my travel photography

…well, some of my best travel photography! I have many more to gradually add, and exciting future trips as inspiration.

Pre-digital photography!

I went on a few exotic trips before I bought my first digital camera in around 2004. I carried around an SLR and sometimes an SLR and a TLR. A TLR – for anyone who doesn’t know – is a Twins Lens Reflex. Basically it’s one of those rectangle box cameras, really heavy, and when you take a photo you look down into the viewfinder. The image in the viewfinder is upside down, but it all works out! No, gunpowder does not go off when you take a photo (but, close). Because it’s medium format, the negative is bigger and the quality can be amazing. Of course it cost a lot; you can still use them now, but unless anything has changed you get only 12 negatives on a roll of expensive film. The format is square.

Of course digital is far, far more convenient and I haven’t looked back even though I just use a digital compact. If you ever use an old medium format, or even large format (5×4 or 10×8) the quality can be phenomenal.

Ahhh….the days and nights when I’d be carrying dishes of chemicals between my bathroom and the tiny darkroom in a cupboard in my old flat in England!

Below are a small handful of my old-fashioned prints; I’ve photographed the photographs for this site! With the initial (non-digital) please excuse the poor quality images!

Lebanon

Above is what I believe to be one of my best ever shots (the original is sharp and far better). It’s taken in Tripoli. A friend, Chris, and myself went on holiday/vacation to Lebanon in 1999. We’d been smoking a hookah pipe on the beach just down garden steps from the American University of Beirut a day or two before. Then we were exploring other cities and were at a modern cafe in Tripoli. My attempts at the hookah must have been a bit clumsy, because the waiter came over to show me how to smoke it properly. This is my photo of him showing me. I got lucky with the perfect amount of smoke dissipation, and with the right exposure (there is no light meter on a TLR camera; you have to work out what aperture and shutter speed to use!))

Peru

I spent a bit of time in Peru in 1995, staying with a family in Lima and going on an excursion to Cuzco.

Back then the idea of carrying luggage with wheels never occurred to me! Like my brother Martyn still does now, I carried a giant sports bag (often hauled over the shoulder) which got very heavy with contents that included pots and plates I bought as gifts.

These are just a few taken out of a shoe box full of 6 x 4 prints…