Travel and Photography: A Vicious Cycle

Anyone who has met us for at least, oh, 2 minutes knows how much we love to travel and see new places all that this wonderful world has to offer.

And in the past few years, we've both developed a love of photography that usually goes very well with our love of travel. I now find myself taking pictures not just to document the trip, but also enjoying the challenge of trying to capture the beauty of a special place or cope with difficult photographic conditions.  Or, sometimes I start to prioritize destinations based on the photos we could take. There were many reasons I was excited to go to Istanbul over Easter, but the truth is that one of them was I wanted to photograph the gorgeous mosques now that I had a good camera and knew (somewhat) how to use it! 

Sometimes hard to balance the desire to see the sights with the other desire to photograph it. You would think these are always the perfect combination. And though usually they go well together, sometime I find myself concentrating more on the photography than seeing the place. Not sure if that's "right" or "wrong" and it may be quite normal, but it's a bit like the typical quandry of how much time to spend on seeing the sites and how much time to spend eating, relaxing, and soaking up the culture. 

The right balance is key for an enjoyable trip. The Europeans often marvel (and not in a positive way) at the typical American European holiday: It's usually something like 5 cities in 6 days, or sometimes even more cities than days.  I always explain that we have to make our short trips count since we Americans have much less vacation time and great difficulty getting longer than a week off work at a time. But this feeling like you have to see it all and not waste the trip leaves us exhausted by the end of the trip and suffering from what I'd call in Europe "castle fatigue" or in Egypt "tomb burnout."  Andrew from Grounded Traveler calls it the "Aquarium Effect of Sightseeing," but the result is that after too many castles/tombs/old squares they all start to look alike and it's not really that much fun anymore. Diminishing marginal utility of sightseeing...I'm having flashbacks to econ classes...

After enough years of travel (and of having the wrong balance), I've learned to be OK with taking a trip somewhere great and not seeing everything. We usually prioritize what we want to see, and then we don't worry too much if we don't see the rest. It's much more enjoyable if we take the time to sit in a cafe and have turkish coffee or watch the scenes from a lunch table on the plaza instead of rushing around to see everything. Fish and chips in London, macarons in Paris.... part of travel is soaking up the culture and getting to try new foods, right? 

But I'm still working on finding my travel/photography balance.  Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the photography that we forget about how interesting the subject is. I guess luckily there's the internet and we can always read more about it later. Though I struggle with the same question of "am I getting everything out of it that I should?" 

Our trips often look a lot like this

(I'd just gotten a macro lens, so we pulled over to a scenic spot on the way home from spring skiing)

Or this, at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna

We're learning to manage it better and build in time for photos, since that's one of the fun parts of the trip. We know that when we stop to take pictures, we're a lot slower than the average person, so we build in extra time to the schedule. And especially extra time when we're hiking!

But I've recently realized there's a bigger problem with combining travel and photography - it's a vicious (and potentially expensive!) cycle. 

The more I travel and practice, the more I enjoy photography. And the better my pictures and processing get, the more I want to take pictures and improve my photography. And the more my photography improves, the more unhappy I am with the older pictures because I remember how beautiful the place was and I know I could do it better now. So then I want to go back and "do it right." And I want more equipment...

Luckily the processing side of it only costs time and terabytes in the digital photography world. Herr J is finding that out the hard way. Every time he learns a better way to process the pictures, he wants to go back and redo the older ones. That can eat up a lot of time! As for me...I'm still trying to get through the huge backlog of almost every photo I've taken since getting a DSLR.... But we now have a digital photo frame filled with hundreds of beautiful places and happy memories.

Last week as I was dreaming of potential honeymoon destinations, I was inspired to look through my safari photos from a trip to South Africa a couple of years ago. This trip was the catalyst for upgrading to a D700. I'd been thinking about going to full frame and knew this trip was coming up later in the year, so it was a good time. The problem now is that I didn't know a quarter of what I know now (and there's so much I STILL don't know!). So I was disappointed looking back through the pictures. There were some good shots, but most of them were not what I remembered/expected and a few simple adjustments like shutter priority would have really made a huge difference. 

Looking through those photos again, I concluded that:

1) I'm so lucky to have the chance to go such an amazing trip

2) Wow, I did NOT know how to use my camera back then!!

3) I need a longer lens

4) I need to go back*

* this one probably is only 50% photography related. I just love animals. I could easily be a safari junkie!

Realistically, I can't justify one of those awesome, superfast 400mm+ lenses. Even if money were no object, would I really carry around a 10-15 pound lens??? 

No, but looking through these photos - remembering how amazing it is to see the animals and knowing how much better the pictures could be - I find myself wanting to take more pictures and travel more. (And really wanting some extra reach) In the short run, a trip to the zoo or to one of Germany's safari parks would be a great idea. All the fun of seeing/photographing animals for a fraction of the price and travel time! And a good opportunity to practice before the the next time. Maybe next time we rent a lens? I'm currently still failing, but I keep trying to rationalize Nikon's 70-200mm 2.8 and a 2x teleconverter. Herr J's micro four-thirds with it's tiny, light effectively 600mm lens beats me every time!

But, back to South Africa...while there were disappointingly few good ones among the couple thousand photos I took, there still were a few good ones. And I guess even the not so good ones are worth keeping, since they provide me with memories of good experiences and time with friends. And, of course, inspiration for the future! 

Here were some of the better ones:

The vultures waiting for the lions to leave the dinner table

 

 In the middle of a huge herd of Cape Buffalo and their birdie friends

This one of the European Roller came out very well!

We unintentionally drove right into the middle of an elephant herd. None of the photos of the babies came out well, but one or two out of a hundred worked. Frustrating about the photos, but I do have the memories.

 

More birds, either waiting for a free meal or hiding out up high as the predators come out for dinner time

In this case, the 70-300mm was plenty to get a nice close shot of a Cape Buffalo. I like how their horns grow to look like they're wearing an old-fashioned wig. 

Not very nice skies, but a decent shot of the Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill

 

Procrastination actually paid off for me here. Upon returning 2 years ago, I did nothing other than convert the RAW files to jpg. But in the last month, we've found out how to rescue those grainy night shots using Topaz DeNoise. It's a bit of a miracle-worker!

No animals, but this one pretty much sums up the safari experience....hats, cocktail hour, photography, and some wildlife magazines. And a big bowl of brightly colored monkey balls.  

Capturing the moon is one of the big photo challenges I haven't yet worked out, but I do like the dreaminess of this shot of it coming up above the trees and grass.

And it's shots like these that make me want the big boy lenses.....This was at 300mm and cropped as much as I could. Though the picture is nothing special, it reminds me how helpful the monkeys were. Thanks to their incessant screeching, we realized there was a young leopard nearby!

Sure, I'm biased because I love cats, especially big, boldly patterned ones. But the leopards were by far my favorite animal out there. We saw 3 or 4 of them. They are breathtakingly beautiful and one can easily lose an hour just watching the leopard stroll around, roll in the grass, and primp. And my lack of good photos of the cats (and anything that moved, really) makes me want to go back and try again. Too many were blurry (use a faster shutter speed), not proper exposure, or obscured by grass (more careful composition). I want to go take a beautiful portrait of the cat's face, but I just never got in close enough.  Isn't he gorgeous? 

(Something tells me that getting a leopard to stay still and to look in my direction is going to be equally frustrating as trying to get my housecat to pose!)

And finally, we found the giraffes, about 5 minutes before it was time to turn around and head back to the airport.

 

It wasn't all big creatures. The smaller ones were everywhere too. Luckily this little guy was slow enough for me to catch him in focus. Unfortunately most of the smaller, faster creatures were too far or too fast to really be in detail. Especially the wildebeasts and the cute little warthogs that ran through the grass with their anntenna-like tails sticking up - just like Pumba!

 

Though I was able to get a few impala not running.