Travelling Light

One of the biggest frustrations of being a photographer when traveling is often being at the mercy of others around when and where and for how long you can stop. This is particularly true when you’re traveling for work, not fun. And the frustration only grows when the landscape you’re passing through is visually spectacular.

The key to any good picture, and definitely true to landscape photography, is the need to move yourself into a position to make the most of a scene. Is that tree better placed on the left or the right? Should I get in close and use a wide angle, or stand off and zoom? If I wait here another five minutes, is the sun going to break through and hit that particular part of my composition and make it take off? Photography is the art of scribing light. You need to be in the perfect position, and the perfect moment.

And that perfect position and perfect moment is almost never through a car window. Or a car windshield. Or, for that matter, an airplane seat.

I’ve sadly had to score my fair share of shots from car windows. I hate it. They are always sub-standard to what I would like, or the vision I have for the scene, and unless you’re very fortunate, there’s almost invariable motion blur, particularly in the foreground. On my most recent trip through north-western Ethiopia, it was doubly painful. Not only was the landscape glorious, but the lighting was spectacular. It was variable and changing, we were on the road early and late as the light turned golden, and you really would have struggled to find more dramatic combinations of scenery and sunlight at times. I just wanted out of that vehicle and to be taking my sweet time framing up the shots I wanted to take.

Alas, there are only so many times you can ask the driver to stop and your colleagues to wait patiently in the car while you grab your snaps.

And the toilet-break excuse has a ceiling.

Sometimes you just make do with what you’ve got, however, and in this case, several of this little series of light-captures were snapped from the moving vehicle, the others grabbed during brief moments when we were stopped at the side of the road. Not my favourite option, and given the quality of the light, I wish I could have positioned myself better- there were some epic opportunities. But thems the breaks. Here’s what I got out of them though, and I quite like how some of them turned out. As much luck as anything. One of these days I hope to be out on the road myself here, able to stop whenever I feel like it. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these ones.

Photos:

1. The Golden Hour: Morning haze gathers in folds of the landscape lit by a morning sun just on the Amhara side of the border with Benishangul-Gumuz
Note: If you click on this image, I’ve included the link to a larger size of this image which is worth linking through to- the small frame doesn’t capture the landscape well.

2. Traveling Light: Shooting straight into the sun, hanging out of the side window of the Land Cruiser

3. Out of the Burning Dawn: A man walks along a road at sunrise not far from Chagni, in SW Amhara Region; shot through the car windshield into full sun.
Note: Same for this one- click through for larger image.

4. A tree, captured out of the side window of the truck, stands silhouetted against the overexposed sky, smoke and dust from the road swirling at its roots

5. Metalled road west of Chagni, Amhara Region, at dawn

6. A painted truck, caught with the rising sun ahead of it, through the windshield of our four-by-four

7. Truck headlights at dusk in Mandura Woreda, Benishangul-Gumuz

8. Smoke and clouds blend at dusk above a burning rubbish tip on the outskirts of Bahir Dar

In Passing

I’m not a fan of photographs from windows- any windows- as a rule, but when you’re in the field you spend so much time in four-by-fours (see Field Visit Bingo) that sometimes, you have no choice.

Shots from car windows tend to be bland and blurry. It’s a rule of thumb in landscape photography that you don’t take a landscape from where you are, but you move into the landscape to take the photo. Very rarely do the elements line up to give you the right composition- and when they do, they’re usually shooting by so fast that if you’re late by a tenth of a second you miss the moment, and if the shutter speed isn’t high enough, they blur right out. It’s rare to get a sharp image- although by shooting more forwards and less sideways, you reduce the movement of the landscape relative to yourself.

For me, the above image, snapped from a speeding Land Cruiser several hours out of Nairobi, isn’t perfect- but it somehow works for all its imperfections. There’s no hiding what it is- a photo taken hanging out of a car window: the location of the cyclists and the little corner of road make that clear. The foreground is blurred, and the cyclists moreso. The rear tyre of the second cyclist has been clipped by the edge of the frame, and there’s even a little lens-flare catching against the low sun.

But I love the elements. It was a gorgeous sunset, and the sky and terrain were both full of drama. The cyclists- one in a football shirt- are typical of the area and tell their own story about place. And I actually think their blur adds something to the image, a sense of moving towards a brighter horizon. For all its quirks, I was pleased with how this shot turned out.

Ponderings On The Road

The air-con is broken. This is rarely a good thing at the best of times, but when it’s so hot outside that opening the window doesn’t reduce the perspiration soaking into the back of my t-shirt, it starts to become something of a drag. We’re halfway into the ten-hour journey between Maradi and Niamey, and the day’s still getting hotter. Happily my iPad doesn’t seem to mind the heat. So far…

The trip is much as I remember it. Long, dull and unremarkable. But then I’m seeing it through the eyes of familiarity. Granted, a familiarity several years old. But I’m seeing only a couple of differences. One is the amount of green. This I recall from the very first times I did this journey, the same season in 2005. It was striking, because the fields seemed so lush for a country in the grip of it’s worst famine in a decade. But as colleagues pointed out to me, if the food is still growing in the fields it means it’s not on people’s plates.

Of course, the last time I did this journey it was the height of the dry season. I have vivid memories of stopping for a comfort break (‘checking the tyres’ as an Ivorian colleague euphemistically observed) along some desolate stretch of country far between villages. The air was so hot that inhaling it made the lungs burn. My skin sang under what felt like pressure coming from the sun, and I got little shivers up and down my back. Crickets whined a persecuted song, but otherwise the landscape was silent. In the distance, across brown scrubland near a line of low flat-topped hills, a pair of dust-devils, small brown tornadoes, twisted in a macabre dance. It was the sort of scene to crush a traveller’s weary soul.

Thank God for the rains.

The other difference now is the road. I noted immediately in 2005 how good the highway between Niamey and Maradi was at the time, certainly compared to other Sahelian roads I had driven. I can no longer make the same claim. While much of it is still in good nick, there’s a good two hours of driving where the blacktop has deteriorated into a potholed mess barely better- and in some cases far worse- than a dirt road. I have had a number of colleagues tell me that life here for the population of the world’s poorest country has gotten harder over the last half-decade.

Otherwise the journey is remarkably similar. It is an alternating pastiche of farmland with antenna-high millet, thicket-spotted scrubland running to a low, flat horizon, and run-down villages replete with square mud-brick buildings and ricketty wooden roadside stalls. The few towns are dusty but buzzing with energy. Gigantic overladen trucks jam the streets. Vendors hawk loaves of sugary yellow bread, cheap plastic wares imported from Nigeria, and chocolate wafers that taste like cardboard. Where we stop for lunch at a stall in Dogon-Doutchi we chow down on a plate of rice and sauce, liberally sprinkled with a local spice mix that is both tangy and delicious. It costs a buck fifty a head. Standing out on the street a few minutes later waiting for the car to come back for us, a skinny old man shuffles past us. His trousers are held around the middle of his thighs, he’s covering his genitals with a school exercise book, and nobody pays him any attention as his bony, dusty buttocks recede down the street. It’s a tragic indifference to poverty and neglect in a country where most people live on less than two dollars a day.

But now Ravi, our driver, is tootling along at 120kph, and if you see this post online it means we haven’t ended up as a metallic confetti at the side of the road, which some do as evidenced by twisted vehicular remains littered along the highway. George is dozing in the front seat, Cam has his head in the open window catching the breeze on his face like some satisfied pooch, and Mike is next to me in the short-straw seat in the middle, listening to an mp3 player (I’m trying to talk him into getting an iPad; which I do with most people). And we’re all looking forward to getting to our hotel rooms in Niamey, having a cool shower, and heading out for some Bieres Niger and good local cuisine.

Uncomfortable travel is a part of any aid worker’s job description- and any foreign correspondent’s too. It is, of course, by far the most dangerous part of the job we do- even though it gets far less press than abductions and hijackings. The combination of poorly maintained vehicles, bad drivers, meandering donkeys, long distances and deteriorating roads make traffic accidents among the leading causes of death for adults across the developing world- and that includes foreigners silly enough to take to the roads as well.

I actually quite enjoy road travel as a rule. I prefer it if I’m the one driving, and if I’ve got the time to stop, explore, take photos and let the roads lead me. However even on work trips, it makes for a great way to see the country up-close, to get a feel for landscape and people, and show how things hang together.

In my early twenties I wrote a list of things I wanted to accomplish or expeience. It was (unsurprisingly) quite long, but I recall that one of the things on the list was ‘to have a job where in order to commute I need a four-wheel-drive’. I’ve certainly ticked that one off the list. Just in the last four days I reckon I’ve spent an easy 24 hours in Land Cruisers getting to remote field locations, mostly on sandy tracks through the scrubland and getting nicely knocked around in the process.

The novelty wore off a long time ago, but it still beats the heck out of the Monash freeway at rush hour.

(Actually, root canal work beats the Monash at rush hour, but that’s the subject of another post…)

So our wing-mirror slips down the length of another overflowing truck trundling the other way up the narrow highway, and the verdant landscape glides past in a blur of contrast with rich red soil. Heat haze makes the horizon white and featureless, like a washed-out photograph. The car stinks of dust and diesel fumes, and the clothes I’m wearing now will need to be washed before I put them back on, even though they’re fresh from this morning. The sun slanting through the passenger window washes out my iPad screen, but not enough to halt my typing. It burns my skin and makes my eyes squint. Mumford & Sons are singing ‘Awake My Soul’ in my ears as we pass some dead animal hidden in the bush, and the stench fills the vehicle.

They’re the moments both mundane and exotic that form the patchwork of memories that are often all that we, sojourners, get to carry away with us when we leave these places through which we pass so temporarily and so frequently. On the one hand, they tend to fade, after so many similar journeys, into an obscurity that is hard to distinguish one from another. On the other, they sit at such sharp contrast from the routines of our daily lives that they become in their own way enough of an experience to justify coming here; just to live the difference.

Both a privilege and a pergatory.

Yet another example of the dichotomy that is the aid worker’s existence.

Three more hours till Niamey…

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Niamey-Maradi Road near Dogon-Doutchi

The Tasmania Tour, Gate 4: Rural Wanderings

One of my favourite things about road trips is not so much the destination (although these can be great fun), but the journey.  And I’m not just talking about the process (although I do love that too- driving new terrain is a favourite past-time, and if the company is good (and here it was spectacular) then the whole thing is a happy medley).  I’m talking about the opportunity just to stop willy-nilly and enjoy whatever surprises the landscape has to offer.

Given that we drive a fairly large portion of Tasmania in our six-day circuit, these little surprises were a regular feature of the journey.  I’ve already showcased one such little surprise, the church in the field, in Buckland.  Here’s a smattering more.

Those who know my photography by now have worked out that I’m an absolute sucker for road shots.  Love ‘em.  The way they lead the eye, teasingly, across a landscape, or into a vanishing point, giving both a visual sense of motion, and a soulful sense of travelling.  They’re reminiscent as subjects of the very feeling they evoke- that of moving from one place to another.  And, of course, they’re the archetypal road-trip image.  Can’t go wrong.

I snapped the top image of a road snaking down through gentle country somewhere an hour or two north of Hobart, coming down off the Great Western Tiers.  The contrast between bright fields and somewhat patchy sky add drama to the view, and the road guides the viewer through the scene.

In a similar vein, on our second day we found ourselves south of Swansea on the way up the east coast, beneath a dark and brooding sky which threatened rain at every turn.  The road was largely empty of traffic and the mood was quite desolate in its own way.  Tassie was drier than either of us were expecting, and the fields were full of yellow-white grass which was a lovely counterpoint to the dark clouds.  I took a little detour into a field we were passing (which required an involved negotiation of a pair of barbed wire fences at the bottom of a little ditch- quite the delicate operation with an expensive DSLR camera and associated lenses…) to frame up this shot of a gum tree in a field, accompanied by a cattle track.  The otherwise-dull light was made more interesting by upping the contrast and saturation for a somewhat artificial but (in my humble opinion) engaging image.  This next image was snapped feet away in a different direction, and turned into a high-contrast black-and-white photo to emphasize the mood of the gusty wind in the hay.

Sometimes the light just works out, even when you’re not in any particular location, and this can make the simplest of subjects turn quite dramatic.  Part way through an afternoon sprint across the north of the island, the blue sky was dripping with saturated colour behind my polarizing filter, transforming quite the ordinary tree in the ordinary field at the roadside into a set of photographs worth indulging in:

Given my exhortation of road photography above, the next two images need no justification, save to point out that they were taken about forty-five minutes outside Launceston in some beautiful countryside, again beneath that un-ignorably blue sky.  The clouds were a great balance to break up the texture above.

Meanwhile, this next landscape was taken at near-full zoom standing in almost exactly the same spot as the above two photos (perhaps a little off to one side to avoid passing trucks)- but shot at right-angles out towards the line of hills in the middle distance.  The landscape was one I could have explored for far longer had I the time.

And finally, on the same afternoon but a couple of hours and several hundred k’s further on, these two shots of Mt. Roland were begging to be taken.  In the first shot in particular I loved the faint rows of cut grass leading the eye up to the mountain.  The blue sky against the green fields and that textured rock made this a shot I was really chuffed with.

All up, lots of great touring to be had in Tasmania.  Destinations aside, I’m pretty sure I could go back and just drive around taking photos of random aspects.  That’s the sort of place Tasmania is.  We basically spent six days looking out of the car window going- ‘oh wow, isn’t that beautiful!’  You may have noticed, but this is the nth post I’ve put up now exhorting you to go visit.  Taken the hint yet?  Get there!

Up soon: Wineglass Bay

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The Road Ahead

Photo Notes: Shot taken paying close attention to potential traffic on a quiet stretch of highway half an hour east of Launceston, Tasmania.  Wide-angle (24mm at full-frame) with polarizer taken at partial crouch angled down with vanishing-point at centre of frame.  Slightly underexposed (EV -2/3) and processed for high contrast/saturation, increased vignetting and high blacks.  I was looking for a road like this one all trip long and only found a couple of places where the road straightened up and there was a nice high vantage (in this point a slight rise in the landscape) that gave a good perspective to create the sense of vanishing, depth and movement.

Nigerien Nostalgia- Road Rules

The fourth entry in a series of messages I wrote while living and working in West Africa’s Niger in 2005/6.

Road Rules

Back in Niamey, and life has plateaued in something resembling normality. Six weeks ago, the Nigerien bureaucracy finally relented and gave me a provisional driver’s license (a month after submitting my original and at the start of a two-month wait for a proper license).

Click here to keep reading…

One for the Roads

I like roads.

I like roads for lots of reasons. Usually, they’re going somewhere, so if I’m on them, that means I am too. I particularly like roads across remote areas, because that means I’m in a remote area. They also look great. And in nice wild areas, they’re often really straight, too, which makes them look great as part of a landscape.

These are a few I’ve seen in the last few years, at various times.

The one at top was one of the first of this sort of shot I attempted. It was too good not to try, really. It’s taken in Flinders country, a few hours north of Port Augusta on the way up towards the Oodnadatta Track in the South Australian Outback. The next one is also from SA, but a different stretch of road very close to Port Augusta, set in attractive farmland near the Remarkables, a small range of picturesque hills not to be mistaken for the mountain range by the same name in New Zealand.

This shot is from Route 66 in California- I like the low wide perspective.

The one below is from Death Valley National Park. It’s an awesome stretch of black-top not far from Stovepipe Wells and the Mesquite Dunes- a fantastic strip to cruise if ever there was one.

This one is also from Death Valley- and from the heart of the valley, too, near the salt flats and one of the world’s lowest points above-ground below sea-level (if that makes any sense). It was also quite warm.

And this one is also Death Valley- on the way in to the park from the south. I like how the road just keeps going and going into the landscape.

I love this shot (which you may have seen before) of the North Coast Road in Madang Province, northern Papua New Guinea. The North Coast Road was one of only two sealed roads in Madang. From Madang you could head south and east, where the roads split, one towards Morobe Province and Lae, and the other towards Eastern Highlands Province and Goroka. Or you could head north, where the North Coast Road ran along the coastline for three hours, linking small villages until it hit the town of Bogia, at it’s far end. From there, it deteriorated into an unsealed road, and grew progressively rougher and rougher until it hit the swampy terrain around the Ramu River, and stopped altogether. From there, it was canoes only. There were no interior roads save for some violently rough four-wheel-drive tracks running like fluke-mines straight into the hills. Madang remains one of the poorest and least accessible parts of what is predominately a poor and inaccessible island. The North Coast Road is, however, a stunning drive, and was one of the highlights of working in Madang, with alternating views of spectacular tropical coastline, lush green hills, deep overhanging forest, and the idyllic little gardens and thatched housing of small hamlets along the way. (Note: Most of the way, the road was not this smooth!)

These two are a little more recent and both taken from Western Australia. The first is a highway between the Stirling Ranges and the Porongorups which I snapped one sleeping Sunday morning on an early photo-drive on my way to find a windmill. The second shows a sealed road running through the Stirling Ranges themselves, a great drive if ever you get the chance, with striking views of the mountains and a real sense of open, untouched wilderness.

No more road-trips on the horizon for me just yet, but I’m always on the lookout for an attractive road shot while cruising around, so I’ll hopefully have some more for my portfolio before too long.