Time was, you'd come home from your travels, process your transparencies, set up the Carousel and beguile a rapt audience with a 140-slide tray of wonder-on-the-road. Nowadays when I invite friends over for an evening of travel pictures, you'd think I'd asked them to a dinner of boiled newts. Yet travel photography remains a giddying replay of a trip -- even if it's only for an audience of one.
Afterall, the planet can be a magnificent creature to behold and capture through a viewfinder.
Pause here for a moment. Taking a picture is something we take for granted. Yet what a marvelous alchemy it is. It involves technology, but it is not about technology. It begins with the human eye, but ends up with the human heart. It performs the miracle of plucking a moment from the rush of time.
I wonder if Kodak founder George Eastman knew this when he armed ordinary people -- we who couldn't draw or paint or sculpt -- with the box camera more than 115 years ago. Remember, it took Leonardo da Vinci four years to paint the Mona Lisa. You can shoot your Mona Lisa in 1/125th of a second.
Over the past three decades, I've become a kind of travel photography junkie. The most precious souvenirs I bring back from any journey are the pictures I take. Oddly, they have the effect of justifying my being there in the first place: If I can't shoot, then what I am doing there? What to bring People often ask what equipment to carry. My answer is always the same: Define your end product -- e-mail, prints, display enlargements -- and work backwards to the tools that will do it best.
I use a 35 mm system because it gives me the flexibility to deal with whatever the open road may throw at me. I travel with two Nikon camera bodies and three lenses (28-80 mm and 100-300 zoom lenses and a 20 mm wide-angle). The second camera body allows me to continue shooting without having to stop and switch lenses in a frantic situation. It also keeps me in the game if one camera malfunctions.
How much film to pack? The venerable rule-of-thumb is one 36-exposure roll a day. If you're departing for a visually stunning destination -- India, say, or Southeast Asia -- plan on more. Better to cart it around than run out at a Japanese festival or Balinese cremation.
Other items? Camera bags come with compartmentalized foam-padded interiors, see-through film pockets and organizer pouches for tickets and notebooks. If you fret about airport X-ray inspection as I do, you'll want to search the Internet for the Security X-ray Protective Film Bag, which is made from the same lead fabric used in medical X-ray aprons and holds up to 50 rolls of film. Digital or regular? The trend is to digital. Alex Hille, imaging consultant at the Toronto retailer Henry's, knows plenty about the benefits. "You get immediacy," he says. "You get flexibility: On your travels, you can delete anything shot badly. You get economy: You can shoot and reshoot without the cost of film."
Although digital is still inferior unless you're prepared to pay top dollar, Mr. Hille says quality imaging is becoming affordable much more quickly than anticipated. For instance, a camera that sells for $1,450 at Henry's boasts five megapixels, sufficient firepower to produce a decent 11 x 14-inch print. Making better pictures The essence of travel photography is that it's driven by the same impulse as travel itself, the need to discover. The camera has taken me places I never expected to be, led me down alleys to sights I never expected to see. It's taught me to see in a different way.
I've learned to revere the quality of light that makes or breaks the image. But to use light, you have to have it. That means I go places that offer large helpings of sunshine, steering myself to the tropics rather than maddeningly overcast northern climates. In the hot places -- India, Asia, Africa, the Middle East -- life unfolds in the open, in the street. It's so rich, you could practically go blind-folded and shoot a coffee-table book.
Think love at first light: Convention says light is at its best -- golden-hued and long-shadowed -- in early morning and late afternoon. Convention is right. I shoot until last light, until the ball of the sun drops behind the horizon. In the middle of the day, I hang up my cameras and go to lunch.
Desert light is especially riveting in its abundance and beauty: It brought me to Yemen twice in the same year. But the best light of all -- the photographer's grail -- happens when the sun penetrates and dances across a stormy sky. A charcoal-bellied cloud is suddenly illuminated. Landscapes and buildings drip with gold. It's usually my miserable lot to stumble upon such marvelous light in a dreary suburb or industrial park, but every so often, the gods smile on me -- as they did in the French port of Honfleur, in the Scottish Highlands and on Burma's Inle Lake, where the monsoon broke up over my head and blew away. More tips Take a few seconds to compose your frame. Opt for simplicity. Move in close, thriftily eliminating any distracting detail and wasted space. Keep your subject off-centre in the frame. Use pleasing foreground detail as a frame for additional depth and dimension. Don't be afraid to put the sun behind your subject. Plant a human figure to give scale to a landscape. Try night shots in the purple light air between dusk and dark.
Such considerations may not put you on the same footing as a National Geographic photographer who has the budget to hang in until the sunrise hits the temple just-so. But at least you're doing your best with what you have, which is all anyone can do. The trick is to keep looking until the moment is second-nature.
Follow personal passions: Ruins in late afternoon light. Lurid movie billboards the world over. Every possible take on a rice terrace. I'm addicted to marketplaces: the souks of North Africa, Paris street markets, Turkish bazaars, China's flea markets. Here candid photography is a natural.
It goes without saying that respect is an essential component in taking people-pictures. True, some folk are not amused to find themselves confronted by a glass eye with an electronic wink. But most of the time, in most places, a little respect, a smile and some sign language go surprising distances. Ask permission and the answer is rarely no. In turn, when Japanese tourists request snapshots with their new Canadian best buddy, I try to return the favour. Coming home Now what? How do you make the most of your best? This is one of travel photography's endless bugaboos. Images are sent off on the wires and prints passed around and then everything goes into the proverbial shoebox.
I'm as guilty as anyone on this score. So I'm always looking for ways to keep my images alive. A really artful album is possible if you eschew cheapie mass-produced albums and spend money on class acts with solid bindings and archival pages to protect your prints. Major photo retailers keep them in stock.
Decorating with photography means asking yourself practical questions: Glossy or matte print surfaces? Do you invest in frames and non-reflective glass, or simply flush-mount the images to the edge so there is no frame? Can a collage of rampantly exotic market shots give new life to a corner in the family room? Will a misty morning on the Seine add a dreamy beauty to a bedroom? Are the safari shots powerful enough to conquer the sterility of an office landscape?
I like Toronto's Silvano Color Lab because the veteran photofinisher not only produces impeccable prints, but mounts and frames them in a clean, unfussy style. With Silvano's help, I've been able set up a wall of 11 x 14-inch and 16 x 20-inch prints in a spacious hallway. In a more expansive living room space, I've hung 20 x 30-inch prints, dead-simple, matte-finished, without glass, flush-mounted.
For the impassioned computer user, quality printers and photographic-style papers -- they come in sizes from 4 x 6 inches to 13 x 19 inches and finishes from matte to textured, lustrous pearl -- complete the picture. One of these days, the results ought to match the quality of everyday silver halide photography.
Lately, Henry's Mr. Hille has been telling me about card-reader software that allows you to transfer digital images to CD-ROM and play them back on a DVD. "Just like a slide show," he says.
A slide show? The rebirth of the travel show? I get a gleam in my eye. But when I blather on about it at home, people look at me as if I'm working on a new recipe for boiled newts.
Where to go When you're back from your trip, here are some leading photo labs across Canada: TORONTO BGM Imaging: 497 King St. E.; phone: (416) 947-1325. Silvano Color Lab: 355 Weston Road; phone: (416) 766-4131. SteichenLab: 500 Richmond St. E.; phone: (416) 366-8745; Web: http://www.steichenlab.com. MONTREAL Les Pros de la Photo: 90 Beaubien St.; phone: (514) 273-1588. VANCOUVER ABC Photocolour Products: 1618 W. 4th Ave.; phone: (604) 736-7017; Web: http://www.abcphoto.com.