light did a great job of modeling all of the ornate features and did so with lower contrast than direct sun would have.

Passau also has a great glass museum. We’re talking about a rambling, multi-story maze of room after room of extraordinary glass. You can seriously get lost in there, but you won’t mind much because there’s good stuff around every corner. The lighting doesn’t look too sympathetic to photography at first. There are all different color temperatures from pink to blue to green. Happily, the auto white balance on my Nikon was able to clean that right up without a second thought from me. I just popped on the 60mm Micro lens and went crazy. Most of the glass was behind glass, but limiting depth of field and blocking the background with my own body allowed me to deal with most reflections. Some of these shots will make nice cutouts (like the one on the right) for those guidebooks that want a little detail shot to break up a long block of copy.

All in all, not bad for a rainy day’s work.