Outdoor/Travel

The trip began poorly. The remote, unmaintained road dropping from the Andes to the Amazon was a mess. All day we had struggled to prevent the bus from becoming fossilized in the muck. Hours of labor, and we were covered in a thick layer of red, Amazonian mud. After dark, it started to rain. Huge drops pounded our hair, arms, and soiled clothes. Someone pulled out soap, another...

"Ninety-nine percent of what makes good photography is being there," Kevin Fleming says. "Some supplement the lighting with a flash, use filters, or touch things up on the computer. But my way is the opposite--being there at just the right moment, at the instant when color, light, and shape come together."

For a decade, Fleming worked for...

All photographs start with a great in camera image, right? Well, not really. A good photograph begins as an idea, a vision of how to isolate an interesting subject or subjects in a cluttered scene that will tell a story or communicate an idea or an emotion when a picture is viewed by the photographer and by others.

To illustrate the idea of seeing creatively, I'd...

Firefalls were waterfalls once created with fire in Yosemite National Park. A large fire was started atop Glacier Point and red-hot embers were pushed off a shear granite wall in the evening. It was Yosemite's version of fireworks. Park officials learned it was a fire hazard in the 1960s and the practice was stopped.

These days you can see and photograph a...

Harvey Stein is in no hurry. He has published three photography books--in 1978, Parallels: A Look at Twins; in '86, Artists Observed; and in '98, Coney Island--and the publication dates tell you what you need to know about his pace. The photographs here are from his fourth book, Movimento: Glimpses of Italian Street Life. Due out this fall, it is a collection...

Compose your scenes carefully, and the pictures you take today in Bhutan will not look that different from the ones you might have taken 100 years ago in another life (Buddhists believe in reincarnation). Walk through the dzongs (temple/fortress), experience a festival, hike to a remote location in the Himalayas. With a little imagination, and if you turn off your satellite phone...

With a lot of my business coming from stock images, I travel at least six months of the year to take pictures related to travel, leisure, health, lifestyles, and business. Along with a lot of other stock and travel photographers, I've realized that the next frontiers for photographs are India and China. They are the emerging markets, and more and more photographs from those...