On the Road

Want to see something you don’t see every day—something, in fact, you can’t really see at all?

The September 25, 2016, issue of The New York Times Magazine was titled "The Voyages" Issue, and it featured an impressive collection of images. In the introduction to the issue, the writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus talks about the idea of the image as document or experience: this is what a place looks like as opposed to this is what it feels like to be there. He notes the cliché of “the traveler so busy with documentation that he misses out on some phantom called the ‘experience itself.’”

My flights in helicopters, small planes, and hot-air balloons are often provided by clients as part of my assignments; if I’m shooting for stock, I’ll pick up the hire fee. Aerial tours are widely available to tourists and photo enthusiasts alike, and there’s certainly no limit to spectacular locations you can photograph from above.

Not too long ago I entered a PhotoShelter contest that called for entrants to submit a single photo they deemed their best travel image. I didn’t know if the one I sent was in fact my best, but I was certain it would get the judges’ attention. If you’re a regular reader, you might have seen it featured in my column in the November, 2014, issue: the image of trucks, sheep, and goats held up by a landslide in the Zojila Pass in Kashmir, India.

I travel to take pictures, but sometimes I just happen to be in an interesting area, like last spring in Lexington, Kentucky. Let’s see: Lexington, horse country, the Keeneland racetrack nearby, and me never without my camera gear. Photography was bound to happen.

When I realized that this column would be in the magazine’s lighting focus issue, I looked at the data for the photos I’d taken earlier this year during a nearly month-long combination of safari workshop, assignment, and stock shoot in Africa. What I found surprised me: I’d used flash on about one-third of the 13,000 photos I’d made on that trip. I had no idea I’d used my Speedlights as often as I had.

You might say that images from distant, exotic locations are the stock and trade of a professional travel photographer, and certainly in my case you’d be mostly right. Those images pay off commercially and artistically, and when I can make them in places I’ve never before visited, they provide the added satisfaction of exploration and discovery.