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A dog resting in Luxor

This is another shot from my recent Egyptian trip.

Perhaps this is the real travel photo,

Of course looking at this photo. It doesn’t really give you any idea of place so does it qualify as a travel photo?

Is this dog a particular type of dog? I don’t know. Is there anything about the location that shows where the dog is?

As it happens I was walking through one of the many thousand year old temples near Luxor when I saw this dog walking behind me.

As it clambered on the stones there to have a rest I thought I would take a photograph – I even had time to change to my macro lens and the lighting was pleasant and defused.

Perhaps this dog was a stray dog or maybe it was attached in some way to the administrative staff of the Temple.

But nevertheless the point about it is, that it was taken in a particular location. It did live in a particular place. A place far from my own normal habitat.

So from my point of view, this is just as legitimate as a travel photograph as the photograph of the great Sphinx at Giza.

The problem is that it’s not immediately apparent to the viewer as a single shot that there is anything particular about this dog.

It is just conceivable, although I have no idea, that this is a type of dog found only in Egypt, but as I say I don’t know about that.

I believe that travel photography throws up many many dilemmas of this kind. It’s so easy just to shoot the obvious great sites.

Speaking of course from the purely commercial point of view, if you go to a location such as Egypt, where at least for a lot of the year, the lighting is fairly constant, and if your time is limited anyway, so you can’t choose much concerning what time of day you take photos or indeed in the night, you may very well find that the photographs you take are very similar to those taken by many other competent photographers.

An obvious question then is why should anybody buy your version rather than one of the others?

There are of course some equally obvious answers to this question.

Perhaps it’s the only picture of this particular view sold through your particular agency.

Or maybe there’s something about your photograph that makes it a little bit different.

Another point you can easily see is that the picture of the great Sphinx is a picture of something which has been there for thousands of years and will no doubt be there for thousands of years more.

The dog on the other hand had come to rest for a little while so it’s only for that relatively short time that that particular photograph will be available.

Anyway that’s one or two thoughts on travel photography and perhaps, just to wrap that up just for the moment, at some point I ought to have a look and see what makes what is from one point a very standard picture of the great Sphinx at Giza just a little bit different.

I give one other clue .

As I said on this blog, in the past I used to use medium format equipment based on the Bronica system. And perhaps because of that I have quite a hankering for the square format.

However, shooting square format on a digital SLR greatly reduces the pixel count. Or does it?

Great Sphinx at Giza in Egypt

I hadn’t planned to be away so long. Some delays are planned. I had planned, for example, to look again at the arrangements for my web presence.

This was actually suggested to me by a comment made earlier by Mary who was looking at such things as hosting and domains.

I’ve been on the web for several years now, and it seemed a good idea to me to look again and work out which of my websites I wanted to keep to and which I didn’t, and also of course I’ve changed my system of working from standalone websites to, what are known as content management system approaches.

Maybe later I’ll be looking at how the Internet and computing in general affect the life of a stock photographer.

Another problem I had was that just by accident, I actually deleted one of my databases.

How I did it. I don’t know, lots of us do it. Luckily I had a backup.

What I didn’t take into account was a raging tooth infection, which has kept my dentist occupied with my root canals for some time.

So coming back to the actual meat of the blog, I posted a picture which I think shows what you might call an iconic image.

Almost everybody knows the great Sphinx at Giza so the question is, if you are going to be a travel photographer, is this the kind of picture you should be taking or perhaps something quite different?

One of the great things, of course, about digital photography is that it doesn’t always have to be an either or matter.

I’ll give you an example. Many many years ago, I spent several months in Peru trying to take pictures of all the great sites there.

And I clambered around places like Machu Picchu with my Bronica, with two backs for shooting colour transparency film and black and white.

The main problem was that in Peru in general, and certainly in these isolated circumstances, I had hardly any film.

So when I got to Machu Picchu I think I had about two rolls of colour film and I was fairly certain that they would be very difficult to process in country.

Now this, of course, was a pity for me as it meant I had a very restricted ability to shoot my pictures.

Nowawadays things are quite different.

With a digital camera, you have the possibility of choosing and shooting hundreds of different types of picture and this means that often you can take both the iconic pictures, the pictures that everybody recognizes that you think are so great but which you soon find hundreds of other photographers have taken with similar images, or you can choose to take those pictures which capture the everyday life, and changing times of the people.

I personally find these more interesting.

Now as I’ve been asked a lot about travel photography and as travel photography takes into account a very very wide range of photographic skills, I’ve decided in this blog to devote a number of posts entirely to travel photography now and then.

And perhaps at some stage, and I can put all these posts together and make them into an e book. Let’s wait and see.

For the moment, good shooting and I’ll be there to show the other kind of picture.

Just one small point, although this picture is a fairly standard shot, there is something which is perhaps slightly different about it photographically.

See if you can think what.

I’ll give you a clue:

The mega pixel dimensions of this photo, before I reduced it for the web were 3362 x 3161.