Tag: architecture

“The Travel Photographer’s Toolkit”: Please join me for a special online workshop!

Love to capture photos while traveling the world or near your home? Ready to improve your photography techniques? Join award-winning photographer Kyle Adler for a special online workshop on the basic principles of travel photography. We’ll cover how to plan your travel with an eye toward photography, how to pack, a few simple technical matters, and general approaches to various genres including landscape, cityscape, portrait, night photography, street, sports/action, food/beverage photography, etc. The session will be kept small so we can be interactive. This workshop is suitable for all photographers from beginners through enthusiasts to semi-professionals and professionals. Hope you can participate in this rare opportunity to learn a wide range of practical travel photography techniques in a concise 75-minute format!

Reserve your spot by registering and paying here: https://form.jotform.com/202343669158157

Focus on Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen [Encore Publication]: Canal cities of Northern Europe

On a recent independent driving trip through Northern Europe, my wife and I covered a lot of kilometers in our new Volvo, from the factory in Sweden through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  In this post, I hone in on the ABC’s of European canal cities: Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen, three of the most photogenic places you’re ever likely to visit.  I share some highlights in the order we visited these cities, beginning with Copenhagen, Denmark; then on to Bruges, Belgium; and ending up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Familiar sights, such as Christiansborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament, can transform by night.  To make this image, I set up a tripod on a bridge crossing the canal and framed the shot to capture the building along with its reflection.  Buy this photo

Our hotel in Copenhagen was right on the harbor, or Nyhaven.  This was the view from our window.  Buy this photo

When photographing iconic subjects, like Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, try to avoid the postcard image clichés.  Here, I framed the statue from an unusual perspective and used a very wide aperture to throw the less attractive background into soft focus.  While the subject is still recognizable, to my eye it’s more contemplative and serene than in conventional photos. Buy this photo

Bruges is a gloriously beautiful city, and at its most lovely by night.  This image was shot from a bridge over a small canal, with the camera on a tripod and a fairly wide focal length to capture the reflection in the water.  I converted the image to black-and-white using Lightroom in post-processing.  Buy this photo

Instead of just shooting up at the famous Belfort tower in Markt square, turn the tables and shoot down on the square from the top of the tower.  I love the colorful façades of the old houses on the square in this tight crop looking down.  Buy this photo

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Don’t forget to capture some shots of yourself wherever you travel.  It’s easy to get lost in the splendor of a city like Bruges, and to return home with hundreds or thousands of images of lovely medieval buildings, but you want to have a few that include your traveling companions.  Ask another competent photographer to compose the shot for you (after setting up your camera exactly the way you want), or set up the camera on a tripod and shoot with a remote release or self-timer.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam is another canal city filled with gorgeous subjects for photography.  And like Bruges and Copenhagen, Amsterdam is at its most lovely by night.  I captured this impressionistic night scene of Amsterdam’s Westerkerk (West Church) reflected in the waters of the Prinsengracht Canal.  Buy this photo

Museum art makes a great photographic subject.  Just be sure to understand the museum’s policy on photography and never use flash.  I love Jan Steen’s painting, “The Merry Family”, because it reminds me of dinnertime in my household.  In Holland, unruly families are still referred to as “Steen families.”  I consider it a compliment.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam’s most visited sight remains the so-called “Red Light District,” which actually features some of the city’s most beautiful old canal houses.  The working women in this area do not take kindly to being photographed through the windows, so don’t try this unless you want your camera to end up at the bottom of the canal.  Instead, set up a tripod on a bridge and shoot the bustling crowds as they wander the stately old neighborhood.  Buy this photo

These three atmospheric old cities, with their beautiful canals, lovely architecture, and iconic sights, offer remarkable photographic opportunities.  Visit, get lost along the ancient waterways, and keep on shooting!

Have you visited Amsterdam, Bruges, Copenhagen, or any of Europe’s other great canal cities such as Venice?  What were your favorite experiences and images from the trip?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read about more travel photography destinations?  Find all of the destination posts here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

 

Focus on Chile and Argentina [Encore Publication]: Rugged mountain landscapes and distinctive cultural experiences abound

Our wonderful 3.5-week adventure took us from Santiago, where we visited our older daughter, to fabled Easter Island, sophisticated Buenos Aires, the mystical island of Chiloe, and then through much of Southern Patagonia.  For much of this itinerary we were traveling with a local leader and a small group of fellow travelers on a trip operated by Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT).  The knowledge of our local trip leader coupled with the small group size allowed us to travel to largely untouristed areas and to engage in authentic cultural interactions that would not have been easy to set up on our own and would have been impractical to include on larger group trips.  Such a format offers amazing opportunities for photographers, as it provides access to an array of experiences beyond the “postcard-type” shots.  From home-hosted meals to wildlife encounters to hiking across glaciers and on the slopes of a volcano, this trip packed a lot of memorable moments–and images–into just a few weeks’ time.

Easter Island is a small and extremely remote island, accessible via daily flights from Santiago.  It is, of course, famed for the monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people centuries ago, called moai, that are scattered across the island.  But there is a lot more to Easter Island than the moai, including a distinctive Polynesian culture and a wealth of natural beauty.

When photographing iconic sites like this grouping of moai on Easter Island, look for a different perspective.  Here, I have framed the image from an unusual vantage point, shooting with a telephoto lens to compress the moai so that they appear closer together and more imposing than they would if framed from directly in front.   Buy this photo on my website

From Easter Island we traveled to Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires.  This city has a high-energy feel, offers a huge array of food specialties, and is graced with stately European style avenues and architecture.

 

Buenos Aires’ colorful and historic barrio (neighborhood) of La Boca is the birthplace of the tango.  To give a sense of the dance’s motion, I shot with a slightly slower shutter speed.  The rich colors of La Boca can be brought out in post-processing with subtle adjustments to the vibrance and/or saturation tools in image editing software such as Lightroom.  Buy this photo on my website

A stay in the Alpine style village of San Carlos de Bariloche included fascinating interactions with Hans, who as a German boy growing up in Bariloche uncovered his father’s Nazi past and wrote several scholarly books about Nazis living in Argentina; and with Christina, a Mapuche Indian grandmother, civil rights activist, and jewelry maker.  We then crossed overland toward the border with Chile, stopping en route for a home-hosted lunch of grilled lamb and for some horseback ridingon a family estancia (ranch).

Chango, the family patriarch, saddles up the horses for a ranch ride.  An environmental portrait includes not only the person who is the subject of the portrait, but also enough of the surroundings to give a deeper sense of who the person is.  A classic portrait lens would also work nicely for a shot like this one, but to emphasize the relationship between man and horse, and to give some separation between the subject and the background, I chose a longer telephoto lens.  Buy this photo on my website


An otherworldly sight: a lenticular cloud forms on the summit of Osorno Volcano as we were hiking on the slopes.  To capture high-contrast scenes like this one, it often helps to underexpose by about one stop to preserve the detail in the highlights.  Then the shadow detail can be brought back later during post-processing. Buy this photo on my website

The same Osorno Volcano viewed from Vicente Perez Rosales National Park.  To blur the water, I placed the camera on a steady tripod and used a longer shutter speed.  Attaching a neutral density filter to the lens can help by reducing the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor, thus allowing a longer shutter speed even in bright daylight. Buy this photo on my website

A ferry crossing from mainland Chile brought us to the island of Chiloe for an overnight stay.  Chiloe exudes a strong sense of its mystical past and is characterized by colorful houses rising on stilts out of the water.

Characteristic brightly colored Chilote houses built on stilts.  Choose a vantage point from which the houses can be framed in a pleasing manner, shoot with a wide angle lens to include more of the houses, and add a bit of vibrance in post-processing to bring out the saturated colors. Buy this photo on my website

The island of Chiloe includes a fascinating bird preserve reachable by small boat.  Here is a penguin couple out strolling in their formal wear.  To stabilize the camera and long telephoto lens while shooting from a heavily rocking small boat, use a fast shutter speed (choosing a higher ISO can help), turn on vibration reduction if your lens or camera offers it, and release the shutter at the instant when the boat reaches the top of its cycle of rocking.  It’s helpful to use a monopod if you have one (I didn’t) and to shoot a continuous burst of images so that you are more likely to get a good sharp one. Buy this photo on my website

After traveling south all the way to the Strait of Magellan (the farthest south I have ever stood, with Antarctica the only land mass below it), we continued northwest until we reached Torres del Paine National Park, any photographer’s dream destination.  The photographic possibilities here are endless, with rugged mountains meeting brilliant blue glaciers and clear lakes.  We had the opportunity to view this breathtaking beauty from various hikes and by boat.

Blue ice on Lago Grey’s glacier imitates the mountain peaks soaring behind.  I used a polarizing filter on the lens to bring out the intense blues in the glacier and sky, but had to be careful not to remove too much of the reflection in the water of the lake. Buy this photo on my website

Alpenglow lights the peaks behind Lago Grey and its glacier.  To make this image, I had to forego much of a really good dinner by shooting through the mealtime out on the deck of our lodge.  With the camera on a steady tripod, I shot a series of images using different exposures, a process known as bracketing.  Later, these shots can be blended together using the high dynamic range (HDR) tools in software such as Lightroom or Photoshop. Buy this photo on my website

Heading out of Torres del Paine through the heart of Patagonia, our adventure was not yet over.  We still had another national park (Los Glacieres) to visit on the Argentinian side before returning to Buenos Aires for our farewell dinner and our flights back home.

Patagonian Paradise.  Don’t forget to include yourself and your traveling companions in some of your images.  This one, made as we headed out of Torres del Paine National Park, made a great holiday card. Buy this photo on my website

Have you visited Patagonia, the capital cities of Argentina and Chile, Easter Island, or Chiloe Island?  What did you find most memorable?  Please add your suggestions for places to visit or subjects to shoot.  Just enter your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

 

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Dublin [Encore Publication]: Ireland’s main city overflows with Guinness, literature, history, and music

We began our rambles through Ireland and Scotland with a whirlwind two-day stay in Dublin.  The capital of the Republic of Ireland, Dublin is well known as the home of Guinness beer and for its literary and historical legacy, but perhaps less known as a remarkable hub of live music and contemporary fine dining.  It’s also a marvelous place to make images that highlight the old and the new elements of this vibrant city.  Here’s a brief photo essay along with some discussion of how the images were made.

Perhaps the world’s grandest study hall, Trinity College’s Long Room is a stately palace to higher learning.  Located next to the vault housing the famous Book of Kells (where photography is not permitted), the Long Room is best photographed with a wide-angle lens using natural light.  Here I shot from one end of the hall looking up at the ceiling and upper gallery.  Be careful to watch your horizons when making an architectural image from such an angle.  Buy this photo

Live trad (traditional Irish folk) music is a staple of Dublin nightlife, and nowhere is it better than at the famed O’Donoghue Pub, where in the 1960’s bands such as the Dubliners sparked the Irish folks music revival.  Irish pubs are convivial and interactive places, where you can mingle with the performers and other locals.

To make portraits of the musicians, sit close to the “stage” (there’s rarely a true stage in the formal sense, but rather a performer’s area) and shoot with a fast normal or portrait lens using a high ISO setting.  It helps to get to know a few of the players during their breaks.  Buy this photo

Dublin is a world-class literary city, with ties to James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, among many other literary greats.  We took, and highly recommend, a literary walking tour led by scholar, author, and actor Colm Quilligan.  There are many photo opportunities to be found during this informative walk.  You can learn more about Colm’s walking tours here: http://www.dublinpubcrawl.com/writerswalk.htm.

A self-portrait made at The Duke Pub, where many of Dublin’s great authors took their liquid inspiration.  Remember to include yourself in some images, but always look for unusual perspectives.  Buy this photo

A park sculpture commemorates  the Great Famine of the 1840s.  To bring out the textures, I converted this image to black-and-white using Lightroom’s color channel tools, and boosted the contrast slightly.  Buy this photo

Dublin Castle dates from early Anglo-Norman times, and a guided tour provides a sweeping history of Dublin from its origins through the present day.

To photograph the Castle and Dublin’s other architectural gems, use a wide-angle lens.  Watch out for cluttered foregrounds and keep an eye on the lines at the edges of the frame, as it is tricky to avoid distortion when shooting up with a wide lens.  Here I also used a polarizing filter to add contrast to a rather bleak scene.  Buy this photo

The chapel within Dublin Castle offers many photographic possibilities.  Seek out the details in a place like this.  Here I’ve captured the beautiful (but, alas, no longer functioning) pipe organ.  I brought out the shadow detail and increased the vibrance during post-processing.  Buy this photo

It may or may not come as a surprise to learn that Ireland’s biggest attraction is the Guinness Storehouse.  While it’s easy to dismiss sites like this one–essentially a theme park dedicated to a beer brand–that would be a mistake.  The self-guided tour is fascinating for its historical, cultural, and architectural facets, and the view from the top-floor Gravity Bar (with an included pint of Guinness) is the best in Dublin.

The Guinness Storehouse was converted into a museum and tourist attraction, but happily they have retained much of the old brewing machinery, which makes a great photographic subject.  I used a touch of flash here to saturate the colors.  Buy this photo

My wife Mary pulls a perfect pint of Guinness.  It’s more fun to include traveling companions when they’re doing something locally inspired and interesting.  I used natural light with a fast portrait lens and relatively high ISO setting.  The cluttered background isn’t as distracting as it could be, because it documents the bustle of the place.  Buy this photo

Parting shot on our last night in Dublin.  Another trad music session.  This one (which also incorporates a self-portrait) was shot at the Cobblestone Pub.  It was an informal sit-in session, so I had the chance to chat with and really get to know several of the musicians before shooting their portraits.  Buy this photo

Have you visited Dublin?  What do you consider essential activities–and photographic subjects–in this city?  Please share your comments here.

Want to view posts about other travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Cuba [Encore Publication]: Go to Cuba now while you still can

Cuba is a remarkable destination for travel photographers!  This small island has all the iconic images we expect–beautiful but crumbling art deco buildings, American cars from the late 1950s, unspoiled Caribbean beaches–but there are so many more opportunities to connect with and photograph a culture and a nation that is undergoing very rapid change.

Lovers embrace on Havana’s Malecon at sunset.  Buy this photo

European and Latin American travelers already know about Cuba’s charms and have been coming here for decades.  But to many Americans, Cuba has felt off-limits, a destination forbidden by our government.  I’m going to steer clear of the political issues in this post, but it must be noted that President Trump’s recent orders to tighten Cuba travel restrictions previously relaxed under the Obama administration will make it more difficult once again to visit.  The recent changes do not outlaw all travel to Cuba, but most Americans will need to visit under an official “People-to-People Cultural Exchange” program.  The operators of these programs may have to revise their itineraries due to new prohibitions against travel to any facilities owned by the Cuban military, and the prices of these programs may rise as regularly scheduled commercial flights to the island could revert to more expensive charter flights.  But it is still quite straightforward, and 100% legal, for US residents to visit Cuba under one of these People-to-People programs.

I do not recommend trying to circumvent the licensing requirements.  This can lead to lots of trouble for the unlicensed American traveler later down the road: hefty fines, lots of questions to be answered, and restrictions on one’s future travel possibilities.  Instead, go with one of the many travel companies who operate People-to-People Cultural Exchanges.  These are legal trips licensed by the US government for the purposes of the people from the US and Cuba getting to know each other.  These trips do require that most of the traveler’s time be spent interacting with Cuban people of all walks of life, but isn’t that what we travel photographers seek, anyway?

We spent a delightful 1.5 weeks on one of these cultural exchange programs run by Grand Circle Foundation.  They offer a variety of different Cuban itineraries, and we would have preferred one of the longer ones, but schedule limitations required us to take the shorter trip.  This itinerary brought us to the capital Havana and to the rural Viñales Valley, the center of tobacco production and ecotourism on the island.  Here are some highlights from this travel photographer’s perspective.


Our small group was invited to attend a rehearsal by Opera de la Calle.  Held in a decrepit art deco building in downtown Havana, the spirited performance combined song, dance, and performance art.  Buy this photo


Getting to know some of the locals while visiting the exuberant art installation by Jose Fuster known as Fusterlandia.  Buy this photo

We left Havana’s vibrant urban vibe for a three-day excursion to the rural Viñales Valley.  Exploring this famed tobacco-producing region from our base at an eco-tourism village within a sustainable agricultural collective, we enjoyed hiking through terrain unlike any we’d seen elsewhere, taking in views of local wildlife and flowers along the way.

The picturesque Viñales Valley is noted for its mogotes, dramatic hilly outcroppings.  Buy this photo

 

Tobacco farmer Benito enjoying the fruit of his labor.  Buy this photo

Cuba’s national bird, the brightly colored Tocororo.  Buy this photo

The warm and engaging proprietor of Maria’s Cafe surveys her domain.  Buy this photo

During a Viñales Valley elementary school visit, we met the staff and great  kids in the classrooms!  Three classes for different ages shared one old church building.  Buy this photo

We got to know a friendly and enterprising rural family during a home-hosted dinner.  This is their typical family transportation.  Buy this photo

Back in Havana, we strolled through the city’s Old Town.  Buy this photo

A special performance of Santeria singing and dance.  Santeria combines Roman Catholicism with African religions to form a uniquely Cuban hybrid.  Buy this photo

This selection of photos barely scratches the surface of all the wonderful, unique photographic opportunities awaiting you in Cuba now.  Go soon, though, because for better or for worse, this nation is transitioning quickly into a very different future.

A few years ago, the first commercial flight from the US to Cuba in over 50 years had just taken off from Florida: NY Times on US flights to Cuba.  For many Cubans, this seemed like the dawn of a new era that would mean a partial easing of a great deal of economic hardship suffered under the US embargo.  Instead, we are seeing a regression of US/Cuban relations to a situation more like the Cold War era policy.  It’s anybody’s guess as to how this situation will evolve over the coming years.  On the one hand, it’s possible a new US or Cuban administration could open up relations considerably, leading to huge continuing changes in Cuban society.  On the other hand, we could see further tightening on travel to Cuba, making it very difficult for Americans to visit at all.  I’m eager to visit again in a few years to meet more Cuban people and observe how their lives have changed in the interim.  But if you prefer to visit–and photograph–tiny colorful sidewalk cafes rather than Starbucks, authentic cultural interactions rather than slickly produced touristic shows, and wide open vistas rather than lavish resort developments, then now is the time to book your trip to Cuba!  Depending on the political environment, now could even be your last chance to visit for some years.

Have you been to Cuba?  What surprised you there?  What were some of your favorite photographic subjects?  If you haven’t been yet, what images do you associate with this island nation?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box at the end of this post.

Focus on Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen [Encore Publication]: Canal cities of Northern Europe

On a recent independent driving trip through Northern Europe, my wife and I covered a lot of kilometers in our new Volvo, from the factory in Sweden through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  In this post, I hone in on the ABC’s of European canal cities: Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen, three of the most photogenic places you’re ever likely to visit.  I share some highlights in the order we visited these cities, beginning with Copenhagen, Denmark; then on to Bruges, Belgium; and ending up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Familiar sights, such as Christiansborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament, can transform by night.  To make this image, I set up a tripod on a bridge crossing the canal and framed the shot to capture the building along with its reflection.  Buy this photo

Our hotel in Copenhagen was right on the harbor, or Nyhaven.  This was the view from our window.  Buy this photo

When photographing iconic subjects, like Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, try to avoid the postcard image clichés.  Here, I framed the statue from an unusual perspective and used a very wide aperture to throw the less attractive background into soft focus.  While the subject is still recognizable, to my eye it’s more contemplative and serene than in conventional photos. Buy this photo

Bruges is a gloriously beautiful city, and at its most lovely by night.  This image was shot from a bridge over a small canal, with the camera on a tripod and a fairly wide focal length to capture the reflection in the water.  I converted the image to black-and-white using Lightroom in post-processing.  Buy this photo

Instead of just shooting up at the famous Belfort tower in Markt square, turn the tables and shoot down on the square from the top of the tower.  I love the colorful façades of the old houses on the square in this tight crop looking down.  Buy this photo

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Don’t forget to capture some shots of yourself wherever you travel.  It’s easy to get lost in the splendor of a city like Bruges, and to return home with hundreds or thousands of images of lovely medieval buildings, but you want to have a few that include your traveling companions.  Ask another competent photographer to compose the shot for you (after setting up your camera exactly the way you want), or set up the camera on a tripod and shoot with a remote release or self-timer.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam is another canal city filled with gorgeous subjects for photography.  And like Bruges and Copenhagen, Amsterdam is at its most lovely by night.  I captured this impressionistic night scene of Amsterdam’s Westerkerk (West Church) reflected in the waters of the Prinsengracht Canal.  Buy this photo

Museum art makes a great photographic subject.  Just be sure to understand the museum’s policy on photography and never use flash.  I love Jan Steen’s painting, “The Merry Family”, because it reminds me of dinnertime in my household.  In Holland, unruly families are still referred to as “Steen families.”  I consider it a compliment.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam’s most visited sight remains the so-called “Red Light District,” which actually features some of the city’s most beautiful old canal houses.  The working women in this area do not take kindly to being photographed through the windows, so don’t try this unless you want your camera to end up at the bottom of the canal.  Instead, set up a tripod on a bridge and shoot the bustling crowds as they wander the stately old neighborhood.  Buy this photo

These three atmospheric old cities, with their beautiful canals, lovely architecture, and iconic sights, offer remarkable photographic opportunities.  Visit, get lost along the ancient waterways, and keep on shooting!

Have you visited Amsterdam, Bruges, Copenhagen, or any of Europe’s other great canal cities such as Venice?  What were your favorite experiences and images from the trip?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read about more travel photography destinations?  Find all of the destination posts here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

 

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Chile and Argentina [Encore Publication]: Rugged mountain landscapes and distinctive cultural experiences abound

Our wonderful 3.5-week adventure took us from Santiago, where we visited our older daughter, to fabled Easter Island, sophisticated Buenos Aires, the mystical island of Chiloe, and then through much of Southern Patagonia.  For much of this itinerary we were traveling with a local leader and a small group of fellow travelers on a trip operated by Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT).  The knowledge of our local trip leader coupled with the small group size allowed us to travel to largely untouristed areas and to engage in authentic cultural interactions that would not have been easy to set up on our own and would have been impractical to include on larger group trips.  Such a format offers amazing opportunities for photographers, as it provides access to an array of experiences beyond the “postcard-type” shots.  From home-hosted meals to wildlife encounters to hiking across glaciers and on the slopes of a volcano, this trip packed a lot of memorable moments–and images–into just a few weeks’ time.

Easter Island is a small and extremely remote island, accessible via daily flights from Santiago.  It is, of course, famed for the monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people centuries ago, called moai, that are scattered across the island.  But there is a lot more to Easter Island than the moai, including a distinctive Polynesian culture and a wealth of natural beauty.

When photographing iconic sites like this grouping of moai on Easter Island, look for a different perspective.  Here, I have framed the image from an unusual vantage point, shooting with a telephoto lens to compress the moai so that they appear closer together and more imposing than they would if framed from directly in front.   Buy this photo on my website

From Easter Island we traveled to Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires.  This city has a high-energy feel, offers a huge array of food specialties, and is graced with stately European style avenues and architecture.

 

Buenos Aires’ colorful and historic barrio (neighborhood) of La Boca is the birthplace of the tango.  To give a sense of the dance’s motion, I shot with a slightly slower shutter speed.  The rich colors of La Boca can be brought out in post-processing with subtle adjustments to the vibrance and/or saturation tools in image editing software such as Lightroom.  Buy this photo on my website

A stay in the Alpine style village of San Carlos de Bariloche included fascinating interactions with Hans, who as a German boy growing up in Bariloche uncovered his father’s Nazi past and wrote several scholarly books about Nazis living in Argentina; and with Christina, a Mapuche Indian grandmother, civil rights activist, and jewelry maker.  We then crossed overland toward the border with Chile, stopping en route for a home-hosted lunch of grilled lamb and for some horseback ridingon a family estancia (ranch).

Chango, the family patriarch, saddles up the horses for a ranch ride.  An environmental portrait includes not only the person who is the subject of the portrait, but also enough of the surroundings to give a deeper sense of who the person is.  A classic portrait lens would also work nicely for a shot like this one, but to emphasize the relationship between man and horse, and to give some separation between the subject and the background, I chose a longer telephoto lens.  Buy this photo on my website


An otherworldly sight: a lenticular cloud forms on the summit of Osorno Volcano as we were hiking on the slopes.  To capture high-contrast scenes like this one, it often helps to underexpose by about one stop to preserve the detail in the highlights.  Then the shadow detail can be brought back later during post-processing. Buy this photo on my website

The same Osorno Volcano viewed from Vicente Perez Rosales National Park.  To blur the water, I placed the camera on a steady tripod and used a longer shutter speed.  Attaching a neutral density filter to the lens can help by reducing the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor, thus allowing a longer shutter speed even in bright daylight. Buy this photo on my website

A ferry crossing from mainland Chile brought us to the island of Chiloe for an overnight stay.  Chiloe exudes a strong sense of its mystical past and is characterized by colorful houses rising on stilts out of the water.

Characteristic brightly colored Chilote houses built on stilts.  Choose a vantage point from which the houses can be framed in a pleasing manner, shoot with a wide angle lens to include more of the houses, and add a bit of vibrance in post-processing to bring out the saturated colors. Buy this photo on my website

The island of Chiloe includes a fascinating bird preserve reachable by small boat.  Here is a penguin couple out strolling in their formal wear.  To stabilize the camera and long telephoto lens while shooting from a heavily rocking small boat, use a fast shutter speed (choosing a higher ISO can help), turn on vibration reduction if your lens or camera offers it, and release the shutter at the instant when the boat reaches the top of its cycle of rocking.  It’s helpful to use a monopod if you have one (I didn’t) and to shoot a continuous burst of images so that you are more likely to get a good sharp one. Buy this photo on my website

After traveling south all the way to the Strait of Magellan (the farthest south I have ever stood, with Antarctica the only land mass below it), we continued northwest until we reached Torres del Paine National Park, any photographer’s dream destination.  The photographic possibilities here are endless, with rugged mountains meeting brilliant blue glaciers and clear lakes.  We had the opportunity to view this breathtaking beauty from various hikes and by boat.

Blue ice on Lago Grey’s glacier imitates the mountain peaks soaring behind.  I used a polarizing filter on the lens to bring out the intense blues in the glacier and sky, but had to be careful not to remove too much of the reflection in the water of the lake. Buy this photo on my website

Alpenglow lights the peaks behind Lago Grey and its glacier.  To make this image, I had to forego much of a really good dinner by shooting through the mealtime out on the deck of our lodge.  With the camera on a steady tripod, I shot a series of images using different exposures, a process known as bracketing.  Later, these shots can be blended together using the high dynamic range (HDR) tools in software such as Lightroom or Photoshop. Buy this photo on my website

Heading out of Torres del Paine through the heart of Patagonia, our adventure was not yet over.  We still had another national park (Los Glacieres) to visit on the Argentinian side before returning to Buenos Aires for our farewell dinner and our flights back home.

Patagonian Paradise.  Don’t forget to include yourself and your traveling companions in some of your images.  This one, made as we headed out of Torres del Paine National Park, made a great holiday card. Buy this photo on my website

Have you visited Patagonia, the capital cities of Argentina and Chile, Easter Island, or Chiloe Island?  What did you find most memorable?  Please add your suggestions for places to visit or subjects to shoot.  Just enter your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

 

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Cuba [Rewritten for new policies]: Go to Cuba now while you still can

Cuba is a remarkable destination for travel photographers!  This small island has all the iconic images we expect–beautiful but crumbling art deco buildings, American cars from the late 1950s, unspoiled Caribbean beaches–but there are so many more opportunities to connect with and photograph a culture and a nation that is undergoing very rapid change.

Lovers embrace on Havana’s Malecon at sunset.  Buy this photo

European and Latin American travelers already know about Cuba’s charms and have been coming here for decades.  But to many Americans, Cuba has felt off-limits, a destination forbidden by our government.  I’m going to steer clear of the political issues in this post, but it must be noted that President Trump’s recent orders to tighten Cuba travel restrictions previously relaxed under the Obama administration will make it more difficult once again to visit.  The recent changes do not outlaw all travel to Cuba, but most Americans will need to visit under an official “People-to-People Cultural Exchange” program.  The operators of these programs may have to revise their itineraries due to new prohibitions against travel to any facilities owned by the Cuban military, and the prices of these programs may rise as regularly scheduled commercial flights to the island could revert to more expensive charter flights.  But it is still quite straightforward, and 100% legal, for US residents to visit Cuba under one of these People-to-People programs.

I do not recommend trying to circumvent the licensing requirements.  This can lead to lots of trouble for the unlicensed American traveler later down the road: hefty fines, lots of questions to be answered, and restrictions on one’s future travel possibilities.  Instead, go with one of the many travel companies who operate People-to-People Cultural Exchanges.  These are legal trips licensed by the US government for the purposes of the people from the US and Cuba getting to know each other.  These trips do require that most of the traveler’s time be spent interacting with Cuban people of all walks of life, but isn’t that what we travel photographers seek, anyway?

We spent a delightful 1.5 weeks on one of these cultural exchange programs run by Grand Circle Foundation.  They offer a variety of different Cuban itineraries, and we would have preferred one of the longer ones, but schedule limitations required us to take the shorter trip.  This itinerary brought us to the capital Havana and to the rural Viñales Valley, the center of tobacco production and ecotourism on the island.  Here are some highlights from this travel photographer’s perspective.


Our small group was invited to attend a rehearsal by Opera de la Calle.  Held in a decrepit art deco building in downtown Havana, the spirited performance combined song, dance, and performance art.  Buy this photo


Getting to know some of the locals while visiting the exuberant art installation by Jose Fuster known as Fusterlandia.  Buy this photo

We left Havana’s vibrant urban vibe for a three-day excursion to the rural Viñales Valley.  Exploring this famed tobacco-producing region from our base at an eco-tourism village within a sustainable agricultural collective, we enjoyed hiking through terrain unlike any we’d seen elsewhere, taking in views of local wildlife and flowers along the way.

The picturesque Viñales Valley is noted for its mogotes, dramatic hilly outcroppings.  Buy this photo

 

Tobacco farmer Benito enjoying the fruit of his labor.  Buy this photo

Cuba’s national bird, the brightly colored Tocororo.  Buy this photo

The warm and engaging proprietor of Maria’s Cafe surveys her domain.  Buy this photo

During a Viñales Valley elementary school visit, we met the staff and great  kids in the classrooms!  Three classes for different ages shared one old church building.  Buy this photo

We got to know a friendly and enterprising rural family during a home-hosted dinner.  This is their typical family transportation.  Buy this photo

Back in Havana, we strolled through the city’s Old Town.  Buy this photo

A special performance of Santeria singing and dance.  Santeria combines Roman Catholicism with African religions to form a uniquely Cuban hybrid.  Buy this photo

This selection of photos barely scratches the surface of all the wonderful, unique photographic opportunities awaiting you in Cuba now.  Go soon, though, because for better or for worse, this nation is transitioning quickly into a very different future.

A few years ago, the first commercial flight from the US to Cuba in over 50 years had just taken off from Florida: NY Times on US flights to Cuba.  For many Cubans, this seemed like the dawn of a new era that would mean a partial easing of a great deal of economic hardship suffered under the US embargo.  Instead, we are seeing a regression of US/Cuban relations to a situation more like the Cold War era policy.  It’s anybody’s guess as to how this situation will evolve over the coming years.  On the one hand, it’s possible a new US or Cuban administration could open up relations considerably, leading to huge continuing changes in Cuban society.  On the other hand, we could see further tightening on travel to Cuba, making it very difficult for Americans to visit at all.  I’m eager to visit again in a few years to meet more Cuban people and observe how their lives have changed in the interim.  But if you prefer to visit–and photograph–tiny colorful sidewalk cafes rather than Starbucks, authentic cultural interactions rather than slickly produced touristic shows, and wide open vistas rather than lavish resort developments, then now is the time to book your trip to Cuba!  Depending on the political environment, now could even be your last chance to visit for some years.

Have you been to Cuba?  What surprised you there?  What were some of your favorite photographic subjects?  If you haven’t been yet, what images do you associate with this island nation?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box at the end of this post.

Focus on Dublin [Encore Publication]: Ireland’s main city overflows with Guinness, literature, history, and music

We began our rambles through Ireland and Scotland with a whirlwind two-day stay in Dublin.  The capital of the Republic of Ireland, Dublin is well known as the home of Guinness beer and for its literary and historical legacy, but perhaps less known as a remarkable hub of live music and contemporary fine dining.  It’s also a marvelous place to make images that highlight the old and the new elements of this vibrant city.  Here’s a brief photo essay along with some discussion of how the images were made.

Perhaps the world’s grandest study hall, Trinity College’s Long Room is a stately palace to higher learning.  Located next to the vault housing the famous Book of Kells (where photography is not permitted), the Long Room is best photographed with a wide-angle lens using natural light.  Here I shot from one end of the hall looking up at the ceiling and upper gallery.  Be careful to watch your horizons when making an architectural image from such an angle.  Buy this photo

Live trad (traditional Irish folk) music is a staple of Dublin nightlife, and nowhere is it better than at the famed O’Donoghue Pub, where in the 1960’s bands such as the Dubliners sparked the Irish folks music revival.  Irish pubs are convivial and interactive places, where you can mingle with the performers and other locals.

To make portraits of the musicians, sit close to the “stage” (there’s rarely a true stage in the formal sense, but rather a performer’s area) and shoot with a fast normal or portrait lens using a high ISO setting.  It helps to get to know a few of the players during their breaks.  Buy this photo

Dublin is a world-class literary city, with ties to James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, among many other literary greats.  We took, and highly recommend, a literary walking tour led by scholar, author, and actor Colm Quilligan.  There are many photo opportunities to be found during this informative walk.  You can learn more about Colm’s walking tours here: http://www.dublinpubcrawl.com/writerswalk.htm.

A self-portrait made at The Duke Pub, where many of Dublin’s great authors took their liquid inspiration.  Remember to include yourself in some images, but always look for unusual perspectives.  Buy this photo

A park sculpture commemorates  the Great Famine of the 1840s.  To bring out the textures, I converted this image to black-and-white using Lightroom’s color channel tools, and boosted the contrast slightly.  Buy this photo

Dublin Castle dates from early Anglo-Norman times, and a guided tour provides a sweeping history of Dublin from its origins through the present day.

To photograph the Castle and Dublin’s other architectural gems, use a wide-angle lens.  Watch out for cluttered foregrounds and keep an eye on the lines at the edges of the frame, as it is tricky to avoid distortion when shooting up with a wide lens.  Here I also used a polarizing filter to add contrast to a rather bleak scene.  Buy this photo

The chapel within Dublin Castle offers many photographic possibilities.  Seek out the details in a place like this.  Here I’ve captured the beautiful (but, alas, no longer functioning) pipe organ.  I brought out the shadow detail and increased the vibrance during post-processing.  Buy this photo

It may or may not come as a surprise to learn that Ireland’s biggest attraction is the Guinness Storehouse.  While it’s easy to dismiss sites like this one–essentially a theme park dedicated to a beer brand–that would be a mistake.  The self-guided tour is fascinating for its historical, cultural, and architectural facets, and the view from the top-floor Gravity Bar (with an included pint of Guinness) is the best in Dublin.

The Guinness Storehouse was converted into a museum and tourist attraction, but happily they have retained much of the old brewing machinery, which makes a great photographic subject.  I used a touch of flash here to saturate the colors.  Buy this photo

My wife Mary pulls a perfect pint of Guinness.  It’s more fun to include traveling companions when they’re doing something locally inspired and interesting.  I used natural light with a fast portrait lens and relatively high ISO setting.  The cluttered background isn’t as distracting as it could be, because it documents the bustle of the place.  Buy this photo

Parting shot on our last night in Dublin.  Another trad music session.  This one (which also incorporates a self-portrait) was shot at the Cobblestone Pub.  It was an informal sit-in session, so I had the chance to chat with and really get to know several of the musicians before shooting their portraits.  Buy this photo

Have you visited Dublin?  What do you consider essential activities–and photographic subjects–in this city?  Please share your comments here.

Want to view posts about other travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

Focus on Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen [Encore Publication]: Canal cities of Northern Europe

On a recent independent driving trip through Northern Europe, my wife and I covered a lot of kilometers in our new Volvo, from the factory in Sweden through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  In this post, I hone in on the ABC’s of European canal cities: Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen, three of the most photogenic places you’re ever likely to visit.  I share some highlights in the order we visited these cities, beginning with Copenhagen, Denmark; then on to Bruges, Belgium; and ending up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Familiar sights, such as Christiansborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament, can transform by night.  To make this image, I set up a tripod on a bridge crossing the canal and framed the shot to capture the building along with its reflection.  Buy this photo

Our hotel in Copenhagen was right on the harbor, or Nyhaven.  This was the view from our window.  Buy this photo

When photographing iconic subjects, like Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, try to avoid the postcard image clichés.  Here, I framed the statue from an unusual perspective and used a very wide aperture to throw the less attractive background into soft focus.  While the subject is still recognizable, to my eye it’s more contemplative and serene than in conventional photos. Buy this photo

Bruges is a gloriously beautiful city, and at its most lovely by night.  This image was shot from a bridge over a small canal, with the camera on a tripod and a fairly wide focal length to capture the reflection in the water.  I converted the image to black-and-white using Lightroom in post-processing.  Buy this photo

Instead of just shooting up at the famous Belfort tower in Markt square, turn the tables and shoot down on the square from the top of the tower.  I love the colorful façades of the old houses on the square in this tight crop looking down.  Buy this photo

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Don’t forget to capture some shots of yourself wherever you travel.  It’s easy to get lost in the splendor of a city like Bruges, and to return home with hundreds or thousands of images of lovely medieval buildings, but you want to have a few that include your traveling companions.  Ask another competent photographer to compose the shot for you (after setting up your camera exactly the way you want), or set up the camera on a tripod and shoot with a remote release or self-timer.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam is another canal city filled with gorgeous subjects for photography.  And like Bruges and Copenhagen, Amsterdam is at its most lovely by night.  I captured this impressionistic night scene of Amsterdam’s Westerkerk (West Church) reflected in the waters of the Prinsengracht Canal.  Buy this photo

Museum art makes a great photographic subject.  Just be sure to understand the museum’s policy on photography and never use flash.  I love Jan Steen’s painting, “The Merry Family”, because it reminds me of dinnertime in my household.  In Holland, unruly families are still referred to as “Steen families.”  I consider it a compliment.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam’s most visited sight remains the so-called “Red Light District,” which actually features some of the city’s most beautiful old canal houses.  The working women in this area do not take kindly to being photographed through the windows, so don’t try this unless you want your camera to end up at the bottom of the canal.  Instead, set up a tripod on a bridge and shoot the bustling crowds as they wander the stately old neighborhood.  Buy this photo

These three atmospheric old cities, with their beautiful canals, lovely architecture, and iconic sights, offer remarkable photographic opportunities.  Visit, get lost along the ancient waterways, and keep on shooting!

Have you visited Amsterdam, Bruges, Copenhagen, or any of Europe’s other great canal cities such as Venice?  What were your favorite experiences and images from the trip?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read about more travel photography destinations?  Find all of the destination posts here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

 

Focus on Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen [Encore Publication]: Canal cities of Northern Europe

On a recent independent driving trip through Northern Europe, my wife and I covered a lot of kilometers in our new Volvo, from the factory in Sweden through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  In this post, I hone in on the ABC’s of European canal cities: Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen, three of the most photogenic places you’re ever likely to visit.  I share some highlights in the order we visited these cities, beginning with Copenhagen, Denmark; then on to Bruges, Belgium; and ending up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Familiar sights, such as Christiansborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament, can transform by night.  To make this image, I set up a tripod on a bridge crossing the canal and framed the shot to capture the building along with its reflection.  Buy this photo

Our hotel in Copenhagen was right on the harbor, or Nyhaven.  This was the view from our window.  Buy this photo

When photographing iconic subjects, like Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, try to avoid the postcard image clichés.  Here, I framed the statue from an unusual perspective and used a very wide aperture to throw the less attractive background into soft focus.  While the subject is still recognizable, to my eye it’s more contemplative and serene than in conventional photos. Buy this photo

Bruges is a gloriously beautiful city, and at its most lovely by night.  This image was shot from a bridge over a small canal, with the camera on a tripod and a fairly wide focal length to capture the reflection in the water.  I converted the image to black-and-white using Lightroom in post-processing.  Buy this photo

Instead of just shooting up at the famous Belfort tower in Markt square, turn the tables and shoot down on the square from the top of the tower.  I love the colorful façades of the old houses on the square in this tight crop looking down.  Buy this photo

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Don’t forget to capture some shots of yourself wherever you travel.  It’s easy to get lost in the splendor of a city like Bruges, and to return home with hundreds or thousands of images of lovely medieval buildings, but you want to have a few that include your traveling companions.  Ask another competent photographer to compose the shot for you (after setting up your camera exactly the way you want), or set up the camera on a tripod and shoot with a remote release or self-timer.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam is another canal city filled with gorgeous subjects for photography.  And like Bruges and Copenhagen, Amsterdam is at its most lovely by night.  I captured this impressionistic night scene of Amsterdam’s Westerkerk (West Church) reflected in the waters of the Prinsengracht Canal.  Buy this photo

Museum art makes a great photographic subject.  Just be sure to understand the museum’s policy on photography and never use flash.  I love Jan Steen’s painting, “The Merry Family”, because it reminds me of dinnertime in my household.  In Holland, unruly families are still referred to as “Steen families.”  I consider it a compliment.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam’s most visited sight remains the so-called “Red Light District,” which actually features some of the city’s most beautiful old canal houses.  The working women in this area do not take kindly to being photographed through the windows, so don’t try this unless you want your camera to end up at the bottom of the canal.  Instead, set up a tripod on a bridge and shoot the bustling crowds as they wander the stately old neighborhood.  Buy this photo

These three atmospheric old cities, with their beautiful canals, lovely architecture, and iconic sights, offer remarkable photographic opportunities.  Visit, get lost along the ancient waterways, and keep on shooting!

Have you visited Amsterdam, Bruges, Copenhagen, or any of Europe’s other great canal cities such as Venice?  What were your favorite experiences and images from the trip?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read about more travel photography destinations?  Find all of the destination posts here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

 

Focus on Dublin [Encore Publication]: Ireland’s main city overflows with Guinness, literature, history, and music

We began our rambles through Ireland and Scotland with a whirlwind two-day stay in Dublin.  The capital of the Republic of Ireland, Dublin is well known as the home of Guinness beer and for its literary and historical legacy, but perhaps less known as a remarkable hub of live music and contemporary fine dining.  It’s also a marvelous place to make images that highlight the old and the new elements of this vibrant city.  Here’s a brief photo essay along with some discussion of how the images were made.

Perhaps the world’s grandest study hall, Trinity College’s Long Room is a stately palace to higher learning.  Located next to the vault housing the famous Book of Kells (where photography is not permitted), the Long Room is best photographed with a wide-angle lens using natural light.  Here I shot from one end of the hall looking up at the ceiling and upper gallery.  Be careful to watch your horizons when making an architectural image from such an angle.  Buy this photo

Live trad (traditional Irish folk) music is a staple of Dublin nightlife, and nowhere is it better than at the famed O’Donoghue Pub, where in the 1960’s bands such as the Dubliners sparked the Irish folks music revival.  Irish pubs are convivial and interactive places, where you can mingle with the performers and other locals.

To make portraits of the musicians, sit close to the “stage” (there’s rarely a true stage in the formal sense, but rather a performer’s area) and shoot with a fast normal or portrait lens using a high ISO setting.  It helps to get to know a few of the players during their breaks.  Buy this photo

Dublin is a world-class literary city, with ties to James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, among many other literary greats.  We took, and highly recommend, a literary walking tour led by scholar, author, and actor Colm Quilligan.  There are many photo opportunities to be found during this informative walk.  You can learn more about Colm’s walking tours here: http://www.dublinpubcrawl.com/writerswalk.htm.

A self-portrait made at The Duke Pub, where many of Dublin’s great authors took their liquid inspiration.  Remember to include yourself in some images, but always look for unusual perspectives.  Buy this photo

A park sculpture commemorates  the Great Famine of the 1840s.  To bring out the textures, I converted this image to black-and-white using Lightroom’s color channel tools, and boosted the contrast slightly.  Buy this photo

Dublin Castle dates from early Anglo-Norman times, and a guided tour provides a sweeping history of Dublin from its origins through the present day.

To photograph the Castle and Dublin’s other architectural gems, use a wide-angle lens.  Watch out for cluttered foregrounds and keep an eye on the lines at the edges of the frame, as it is tricky to avoid distortion when shooting up with a wide lens.  Here I also used a polarizing filter to add contrast to a rather bleak scene.  Buy this photo

The chapel within Dublin Castle offers many photographic possibilities.  Seek out the details in a place like this.  Here I’ve captured the beautiful (but, alas, no longer functioning) pipe organ.  I brought out the shadow detail and increased the vibrance during post-processing.  Buy this photo

It may or may not come as a surprise to learn that Ireland’s biggest attraction is the Guinness Storehouse.  While it’s easy to dismiss sites like this one–essentially a theme park dedicated to a beer brand–that would be a mistake.  The self-guided tour is fascinating for its historical, cultural, and architectural facets, and the view from the top-floor Gravity Bar (with an included pint of Guinness) is the best in Dublin.

The Guinness Storehouse was converted into a museum and tourist attraction, but happily they have retained much of the old brewing machinery, which makes a great photographic subject.  I used a touch of flash here to saturate the colors.  Buy this photo

My wife Mary pulls a perfect pint of Guinness.  It’s more fun to include traveling companions when they’re doing something locally inspired and interesting.  I used natural light with a fast portrait lens and relatively high ISO setting.  The cluttered background isn’t as distracting as it could be, because it documents the bustle of the place.  Buy this photo

Parting shot on our last night in Dublin.  Another trad music session.  This one (which also incorporates a self-portrait) was shot at the Cobblestone Pub.  It was an informal sit-in session, so I had the chance to chat with and really get to know several of the musicians before shooting their portraits.  Buy this photo

Have you visited Dublin?  What do you consider essential activities–and photographic subjects–in this city?  Please share your comments here.

Want to view posts about other travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona [Encore Publication]: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Cuba [Rewritten for new policies]: Go to Cuba now while you still can

Cuba is a remarkable destination for travel photographers!  This small island has all the iconic images we expect–beautiful but crumbling art deco buildings, American cars from the late 1950s, unspoiled Caribbean beaches–but there are so many more opportunities to connect with and photograph a culture and a nation that is undergoing very rapid change.

Lovers embrace on Havana’s Malecon at sunset.  Buy this photo

European and Latin American travelers already know about Cuba’s charms and have been coming here for decades.  But to many Americans, Cuba has felt off-limits, a destination forbidden by our government.  I’m going to steer clear of the political issues in this post, but it must be noted that President Trump’s recent orders to tighten Cuba travel restrictions previously relaxed under the Obama administration will make it more difficult once again to visit.  The recent changes do not outlaw all travel to Cuba, but most Americans will need to visit under an official “People-to-People Cultural Exchange” program.  The operators of these programs may have to revise their itineraries due to new prohibitions against travel to any facilities owned by the Cuban military, and the prices of these programs may rise as regularly scheduled commercial flights to the island could revert to more expensive charter flights.  But it is still quite straightforward, and 100% legal, for US residents to visit Cuba under one of these People-to-People programs.

I do not recommend trying to circumvent the licensing requirements.  This can lead to lots of trouble for the unlicensed American traveler later down the road: hefty fines, lots of questions to be answered, and restrictions on one’s future travel possibilities.  Instead, go with one of the many travel companies who operate People-to-People Cultural Exchanges.  These are legal trips licensed by the US government for the purposes of the people from the US and Cuba getting to know each other.  These trips do require that most of the traveler’s time be spent interacting with Cuban people of all walks of life, but isn’t that what we travel photographers seek, anyway?

We spent a delightful 1.5 weeks on one of these cultural exchange programs run by Grand Circle Foundation.  They offer a variety of different Cuban itineraries, and we would have preferred one of the longer ones, but schedule limitations required us to take the shorter trip.  This itinerary brought us to the capital Havana and to the rural Viñales Valley, the center of tobacco production and ecotourism on the island.  Here are some highlights from this travel photographer’s perspective.


Our small group was invited to attend a rehearsal by Opera de la Calle.  Held in a decrepit art deco building in downtown Havana, the spirited performance combined song, dance, and performance art.  Buy this photo


Getting to know some of the locals while visiting the exuberant art installation by Jose Fuster known as Fusterlandia.  Buy this photo

We left Havana’s vibrant urban vibe for a three-day excursion to the rural Viñales Valley.  Exploring this famed tobacco-producing region from our base at an eco-tourism village within a sustainable agricultural collective, we enjoyed hiking through terrain unlike any we’d seen elsewhere, taking in views of local wildlife and flowers along the way.

The picturesque Viñales Valley is noted for its mogotes, dramatic hilly outcroppings.  Buy this photo

 

Tobacco farmer Benito enjoying the fruit of his labor.  Buy this photo

Cuba’s national bird, the brightly colored Tocororo.  Buy this photo

The warm and engaging proprietor of Maria’s Cafe surveys her domain.  Buy this photo

During a Viñales Valley elementary school visit, we met the staff and great  kids in the classrooms!  Three classes for different ages shared one old church building.  Buy this photo

We got to know a friendly and enterprising rural family during a home-hosted dinner.  This is their typical family transportation.  Buy this photo

Back in Havana, we strolled through the city’s Old Town.  Buy this photo

A special performance of Santeria singing and dance.  Santeria combines Roman Catholicism with African religions to form a uniquely Cuban hybrid.  Buy this photo

This selection of photos barely scratches the surface of all the wonderful, unique photographic opportunities awaiting you in Cuba now.  Go soon, though, because for better or for worse, this nation is transitioning quickly into a very different future.

A few years ago, the first commercial flight from the US to Cuba in over 50 years had just taken off from Florida: NY Times on US flights to Cuba.  For many Cubans, this seemed like the dawn of a new era that would mean a partial easing of a great deal of economic hardship suffered under the US embargo.  Instead, we are seeing a regression of US/Cuban relations to a situation more like the Cold War era policy.  It’s anybody’s guess as to how this situation will evolve over the coming years.  On the one hand, it’s possible a new US or Cuban administration could open up relations considerably, leading to huge continuing changes in Cuban society.  On the other hand, we could see further tightening on travel to Cuba, making it very difficult for Americans to visit at all.  I’m eager to visit again in a few years to meet more Cuban people and observe how their lives have changed in the interim.  But if you prefer to visit–and photograph–tiny colorful sidewalk cafes rather than Starbucks, authentic cultural interactions rather than slickly produced touristic shows, and wide open vistas rather than lavish resort developments, then now is the time to book your trip to Cuba!  Depending on the political environment, now could even be your last chance to visit for some years.

Have you been to Cuba?  What surprised you there?  What were some of your favorite photographic subjects?  If you haven’t been yet, what images do you associate with this island nation?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box at the end of this post.

Focus on Chile and Argentina [Encore Publication]: Rugged mountain landscapes and distinctive cultural experiences abound

Our wonderful 3.5-week adventure took us from Santiago, where we visited our older daughter, to fabled Easter Island, sophisticated Buenos Aires, the mystical island of Chiloe, and then through much of Southern Patagonia.  For much of this itinerary we were traveling with a local leader and a small group of fellow travelers on a trip operated by Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT).  The knowledge of our local trip leader coupled with the small group size allowed us to travel to largely untouristed areas and to engage in authentic cultural interactions that would not have been easy to set up on our own and would have been impractical to include on larger group trips.  Such a format offers amazing opportunities for photographers, as it provides access to an array of experiences beyond the “postcard-type” shots.  From home-hosted meals to wildlife encounters to hiking across glaciers and on the slopes of a volcano, this trip packed a lot of memorable moments–and images–into just a few weeks’ time.

Easter Island is a small and extremely remote island, accessible via daily flights from Santiago.  It is, of course, famed for the monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people centuries ago, called moai, that are scattered across the island.  But there is a lot more to Easter Island than the moai, including a distinctive Polynesian culture and a wealth of natural beauty.

When photographing iconic sites like this grouping of moai on Easter Island, look for a different perspective.  Here, I have framed the image from an unusual vantage point, shooting with a telephoto lens to compress the moai so that they appear closer together and more imposing than they would if framed from directly in front.   Buy this photo on my website

From Easter Island we traveled to Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires.  This city has a high-energy feel, offers a huge array of food specialties, and is graced with stately European style avenues and architecture.

 

Buenos Aires’ colorful and historic barrio (neighborhood) of La Boca is the birthplace of the tango.  To give a sense of the dance’s motion, I shot with a slightly slower shutter speed.  The rich colors of La Boca can be brought out in post-processing with subtle adjustments to the vibrance and/or saturation tools in image editing software such as Lightroom.  Buy this photo on my website

A stay in the Alpine style village of San Carlos de Bariloche included fascinating interactions with Hans, who as a German boy growing up in Bariloche uncovered his father’s Nazi past and wrote several scholarly books about Nazis living in Argentina; and with Christina, a Mapuche Indian grandmother, civil rights activist, and jewelry maker.  We then crossed overland toward the border with Chile, stopping en route for a home-hosted lunch of grilled lamb and for some horseback ridingon a family estancia (ranch).

Chango, the family patriarch, saddles up the horses for a ranch ride.  An environmental portrait includes not only the person who is the subject of the portrait, but also enough of the surroundings to give a deeper sense of who the person is.  A classic portrait lens would also work nicely for a shot like this one, but to emphasize the relationship between man and horse, and to give some separation between the subject and the background, I chose a longer telephoto lens.  Buy this photo on my website


An otherworldly sight: a lenticular cloud forms on the summit of Osorno Volcano as we were hiking on the slopes.  To capture high-contrast scenes like this one, it often helps to underexpose by about one stop to preserve the detail in the highlights.  Then the shadow detail can be brought back later during post-processing. Buy this photo on my website

The same Osorno Volcano viewed from Vicente Perez Rosales National Park.  To blur the water, I placed the camera on a steady tripod and used a longer shutter speed.  Attaching a neutral density filter to the lens can help by reducing the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor, thus allowing a longer shutter speed even in bright daylight. Buy this photo on my website

A ferry crossing from mainland Chile brought us to the island of Chiloe for an overnight stay.  Chiloe exudes a strong sense of its mystical past and is characterized by colorful houses rising on stilts out of the water.

Characteristic brightly colored Chilote houses built on stilts.  Choose a vantage point from which the houses can be framed in a pleasing manner, shoot with a wide angle lens to include more of the houses, and add a bit of vibrance in post-processing to bring out the saturated colors. Buy this photo on my website

The island of Chiloe includes a fascinating bird preserve reachable by small boat.  Here is a penguin couple out strolling in their formal wear.  To stabilize the camera and long telephoto lens while shooting from a heavily rocking small boat, use a fast shutter speed (choosing a higher ISO can help), turn on vibration reduction if your lens or camera offers it, and release the shutter at the instant when the boat reaches the top of its cycle of rocking.  It’s helpful to use a monopod if you have one (I didn’t) and to shoot a continuous burst of images so that you are more likely to get a good sharp one. Buy this photo on my website

After traveling south all the way to the Strait of Magellan (the farthest south I have ever stood, with Antarctica the only land mass below it), we continued northwest until we reached Torres del Paine National Park, any photographer’s dream destination.  The photographic possibilities here are endless, with rugged mountains meeting brilliant blue glaciers and clear lakes.  We had the opportunity to view this breathtaking beauty from various hikes and by boat.

Blue ice on Lago Grey’s glacier imitates the mountain peaks soaring behind.  I used a polarizing filter on the lens to bring out the intense blues in the glacier and sky, but had to be careful not to remove too much of the reflection in the water of the lake. Buy this photo on my website

Alpenglow lights the peaks behind Lago Grey and its glacier.  To make this image, I had to forego much of a really good dinner by shooting through the mealtime out on the deck of our lodge.  With the camera on a steady tripod, I shot a series of images using different exposures, a process known as bracketing.  Later, these shots can be blended together using the high dynamic range (HDR) tools in software such as Lightroom or Photoshop. Buy this photo on my website

Heading out of Torres del Paine through the heart of Patagonia, our adventure was not yet over.  We still had another national park (Los Glacieres) to visit on the Argentinian side before returning to Buenos Aires for our farewell dinner and our flights back home.

Patagonian Paradise.  Don’t forget to include yourself and your traveling companions in some of your images.  This one, made as we headed out of Torres del Paine National Park, made a great holiday card. Buy this photo on my website

Have you visited Patagonia, the capital cities of Argentina and Chile, Easter Island, or Chiloe Island?  What did you find most memorable?  Please add your suggestions for places to visit or subjects to shoot.  Just enter your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.

 

Focus on Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona: History, architecture, and cultures yield boundless photographic opportunities

My wife and I recently returned from two weeks of travel in Europe to fulfill several of my photography assignments. I’ll publish separate posts in the coming weeks covering some of those professional assignments. In today’s post we’ll explore the vibrant capital cities of Lisbon, Berlin, and Barcelona. While each of these three cities has a personality very much its own, I’m hoping my images will demonstrate that photographing cities, like photographing people, is all about looking for what we have in common even as we celebrate our differences. Urban photography is special to me because cities are the places where history, architecture, and culture often align most dramatically to paint a full picture of how we live today. Note that all of these images and many more are available to view and, if desired, to purchase; just click on any image to view the gallery. Enjoy!

On arrival in Lisbon, we are treated to an early morning view of the old Moorish quarter of Alfama. I like to underexpose by 1-2 stops when shooting sunrises and sunsets to bring out more intensity in the colors. If in doubt, bracket your exposures and choose the one that best captures the scene as you experienced it, or combine the different exposures into a composite high dynamic range (HDR) image.
I loved the look and feel of the old streetcars plying the streets of Lisbon, so I found this picturesque spot and waited until the next tram came into view.
If you had told me one of the most amazing experiences in Lisbon is visiting a tile museum, I’d have answered it’s more exciting to watch the grass grow. But it turns out the National Azulejo (Tile) Museum is absolutely incredible from start to finish. This ornate chapel, decorated in azulejo tiles, is entirely contained within a part of the museum. When shooting interiors it is often advantageous to use a wide-angle lens, but it’s important to keep the camera level to the plane of the ground and avoid shooting upward or downward in order to avoid the severe proportional distortion that can occur in these situations. While it is possible to correct for this sort of distortion in post-processing software like Lightroom, it is preferable to get it right in-camera.
A nighttime street scene in Lisbon’s old Moorish neighborhood of Alfama. When handholding the camera in a low-light situation, especially when a small aperture is required for depth-of-field, it’s a good idea to boost the camera’s ISO sensitivity setting in order to achieve a relatively fast shutter speed.
We spent a full day exploring the Sintra region about an hour west of Lisbon, at the very far western edge of the European continent. Quinta da Regaleira is a wonderfully eccentric estate including a palace, a chapel, and several strange features adorned with symbols of alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. Our favorite feature was this stone tower. I’m always on the lookout for repeating geometric patterns that often make for compelling images. It’s important to compose such shots carefully to enhance the power of the recurring pattern. I converted this image to black-and-white during postprocessing to give it a high-contrast graphic arts style look.

The Alfama neighborhood is famous as the birthplace of fado, a form of music typically performed by a solo singer accompanied by two Portuguese guitars. Fado is essentially a Portuguese version of the blues, with lyrics and melodies emphasizing the melancholy side of the culture. Most fado clubs feature extremely dim lighting to set the mood, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. This results in a technical challenge trying to capture good images. Here I used a very fast (f/1.4) prime lens almost all the way open and also boosted my camera’s ISO sensitivity setting to 6400 (as high as I like to go in order to avoid excessive digital noise), but still the required shutter speed was a rather slow 1/15 second. Instead of trying to capture the moving singer in tack-sharp fashion, I leaned into the mood of the place and allowed some motion blur to occur.
On our final day in Lisbon we explored Belem, an historic Medieval parish most well known for its medieval tower. Again, when shooting architecture with a wide-angle lens, try to shoot with the camera parallel to the ground to avoid distortion of the vertical lines. I also underexposed this image a bit to make for a more dramatic sky, recovering some of the shadow detail in post-processing.
Enjoying the Lisbon obsession, the sublime custard pastry known as Pastel de Belém, at the cafe that invented them (well, the recipe was probably borrowed from the Jerónimos Monastery next door). Food is a key part of any people’s culture, so I like to capture food scenes as part of every urban shoot. Insofar as possible, I try to arrange the various elements on the table so they tell a story in the frame of the image. Here I removed some of the items that cluttered the background, including just the pastries and the local coffee drinks. I try not to shoot straight down onto the food, as that usually results in unappealing shots. With food photography, some work is usually required in post-processing to adjust color temperatures and remove distractions like dirt and shadows.
After our stay in Lisbon, we enjoyed an unforgettable two days on assignment shooting the annual Mardi Gras Carnival festivities on the Poruguese owned island of Madeira. Those images will be featured in a separate post. Then, onward to Berlin. Our hotel was right next to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie section of the old Berlin Wall, shown here.
No visit to Berlin would be complete without passing through the stately neoclassical Brandenburg Gate. It can be very challenging to get a clean shot of very crowded iconic urban sites. Here I fitted a wide-angle lens, composed the shot looking straight toward the gate without pointing the camera up or down, and waited until nearly all of the tourists had left the frame. Some straightening of the vertical and horizontal lines still had to be done in post-processing to avoid the perspective distortion introduced by the very wide focal length.
Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial takes up a large city block and requires some time to take in and explore. To capture this large, powerful, and rather imposing monument, I composed using a moderately wide lens stopped down to a small aperture for maximum depth-of-field and keeping the horizon line with the background buildings completely straight. I converted to black-and-white in post-processing to achieve a stately, somber feel.
On our way home from Berlin, we had an overnight layover in Barcelona. With time in town for only one dinner and a bit of nighttime and morning sightseeing, we enjoyed Catalonian tapas for an authentic local dining experience. I arranged the stuffed pasta and wine glass in a pleasing pattern against the simple background of the wooden table and cropped the image to emphasize the food and wine without distractions. The color temperature usually needs to be adjusted during post-processing to give the food and beverage a realistic color.
Exploring Gaudí’s masterpiece, the cathedral known as La Sagrada Familia, at night. When shooting really iconic sites, I like to seek out unusual perspectives to avoid the dreaded “postcard shot”. Here I composed looking up from near the base of one of the towers, allowing the background to be filled by the dark night sky. This composition cleaned up most of the busy urban scene’s clutter and made for a dramatic capture of the basilica bathed in several types of light.
We had only 90 minutes to visit the interior of La Sagrada Familia before heading to Barcelona’s airport to fly home to San Francisco. I shot this self-portrait (Mary is also included) using a mirror positioned so visitors could view the soaring interior space of La Sagrada Familia.

I hope you enjoyed these favorite images from three great European cities, along with my descriptions of how the images were made. To view more images, or perhaps to purchase a few, just click on any of the photos to go to the gallery.

What are your favorite techniques or images from your urban photography? Do you have urban themes you like to document wherever you travel? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations? Find them all here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

Focus on Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen [Encore Publication]: Canal cities of Northern Europe

On a recent independent driving trip through Northern Europe, my wife and I covered a lot of kilometers in our new Volvo, from the factory in Sweden through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  In this post, I hone in on the ABC’s of European canal cities: Amsterdam, Bruges, and Copenhagen, three of the most photogenic places you’re ever likely to visit.  I share some highlights in the order we visited these cities, beginning with Copenhagen, Denmark; then on to Bruges, Belgium; and ending up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Familiar sights, such as Christiansborg Palace, seat of the Danish Parliament, can transform by night.  To make this image, I set up a tripod on a bridge crossing the canal and framed the shot to capture the building along with its reflection.  Buy this photo

Our hotel in Copenhagen was right on the harbor, or Nyhaven.  This was the view from our window.  Buy this photo

When photographing iconic subjects, like Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid statue, try to avoid the postcard image clichés.  Here, I framed the statue from an unusual perspective and used a very wide aperture to throw the less attractive background into soft focus.  While the subject is still recognizable, to my eye it’s more contemplative and serene than in conventional photos. Buy this photo

Bruges is a gloriously beautiful city, and at its most lovely by night.  This image was shot from a bridge over a small canal, with the camera on a tripod and a fairly wide focal length to capture the reflection in the water.  I converted the image to black-and-white using Lightroom in post-processing.  Buy this photo

Instead of just shooting up at the famous Belfort tower in Markt square, turn the tables and shoot down on the square from the top of the tower.  I love the colorful façades of the old houses on the square in this tight crop looking down.  Buy this photo

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Don’t forget to capture some shots of yourself wherever you travel.  It’s easy to get lost in the splendor of a city like Bruges, and to return home with hundreds or thousands of images of lovely medieval buildings, but you want to have a few that include your traveling companions.  Ask another competent photographer to compose the shot for you (after setting up your camera exactly the way you want), or set up the camera on a tripod and shoot with a remote release or self-timer.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam is another canal city filled with gorgeous subjects for photography.  And like Bruges and Copenhagen, Amsterdam is at its most lovely by night.  I captured this impressionistic night scene of Amsterdam’s Westerkerk (West Church) reflected in the waters of the Prinsengracht Canal.  Buy this photo

Museum art makes a great photographic subject.  Just be sure to understand the museum’s policy on photography and never use flash.  I love Jan Steen’s painting, “The Merry Family”, because it reminds me of dinnertime in my household.  In Holland, unruly families are still referred to as “Steen families.”  I consider it a compliment.  Buy this photo

Amsterdam’s most visited sight remains the so-called “Red Light District,” which actually features some of the city’s most beautiful old canal houses.  The working women in this area do not take kindly to being photographed through the windows, so don’t try this unless you want your camera to end up at the bottom of the canal.  Instead, set up a tripod on a bridge and shoot the bustling crowds as they wander the stately old neighborhood.  Buy this photo

These three atmospheric old cities, with their beautiful canals, lovely architecture, and iconic sights, offer remarkable photographic opportunities.  Visit, get lost along the ancient waterways, and keep on shooting!

Have you visited Amsterdam, Bruges, Copenhagen, or any of Europe’s other great canal cities such as Venice?  What were your favorite experiences and images from the trip?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read about more travel photography destinations?  Find all of the destination posts here: http://www.to-travel-hopefully.com/category/destinations/.

 

Architecture in Ireland and Scotland [Encore Publication]: From Neolithic to today, Ireland has remarkable buildings; here’s how to capture them

During our recent travels in Dublin, hiking across southwestern Ireland, and visiting Edinburgh, we encountered fascinating architecture at every turn.  From ruined farmhouses to stately manor houses, and from Neolithic-era “beehive huts” made of stone to modern fishing shacks, there is a wealth of diversity in the buildings in this region.  Here I present some images of the architecture we saw during our rambles, along with a few words about each.

Dublin’s Trinity College is one of the oldest universities in the world.  Famous as the home of the ancient Book of Kells, the college also boasts the Long Room, quite possibly the grandest study hall in the world.  This image was made with a wide-angle lens using only available light.  I used a relatively high ISO setting so that I could choose a small aperture for greater depth-of-field while still using a fast enough shutter speed to handhold the camera.  Buy this photo

Another perspective on the Long Room, this image captures only the upper gallery, emphasizing the repeating patterns of the ladders, arches, and shelves.  During post-processing I decided to render the photo in black-and-white to bring out the texture and pattern.  Buy this photo

An architectural photo doesn’t have to isolate the building from its surroundings.  I combined a shot of Dublin’s famous Olympia Theatre with a street scene by framing the theater and waiting for an interesting cast of characters to walk by.  Buy this photo

Dublin Castle was built during the Anglo-Norman period and has witnessed nearly the entire history of the city.  It is an austere but not particularly pretty building.  To capture this image I shot with a wide-angle lens and a polarizing filter to bring out the texture of the stonework and to attempt to enhance a rather undramatic grey sky.  Buy this photo

The interior of Dublin Castle is prettier than its exterior.  This shot was handheld, as tripods are not allowed inside.  I used a fast normal lens, but even with a high ISO setting the light was sufficiently low that I had to use a large aperture, resulting in a shallow depth-of-field.  Although the foreground objects are not in sharp focus, I think this scene works rather well to capture a sense of the place.  Buy this photo

In the remote and beautiful Gougane Barra Forest Park lie the ruins of a Sixth Century abbey founded by St. Finbarr.  To make this image, I shot from inside one of the cells where the monks lived, looking outward toward the ruins of the abbey walls and altar.  From this perspective the viewer gets a sense of what it would have been like to live a mostly solitary and austere life here many centuries ago.  Buy this photo

On the same tiny island where the ruined abbey is located on Gougane Barra, there is a more modern but quite lovely church.  We spent some time getting to know the American bride and groom who were celebrating their wedding here, and I shot them in front of the little chapel looking across the lake from the mainland.  Including people in the context of the building makes architectural photography more relatable and compelling.  Buy this photo

Hiking along the remote Sheep’s Head Way, we came across this old farmhouse.  I framed the image with an extreme wide-angle lens to lend it an interesting perspective, and I used a circular polarizing filter to saturate the colors of the building and to enhance the sky and lawn.  Buy this photo

The stately Bantry House lies at the end of the Sheep’s Head Way and has been owned by the same family since 1750.  This photo was made from the top of the hundred steps leading through the gardens and up a hill behind the house.  It’s a lovely vantage point from which to photograph the mansion, its gardens, and the gorgeous harbor and mountains in the background.  A polarizing filter was used to add drama to the sky and to saturate the colors of the water and gardens.  Buy this photo

This old farmhouse is now an interpretive center and shop open to the public to give a sense of what rural Irish life was like a century ago.  The front of the house is especially charming when framed to include the rustic surroundings.  Buy this photo

We started our walk in Killarney National Park at the lovely Derrycunnihy Church.  I framed this scene from a low angle looking slightly upward at the church and using a wide-angle lens.  The perspective gives a sense of the stark isolation of the church in this very remote wilderness setting.  As always when shooting upward with a wide-angle lens, one must take care not to distort the lines of the image too severely.  Buy this photo

Along the Gap of Dunloe we hiked past this bucolic scene around a ruined farmhouse.  I framed the image to include the horse carts and the rutted pathway.  Buy this photo

The Wild Atlantic Way showcases some of the most scenic views in all of Ireland as it winds through rolling hills toward the remote Blasket Islands.  Along the way the observant hiker will see dozens of strangely shaped stone enclosures called beehive huts, some of which date back to the Neolithic Period.  This image was shot with a telephoto lens to highlight the beehive huts and to compress the distance between the huts and the Blasket Islands dotting the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.  Buy this photo

The quaint seaside village of Dingle is chock full of charming stone houses with brightly painted doors and windows.  Because it was pouring rain all day and I was recovering from an illness, I brought only my phone’s camera.  Even so, I was able to make some nice images of the houses by using the Manual app to take control of the phone’s camera.  Buy this photo

Edinburgh, Scotland has a tremendous variety of architecture, which could be the subject of a separate post.  For today, I’ll close with this image of the ruins of the ancient abbey at Holyroodhouse at the end of the Royal Mile.  I shot with a wide-angle lens using a small aperture to maximize the depth-of-field and taking care to keep the horizon level so as not to distort the lines of the archways any more than necessary.  Buy this photo

For a refresher on architecture photography, check out this post: Post on Architecture Photography.

What are your favorite destinations for architecture?  Please share your thoughts in the comment box.

Focus on Chile and Argentina [Encore Publication]: Rugged mountain landscapes and distinctive cultural experiences abound

Our wonderful 3.5-week adventure took us from Santiago, where we visited our older daughter, to fabled Easter Island, sophisticated Buenos Aires, the mystical island of Chiloe, and then through much of Southern Patagonia.  For much of this itinerary we were traveling with a local leader and a small group of fellow travelers on a trip operated by Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT).  The knowledge of our local trip leader coupled with the small group size allowed us to travel to largely untouristed areas and to engage in authentic cultural interactions that would not have been easy to set up on our own and would have been impractical to include on larger group trips.  Such a format offers amazing opportunities for photographers, as it provides access to an array of experiences beyond the “postcard-type” shots.  From home-hosted meals to wildlife encounters to hiking across glaciers and on the slopes of a volcano, this trip packed a lot of memorable moments–and images–into just a few weeks’ time.

Easter Island is a small and extremely remote island, accessible via daily flights from Santiago.  It is, of course, famed for the monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people centuries ago, called moai, that are scattered across the island.  But there is a lot more to Easter Island than the moai, including a distinctive Polynesian culture and a wealth of natural beauty.

When photographing iconic sites like this grouping of moai on Easter Island, look for a different perspective.  Here, I have framed the image from an unusual vantage point, shooting with a telephoto lens to compress the moai so that they appear closer together and more imposing than they would if framed from directly in front.   Buy this photo on my website

From Easter Island we traveled to Argentina’s capital city of Buenos Aires.  This city has a high-energy feel, offers a huge array of food specialties, and is graced with stately European style avenues and architecture.

 

Buenos Aires’ colorful and historic barrio (neighborhood) of La Boca is the birthplace of the tango.  To give a sense of the dance’s motion, I shot with a slightly slower shutter speed.  The rich colors of La Boca can be brought out in post-processing with subtle adjustments to the vibrance and/or saturation tools in image editing software such as Lightroom.  Buy this photo on my website

A stay in the Alpine style village of San Carlos de Bariloche included fascinating interactions with Hans, who as a German boy growing up in Bariloche uncovered his father’s Nazi past and wrote several scholarly books about Nazis living in Argentina; and with Christina, a Mapuche Indian grandmother, civil rights activist, and jewelry maker.  We then crossed overland toward the border with Chile, stopping en route for a home-hosted lunch of grilled lamb and for some horseback ridingon a family estancia (ranch).

Chango, the family patriarch, saddles up the horses for a ranch ride.  An environmental portrait includes not only the person who is the subject of the portrait, but also enough of the surroundings to give a deeper sense of who the person is.  A classic portrait lens would also work nicely for a shot like this one, but to emphasize the relationship between man and horse, and to give some separation between the subject and the background, I chose a longer telephoto lens.  Buy this photo on my website


An otherworldly sight: a lenticular cloud forms on the summit of Osorno Volcano as we were hiking on the slopes.  To capture high-contrast scenes like this one, it often helps to underexpose by about one stop to preserve the detail in the highlights.  Then the shadow detail can be brought back later during post-processing. Buy this photo on my website

The same Osorno Volcano viewed from Vicente Perez Rosales National Park.  To blur the water, I placed the camera on a steady tripod and used a longer shutter speed.  Attaching a neutral density filter to the lens can help by reducing the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor, thus allowing a longer shutter speed even in bright daylight. Buy this photo on my website

A ferry crossing from mainland Chile brought us to the island of Chiloe for an overnight stay.  Chiloe exudes a strong sense of its mystical past and is characterized by colorful houses rising on stilts out of the water.

Characteristic brightly colored Chilote houses built on stilts.  Choose a vantage point from which the houses can be framed in a pleasing manner, shoot with a wide angle lens to include more of the houses, and add a bit of vibrance in post-processing to bring out the saturated colors. Buy this photo on my website

The island of Chiloe includes a fascinating bird preserve reachable by small boat.  Here is a penguin couple out strolling in their formal wear.  To stabilize the camera and long telephoto lens while shooting from a heavily rocking small boat, use a fast shutter speed (choosing a higher ISO can help), turn on vibration reduction if your lens or camera offers it, and release the shutter at the instant when the boat reaches the top of its cycle of rocking.  It’s helpful to use a monopod if you have one (I didn’t) and to shoot a continuous burst of images so that you are more likely to get a good sharp one. Buy this photo on my website

After traveling south all the way to the Strait of Magellan (the farthest south I have ever stood, with Antarctica the only land mass below it), we continued northwest until we reached Torres del Paine National Park, any photographer’s dream destination.  The photographic possibilities here are endless, with rugged mountains meeting brilliant blue glaciers and clear lakes.  We had the opportunity to view this breathtaking beauty from various hikes and by boat.

Blue ice on Lago Grey’s glacier imitates the mountain peaks soaring behind.  I used a polarizing filter on the lens to bring out the intense blues in the glacier and sky, but had to be careful not to remove too much of the reflection in the water of the lake. Buy this photo on my website

Alpenglow lights the peaks behind Lago Grey and its glacier.  To make this image, I had to forego much of a really good dinner by shooting through the mealtime out on the deck of our lodge.  With the camera on a steady tripod, I shot a series of images using different exposures, a process known as bracketing.  Later, these shots can be blended together using the high dynamic range (HDR) tools in software such as Lightroom or Photoshop. Buy this photo on my website

Heading out of Torres del Paine through the heart of Patagonia, our adventure was not yet over.  We still had another national park (Los Glacieres) to visit on the Argentinian side before returning to Buenos Aires for our farewell dinner and our flights back home.

Patagonian Paradise.  Don’t forget to include yourself and your traveling companions in some of your images.  This one, made as we headed out of Torres del Paine National Park, made a great holiday card. Buy this photo on my website

Have you visited Patagonia, the capital cities of Argentina and Chile, Easter Island, or Chiloe Island?  What did you find most memorable?  Please add your suggestions for places to visit or subjects to shoot.  Just enter your thoughts in the comment box.

Want to read more posts about travel photography destinations?  Find them all here: Posts on Destinations.