On the Road

Early last year I started planning a month-long trip to Botswana and South Africa, part of which would be spent leading a photo safari. From the start I knew that my photography would include much more than wildlife. It’s my business, and my pleasure, to explore and experience beyond the obvious subjects suggested by a location. As a practical matter, I have to photograph much more of what a destination offers and deserves; as a personal matter, it’s often what’s best about my job.

Here are some of the questions I asked myself on the way to taking some of the photos you see accompanying this column:
• How am I going to find a father and son trekking through snow?
• How long is this fog going to last?
• Police tape? What’s police tape doing here?
• Is this rain ever going to stop?

According to a photo industry writer I know, I do something that’s a bit unusual: I freely admit that sometimes I’m too close to my own photographs to judge them objectively, and because of that, I ask for help.

Years ago I took a photograph of prayer flags at a Buddhist monastery in Bhutan, and as I was shooting the image I wished I could also shoot video to record the movement of the flags and the sound they made as they danced in the wind.

The picture of the Buddhist nun drinking tea in the Drepung Monastery in Tibet was going to be perfect. The light coming in through a window behind her was capturing the texture of her skin and casting a glow on the tea and the rising steam, and from my training in studio photography I knew how rarely light like this happens in real life. But by the time I’d asked for and received permission to take the photo, the moment had passed: she’d finished her tea and was about to move from the light. So now, along with permission to take the photo, I had to get permission to recreate it.

Early on I lived in Paris, shooting fashion photography. I saw all the iconic places and landmarks, of course, and observed hundreds of people shooting them. When I became a travel photographer, my initial thought was to shoot lots of subjects other than the icons; to make untypical, evocative images of marketplaces, shop fronts, and unexpected details. Pretty quickly I found out the icons defined a place, and even more important, the icons made the money.