The Trouble with Travel Photography

Shoot to kill

Apologies for my recent absenteeism, I’ve been away, to India if you’d like to know. In short: nice place but a shame about the money grabbing guys in Delhi. Anyway enough about that, more of this.

My recent trip was the first time out for for me to utilise my new Digital SLR (a Nikon D80 if you must know) I was very excited about getting some travel piccies on a decent camera with a good resolution, for the walls of my new flat. However I discovered that traveling and travel Photography, are not the match made in heaven that one would imagine…

Firstly there is the issue of luggage. I pride myself on traveling relatively light, I pack a 35-40 ltr bag with some of my oldest clothes and laugh at the Americans with their 80+ ltr ‘Rucksacs’ as they worry about them sitting on the roof of the cranky old bus we’re on, in monsoon season. Now, although an SLR is reasonably small (in that you can fit it in a small case) it is a heavy piece of equipment, and when paired with the paraphernalia  that surrounds the use of such a camera (hard drive, tripod, filters etc) it all adds up. These trinkets collude to ruin your back over the course of weeks, comparative to a compact anyway.

Secondly there’s the obvious problem of theft. Although SLRs are designed to appease those with more traditional views of what a camera should be they still come with a ruddy great screen on the back screaming ‘digital’ at the small street urchins that you’d love to photograph. This results in a great internal dialog along the lines of ‘do I risk it or should I wait until there are less people about’ or ‘is it going to get dark before I can go home and hide my wares’. By the time this thought process has occurred the opportunity has gone and the street urchins have begun eying up the next guy. On top of all that you now have to look over your shoulder until you can offload, though you can play the ’secret spy’ game in your head, deciding who’s trying to follow you. Which is sad, but fun.

Note: Some of you, if you had the ability, would comment about getting decent insurance. I can assure you I’m insured to the hilt, in fact I’m almost willing someone to rob me as I’ve over-insured and could get a full frame DSLR with the return on a claim. My problem is that, from that point, you have no camera. Worse still if they nick your bag they get your backups and all your pictures!

Finally, and this one’s the killer, where the hell do you draw the line between travel and travel photography? I’m a fan of both of these things but they just can’t ever fit together.  When I see a lovely moment I either feel that I should be capturing it in a photo or I should be enjoying it. Inevitably I make the wrong decision and either waste my time getting my camera out (and missing the moment once the above internal discussion has settled) or I ‘enjoy’ it by imagining how cool it’d look on my wall or similar. Either way I end up feeling robbed of any satisfaction and thoroughly deflated. Worse still post-trip I look through my photos thinking ‘ahh yeah that was just before I, oh, no, I ‘enjoyed’ that bit’… It’s a double punkd! Worse STILL aside from deciding this is a holiday/photography trip I can’t see a resolution to my predicament! In particular I cannot see a point where a trip purely for photography is a viable option.

So I’m left with this great internal struggle… In the meanwhile check out my progress over on my Flickr. Comments are welcome, criticism is encouraged.