Travel Photography How To

On a recent trip to Jordan I was going through my nightly routine of cleaning the cameras’ sensors and backing up the day’s shoot when it came to me that these two exercises in what you might call preventive maintenance—keeping dust off the sensors and making sure my pictures are safe—are among the things that concern me most as a professional travel photographer.

In terms of extreme locations, you can’t pick a place much more remote than the Falkland Islands. Located 300 miles off the tip of Argentina in the South Atlantic Ocean, the Falkland Islands consists of two main isles—East and West Falkland Islands, plus 776 smaller islets, covering 4,700 square miles.

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

The idea of flying above the earth in a craft composed of a wicker basket and a large balloon lifted by heated air and at the mercy of air current and vectors has always been a subject of wonder and fascination. Indeed, it was the first method by which humans went aloft, a sensation witnessed by amazed crowds in Paris way back in 1783. Fast forward 232 years later, and add hundreds of balloons more, and you get a sense of the thrill you can experience at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, held this year from October 3-11 in New Mexico.

If you’ve visited Shutterbug’s galleries, you’ve likely seen Douglas Croft’s splendid work. A specialist in nature, outdoor, and travel photography, Croft’s gorgeous images have received glowing remarks from fellow Shutterbug readers.

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.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in northeastern Alaska consists of 19,286,722 acres along the Alaskan North Slope, and supports a greater diversity of flora and fauna than anywhere else in the Arctic Circle. It was established in 1960 and is governed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It receives only about 1,500 visitors a year.