Travel Photo Thursday

Travel Photo Thursday: Silhouette Shots

Travel Photo Thursday

When taking photos as a kid using the family’s Kodak “Brownie” box camera, I was told to always stand with the sun coming over my shoulder.  By doing so, the sunlight would bounce off of the subject of the photo—often a friend or relative—back through the camera’s lens and onto the film. The result: Brightly [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Building “Bites” and “Slices”

Travel Photo Thursday
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Two months ago in “Travel Photo Thursday: Sweating the Small Stuff” I said: “Sometimes getting ‘The Big Picture’ just isn’t going to happen when you are shooting photos. If you move back far enough to ‘get it all in’ you end up getting a lot of junk into the frame. This is particularly true when [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: A Sense of Place

Travel Photo Thursday
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Capturing A “Sense of Place” Through Words The phrase “a sense of place” can be defined in many ways. Here’s what an article in Wikipedia says about its importance: “Understanding how sense of place develops and changes is relevant to understanding how people interact with their environment…” In order to write A Sense of Place: [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Natural Disasters, Signs of the Times

Travel Essays
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You’ve seen them all too often:  Newspaper photos, television film clips, and even YouTube videos, chronicling the the utter destruction caused when irresistible forces of nature—winds born of hurricanes, the sucking vortices of tornadoes, or the swirling waters of floods—overwhelm puny man-made structures. I have lived in California for over forty years.  It’s known as [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Enigmatic Images

Travel Photo Thursday
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In “Travel Photo Thursday:  Who Stole My Sunshine?” I said “Light is an essential ingredient in cooking up a photographic image.  No light, no photo, no how.” Today it’s “some light, some enigma, somehow.”

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Travel Photo Thursday: Reflections of A City

Travel Photo Thursday
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In “Travel Photo Thursday:  Who Stole My Sunshine?” I used a photo of Chateau de Chenonceau in France’s Loire Valley to illustrate how a photographer can use reflections of a building into a river on a cloudy day to create a a memorable shot.  This week, I’ll present another way of using reflections in a [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Looking Up

Travel Photo Thursday
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Since we’re bipedal creatures, when we’re walking about we are almost constantly looking directly ahead, or just a bit off to one side or the other.  We look the world in the same way when driving down the road in a car. Because of this habit of staring straight ahead, we tend to shoot nearly [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: “Capturing” Wildlife

Travel Photo Thursday
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Small digital point and shoot cameras are lightweight, simple to use, and easy to carry along when traveling.  They are usually adequate for shooting both cityscapes and landscapes, as well as portraits.  But when it comes to taking photos of wildlife, a DSLR with a long telephoto lens will outshine its smaller cousin. In the [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Who Stole My Sunshine?

Travel Photo Thursday
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Light is an essential ingredient in cooking up a photographic image.  No light, no photo, no how. As travelers, we want plenty of sunshine bouncing off the subjects of our photos, making the colors “pop” or casting shadows that lend an air of mystery to the image.  If the sun hides behind thick clouds, we’re [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: There’s A Pattern to My Madness

Travel Photo Thursday
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The human eye is a wonderful, optical instrument.  It’s more sensitive and versatile than any of the still or video camera that either amateur or professional photographers lug along with themselves when traveling. Tie the eye to the brain and they will can make sense out of what they detect.  And one thing they are [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: The Eye Has It

Travel Photo Thursday
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Four weeks ago in “Sweating the Small Stuff” on Travel Photo Thursday I pointed out that when getting “The Big Picture” proves impossible, or when the light is not optimal for shooting a grand landscapes photos, look for some small detail in the scene that will produce a memorable image. No doubt both at home [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Shooting “On Location”

Oscars Week 2012
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(“Oscars Week” continues today with photos shot at European movie locations.) Royal London So many movies have been filmed in London that picking just a few to highlight that city’s importance as a cinematic location is difficult.  But since I’ve chosen this shot taken in 2006 of one of London’s icons, Buckingham Palace, here are [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: We’re Going to The Chapel

Love Is In The Air Week
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(It’s “Love is in the Air” week on Tales Told From The Road, so every post is about love, romance and, of course, travel.) What could be a more romantic travel experience than stumbling, uninvited and unexpected, upon a couple on their way to the altar, and coming back with a souvenir photo of their [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: Sweating the Small Stuff

Travel Photo Thursday
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Sometimes getting “The Big Picture” just isn’t going to happen when you are shooting photos.  If you move back far enough to “get it all in” you end up getting a lot of junk into the frame. Sometimes the light is just lousy and your photos are going to be dull as dishwater.  Praying for [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: If You’re Not Fast, You’re Food

Travel Photo Thursday

When shooting photos on a crowded city street with people striding quickly up and down the sidewalks, you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time with your camera at the ready so that you can capture a memorable piece of the fleeting urban scene before it passes you by. In keeping [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: My National Geographic Cover

Travel Photo Thursday

So what’s the ultimate shot any amateur photographer could take?  One that was featured in a National Geographic publication, of course. An impossible goal?  Not so.  I achieved it with the photo that launched my career as a travel writer. Yes, you’ve seen that photo of Margerie Glacier before on the pages and photo albums [...]

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Travel Photo Thursday: “Photoshopping” History

Travel Photo Thursday

“I’ll bet that’s been photoshopped.” You’ve probably said that to yourself when you’ve seen a photo that looks other-worldly or in which something seems out of place.  That’s because Adobe’s top-selling photo editing program has not only become a verb, but one that is part of today’s mainstream lexicon. Sometimes the “photoshopping” of an image [...]

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