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If you're reading this bit of the site I figure you are not just interested in hearing about different places, but want to know a bit more about the photos on the site. As they all start with the press of a button, I thought I'd better kick off by saying something about the bods pressing the buttons.
Photography is a part-time hobby for me - that is, I get to do it when we travel. In the meantime, I get my "photography fix" by logging in to my favourite photography website Luminous Landscape, and occasionally drooling over newly released cameras in the store windows, reading reviews of them and browsing other people's photo pages on the web. However, even at this laid-back pace, I seem to have amassed more than 15,000 images. Putting them to some use is part of the reason why I put this site together. Don't panic, only a very tiny fraction are ever going to see the light of day here! By the way, it might be my hobby, but but don't assume all the images you see on the site were taken by me - Trev's taken quite a few of them. You never know, you might have actually seen Trev in action! At popular scenic spots he seems to be a magnet for those wanting someone to take their picture in front of whatever it is! (He gets asked for directions a lot too, especially in cities he's only been in for 10 minutes). Well, that's enough about us.
For years we took two film cameras on our trips - an SLR and a compact. The SLRs were Nikons - a 401s and later an 801s. The compacts were a Ricoh and later a Samsung. We usually shot negative film 100 or 200 ISO, occasionally 400 ISO in the zoom compact, because it had a relatively slow lens at the long end. Photos from all these cameras will appear somewhere on the site, scanned from the negatives to approx 30Mb .tiff files and reduced enormously for on line use. From 2002, we swapped the compact film camera for a Canon Powershot A30 compact digital camera, which had a 1.2 megapixel capacity. I finally swapped to digital in 2004, when I bought the 5 megapixel Nikon D70, and we have not take any film photos since then. In 2005 Trev replaced the Canon compact with a Nikon D50 SLR and in 2007 I swapped my D70 swapped for a 10 megapixel D80. In 2011 Trev upgraded a 12 megapixel D90. We generally each take a short zoom - mine is an 18-70mm Nikkor, equivalent to 27-105mm and Trev's is an 18 - 55mm at the moment. We take one longer Nikkor zoom which fits both cameras - a 70-300mm (equivalent to a 105 - 450mm). However, the Nikons and their lenses weigh quite a bit, and are fairly bulky. In the last couple of years a new breed of interchangeable lens camera has entered the market. I am not keen on the Nikon option in this category (as they chose to base theirs on a very small sensor size), so I am considering a complete change of system, to a Sony NEX-7 with perhaps a 16mm and a 55-210mm lens. They use an APS-C sized sensor, similar in physical dimension to the one in my D80 (but with more than twice the megapixel capacity). Big decision though, so not rushing into it. The other pieces of equipment essential to our travel photography are a small (currently Asus) notebook computer and a separate portable hard drive. We back up the SD-cards from the cameras to both of these each night, and then re-format the cards for use the next day. I don't bother with a tripod or separate flash. I still use Iview Media Pro v3.1.3 to catalogue all our photos and produce the initial .html files that make up the photo album pages (then I tweak the code to make them match the website format). Iview was bought out years ago by Microsoft but I have been very happy with Iview and will only change once it stops being compatible with whatever operating system I am using. I'm adding this bit because I know it is a hot topic in many photography mags and forums. The quick answer to the second question is - yes, sometimes I will have 'fiddled' with the image to make it look closer to what I remember we were looking at. I have used the Nikon film scanner and later Epson flatbed V700 film scanner's wonderful Digital ICE software to remove scratches and restore colour balance on some of the older negatives that have been damaged over the years. I have used various image editors to crop out boring expanses of bitumen or sky when I have not composed things very aesthetically. I have straightened the odd horizon and have also brightened some dark or underexposed images. However, my aim with this website is to show you what I remember we saw at a given place, not something fake, so I have kept my fiddling to a minimum. If you have read this far, you probably think I am some sort of equipment freak and that the most important thing for me is what camera is dangling from my neck. It isn't. We both travel because we want to see and experience other places on the planet. At least half the fun is in the research beforehand. Then once we get wherever it is, we spend a lot more time looking and listening to what is going on than fiddling with our cameras. After all, there is no point recording an experience if you have not actually HAD the experience! Then there is the fun of sharing our trips with others. So what are some of the ways you can record and share your travel experiences? Write a trip journal at the end of each day - where you went, what you saw, what you felt. I do that on the notebook that I store the photos on, and use bits of it to create emails to friends and family. It's a great memory jogger when I am cataloguing the photos and creating the commentary for this website, but it has also become a great way of sneaking a peak at the sort of things I thought and felt on previous trips. I have journals going back nearly 30 years now (yes, originally they were handwritten on actual notebooks, but I transcribed them years ago). Make a photo album. Paper-based albums, either hand-made or created using online print services, are great fun to flick through. Create a blog or a website! Even if no-one else ever visits it, you can take yourself on holidays all over again at the click of a button. The best camera to take is one which you will be happy to keep with you all the time - if you feel like leaving it behind in your hotel room (as I admit I sometimes do), it might as well have stayed at home! So for many, the camera in your mobile phone may be all you really want or need. However, those cameras do have their limitations. If you are thinking about getting a dedicated camera, the main factors to consider other than affordability are the type of photos you want to capture and how much weight and size you want to lug around.
Picture quality often comes down to the lens more than the camera it is attached to. Zoom lenses give you flexibility, but you need to work out how much zoom you want (and it is optical zoom that you need to consider, not digital zoom). The more you want, the larger the camera will tend to have to be to accommodate it. Pocket-sized cameras usually come with a 3-4 times zoom, and if you get one which is described as "wide" at the bottom end, you will probably be able to get most buildings / streetscapes / beaches with sunsets / mountains etc shots fairly easily. Those cameras are easy to keep on you, and are not conspicuous to use. Mid-sized cameras with fixed zoom lenses (some up to 10x) will give you a bit more range and can generally be popped into a small and light camera case.
However, if you like to do a lot of animal photography - eg at a zoo, where the target is moving and often small, or you think you will be photographing sport or other fast-moving subjects, you probably need to move to an interchangeable lens camera (either SLR or "system"), and one or two zoom lenses. These cameras do tend to be heavy (although the "system" ones are WAY lighter than the SLRs now). They are also more expensive (so check your travel insurance coverage for cameras) and have many more features for the keen photographer. They potentially enable you to capture sharper and better-quality images if you know how to use them. However, they do tend to mark you out instantly as a tourist - so if you are after candid street shots, they might not be the best idea! Finally, don't get too hung up on the number of megapixels the camera can produce - anything on the market now will produce photos with sufficient megapixels for you to be able to get great prints and certainly more than you need for any online use. The real advantage of ever-increasing pixel output is for those who like to manipulate their photos in photo-editing software. If you are one of those, you'll have been doing further research elsewhere and have more particular needs than most casual travel photographers. Navigate:
MustDoTrips homepage
-> Photography The bods pressing the buttons
Equipment details
Cataloguing the images
Have I fiddled with any of the digital images on this website?
Remembering and sharing the experience
What sort of camera should I take with me?
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