CalevPhoto

On Photographing in China

As many of you know, one of my strongest passions is for travel photography.  Every year a great deal of time is spent determining where we will go on our next trip.  Once the next trip is decided upon, I spend a great deal of time debating which lenses and equipment to take on the trip and what types of things I want pictures of.

After spending seventeen days travelling through Beijing and Xi’an in mainland China, then Hong Kong, the following is a post mortem of what wound up working well for me and what did not.

What went well

Having two cameras

This is the first vacation where I took both my 5D2 and my 7D.  This provided quite a few advantages over a single camera – primarily that I did not need to change lenses often and could rapidly switch between closeups and wide angle shots.

The configuration I most often used was a TS-E 24 II on my 5D2 and a 70-200/4 IS on my 7D.  I would often zoom in on details of a building with my 7D, then take the entire building with the 5D2.

I did not always have both cameras around my neck at the same time, and on some short trips I took only one camera (typically the 5D2) so as to not overly annoy my wife, but overall the combo was extremely useful.

Using tilt shifts

As I use my tilt shift lenses more and more, I really am starting to feel that autofocus is truly overrated.  Sure, it is extremely useful for action, sports, and wildlife shots – but for most travel photos it is just a convenience – not a necessity.

On this trip I brought my TS-E 17, TS-E 24 II, and TS-E 90.  By far the TS-E 24 II was the most used.  I also used my TS-E 17 for a number of situations – though for the majority of situations it was too wide.  The TS-E 90 was used sparingly – primarily from our hotel room.

I used shift far more than tilt for most shots.  I did take a few shots playing around with tilt – such as above, but the majority of shots used shift for architecture.

Arranging for private tours in Xi’an and Beijing

Mainland China can be difficult to figure out.  I chose to not bother trying and pay a local to do this for me.  This enabled us to very quickly move from site to site – whereas in other trips we would often spend a tremendous amount of time finding places.

What went OK

China Tours

We used China Tours (ChinaTours.net) to book the private tours.  The guides were cordial and we saw for the most part the places we wanted to see, but what we really did not like was that each day we had to stop at one or more shops and spend a specific amount of time there.  We paid for a tour – not to stop in shops.

For others travelling to China, I would not recommend this agency and I would instead specifically enquire whether any time would be spent in shops.  Once already there, it is generally much better to just hire a taxi – as they were OK with us not wanting to go to shop (they didn’t even ask).

What didn’t work well

Monopod

I did not use this a single time and for our next trip I will not bother to take it.  A monopod works extremely well when shooting with longer lenses such as my 300/4 or 100-400, but for the shorter lenses it is fine to just shoot hand held or when not a tripod is required.

How to take travel shots without people

I am a self professed introvert.  I am very close with my wife and kids and have several close friends, but if you are not in that list I am not a very chatty person. I do not want to smile and have a fake conversation with you, and most of all I do not want your picture.

I also do not want your picture because if you are in my shot and I want to sell it, I either must figure out how to clone you out of the shot or I cannot sell the shot.  So it is in my best interest to take steps to assure that you (and by “you” I mean any one of the other six billion odd people out there) are not in my photograph.

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My Impressions of Turkey

Earlier, I wrote a blog about what went right and wrong in Turkey, but I never wrote a post about what I truly thought of the place. So, without further ado…

About a month ago, my wife, kids and I traveled to Turkey for seventeen days. We spent time at three main places – Antalya, Cappadocia, and Istanbul – in that order.

First up was Antalya.  We really liked Antalya, but the six days we spent there were probably one day too much.  Five days would have been much better.  The old town is very nice and I had a lot of fun walking around one morning, getting shots of the interesting houses there.

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The Reality of Lighting when Traveling

We have all read a great deal of blogs about pros as well as books by pros.  In these books, there is a great deal of information about lighting, but the golden rule is if you want to take good landscape photos the best light occurs either early in the morning or in the late afternoon.

The reality of course, is that this is often not an option for us mere mortals. We do not have the flexibility to get up at the wee hours of the morning and trek to a good spot that we scoped out the day before and stay there for several hours getting good shots.  If we did this, our families would kill us.

Therefore much of the light we get to shoot in is of the worst kind.  It occurs when the sun is high above during the mid day.  The other reality is that you may find that the sky is cloudy and ugly on that particular day.  However, this does not necessarily mean that all hope is lost.  There are a number of options available to you and in this post, as well as future ones, I will go over these in more detail.

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Back from Turkey – what worked and what didn’t

After nineteen days of travel in Istanbul, Antalya, and Cappadocia, we are finally back!  Actually we got back a few days ago, but it has been difficult getting back to this time zone and taking care of various issues.

The trip was very interesting and was one of the better trips we have taken.  Everyone had fun and I set a personal record with over 2000 pictures taken and 80GB of data.  Rather than discuss at length what we did, I thought I would cover what went well and what did not in terms of the photography planning I did for the trip.

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How to travel with equipment and children

Recently someone asked about traveling with both photography equipment and children.  Since I have done quite a lot of that, I thought I would share my experiences.

We have two boys – ages four and five and we usually take one international vacation each year and fly domestically twice each year.  Our domestic flights are usually either to New York City (which is an easy direct flight from Seattle) or to Rochester, NY – which is more difficult because we have to change planes and the aircraft are smaller.

So far we have taken our kids to Rome, Singapore, Thailand, Israel, and Mexico on separate trips.  Our five year old has been to ten countries already and both are very used to aircraft and are seasoned travelers.

In every trip since I bought my DSLR three years ago, I have brought the majority of my equipment.  The equipment has varied as I accumulate more of it but it started out as a fully loaded Tamrac Expedition 5 and now I use an Airport Accelerator from ThinkTankPhoto.  The following are my recommendations for traveling safe and sane with both.

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Let’s take a trip to Singapore!

While recently going through my photos, I noticed that I never posted anything about our trip to Singapore several years back.  The likely reason for this is I had a P&S at the time and the photos suck, but it still was an interesting travel destination.

At the time, Eitan and Nathan were 23 months and 10 months old.  Nelya wanted to take a nice relaxing vacation.  Her ideal vacation was resting by a beach, but she wasn’t against shopping.  My ideal vacation was exploring an exotic location.  I spent months searching for the ideal destination, with the end result being the island of Sentosa in Singapore.

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Macro Photography when Traveling

Macro photography is easily my favorite type of photography.  Given that travel is also one of my great passions, it makes sense to combine the two.  After having taken macro equipment on my last several trips – to Thailand, Israel/Jordan, and Mexico, I have learned a bit about what equipment to bring and what not to bring.

First of all, you have to be very realistic about the place you are going to?  What types of macro pictures will you really take there?  While macro photography can be done anywhere, some types of trips make certain types of macro photography difficult.  For instance, my wife and kids generally will not sit around and wait while I setup a tripod to take a picture of a flower.  While I occasionally use a tripod for my flower pictures in gardens around Seattle, I never use a tripod for macro photography on vacation (I do use one for sunrise/sunset and night shots though).  The following are my experiences on different types of vacations.

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Here come the coatis!

At our resort in Mexico along the pathways to the beach it was quite common to find wild coatis.  Though wild, they are obviously habituated to humans and will often scrounge the tables after people have eaten or, more simply, beg for food from those who have it.

The full name of this mammal is “Coatimundi” and they are relatives of the raccoon.  Unlike raccoons, though, they travel in large packs – as many as 40 coatis in a pack.  The baby coatis travel with the parents – as you can see in the picture above.

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Finally back!

Hello everyone!  Yes, this is still an active blog!  Things have been extremely busy lately, but the good news is I now have the material for quite a few new blogs.  The most exciting thing that occurred since my last post was we took a vacation in the Riviera Maya area of Mexico.  For those not familiar with this area, it is south of Cancun.  Cancun itself is located on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, close to its southern border with Belize. 

We stayed at an all inclusive hotel that had a good deal of wildlife so I had a number of photo subjects.  I also took several day trips and have photos from them.  In the next few days I will begin posting blogs about the different types of wildlife I saw there.  In the meantime I will share this picture I took early in the morning at the beach by our hotel.