On the Road

It wasn’t long ago that I began to notice I had competition—and I’m not talking about other travel photographers.

Regular readers know that I emphasize in these columns the idea of visualizing opportunities that will set your images apart from the rest. There is another aspect to that idea, and that’s setting your images apart from each other. In other words, adding variety to your photography by adding, and even combining, techniques.

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.’”

I ended the March 2017 column on my must-have lenses for travel photography and the tripods that support them with a promise that there’d be a part two on the gear that goes beyond cameras and lenses to enable me to get the pictures I envision.

This will probably surprise you, but for someone writing about the advantages of heading out with one camera and one lens, I mostly don't do that. As a professional photographer who emphasizes travel images and loves to apply special techniques, I most often carry a rather full kit of lenses and a back-up DSLR, plus filters and a tripod.

I don't just use clouds in many of my photographs; I actively pursue them for my images. If I hear a storm is a few days out, I'll travel to meet it. I'm not talking about hurricanes—I'll travel away from one of those; but give me an approaching garden-variety Florida storm, and I'll be there.

Color control of our photographs is at our fingertips. It's there, in the camera, all those choices about how we're going to make the most of color, to modify, intensify, or otherwise change it. We have picture controls, scene modes, special effects, exposure compensation, and white balance just waiting to help us make the most colorful photographs ever, right?