Alexander Nevsky in Snow

The Alexander Nevsky Memorial Cathedral Church in Sofia has been a good seller for me.

It’s one of the most famous buildings in the Balkans and it’s best to try to get a slightly different image.

Maybe that’s why I’ve found that snow scenes have done well.

I’m in the happy position that I live within easy walking distance of this fine building and so I can photograph it in all seasons by day and by night, in outline and in detail.

As Stock Photography is partly a numbers game it means I can easily build up a large set of different images of this great church.

The general economic climate and the various changes in the stock photo industry mean that I’m going to write a slightly different blog than I meant to, but I still think that I’m on theme.

It’s for you to judge.

Just as I was planning more chat about the business of stock photography, and how to have a web presence, it turns out that for many individuals and companies it’s actually the end of the business of stock photography and the end of their web presence.

Those of you who have followed my blog for some time will have seen that the link I used to have to Photoshelter has gone because Photoshelter, at least as a stock photo agency, is no more.

I received the news the other day from Alamy, as an Alamy contributor, that Alamy are reducing the photographer’s percentage.

The reason they give is to generate more money to break into the United States market.

And if we look at the USA market, what is happening?

Corbis is still there. Luckily, it seems to have great financial backing but as far as I know, is not exactly a money spinner.

Getty, the big player - its business model so much criticized by Photoshelter, has taken over Jupiter images for a mere $96 m dollars.

Now $96 m. dollars may not be small change to you and me but it seems that somewhere there’s money to be made in the stock photo business.

And only yesterday Digital Railroad posted on their site:

“October 28, 2008

To our valued Members and Partners:

We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down.

On October 15th we reported that the company had reduced its staff and was aggressively pursuing additional financing and/or a strategic partner. Unfortunately, those efforts were unsuccessful. Therefore Digital Railroad has been forced to close all operations.

Digital Railroad has attracted a loyal set of customers and partners, and we regret this unfortunate outcome. Without sufficient long-term financial support, the business had become unsustainable.

Thank you for allowing us to serve the photographic community these past few years.”

So what’s to be done?

Well I have some ideas and just for the moment I’m going to continue with how to build a web presence which might be even more important in these troubled times.

Interestingly enough I recently revisited Dan Heller’s site and found some interesting comments there which reinforce the point I made about photographers and web designers:

“If you get beyond your own technical skills or interests, then you might want to outsource the job to a web designer. But buyer beware: this path comes with some risks”

I suggest you read his comments here

Now I’m not going to suggest to everyone that you do what Dan did and learn everything yourself  but I do still want to emphasize that however much you want to work with an expert professional like a web-designer, it’s still a good idea to have some idea of how to do things, if only to ask the right questions.

You’ll see that this Blog is hosted on Wordpress.

It’s taken me a long time and lot of thinking to make this decision, and things are changing all the time.

I’ll comment on my reasons for choosing a blogging platform and some other online matters in my next post.

By the way, so far my images have been straightforward stock photos but I do try to explore other outlets for sales and so for the next few blogs I’m going to showcase some of my photos available for sale on ImageKind

Daisy - Collectable Bisque Head Doll

Stock photos are often all too depressingly “samey” - you know, cardboard cutouts of business people and happy families.

So I’m always pleased when I get success with something a bit different.

This photo of “Daisy” has been successful both as an editorial and stock photo.

Exactly why I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s because the image is intrinsically attractive.

Perhaps because the object is quite valuable.

Perhaps because the picture is exclusive.

One peculiar aspect of this and others that come from the family collection is that I have to, in principle, make up a property release for myself.

And so back to the current theme of creating your own web presence.

I’ve found myself a bit too busy to blog lately.

After all, we live in very stirring times and I decided like many other people and many photographers of course to take stock of some of the ways that I live my life and look after business.

Partly that has been forced on me like it has many other people because there really isn’t much business around.

Now photographers suffer from what is called the credit crunch, just like everybody else so I was very interested to read a report via the EPUK news letter from Black Star Rising Contributer, photographer Sean Casey, which gives some tips for photographers to deal with the downturn in business.

I think this does relate to my topic because I have been looking at how to have a web presence.

I suppose anybody reading the blog can say, “Ah. well there’s a very easy way of doing this and that is to pay an expert.”

However as you can see from Sean’s post there is a case, however peculiar and desperate it might be for what you might call “in sourcing” that is doing it yourself.

Now, I have long had a suspicion about websites which are built for photographers who know nothing about web design by web designers.

This is in my opinion, what often happens:

A very ignorant person, in this case a photographer asks an expert - here a web designer - for help.

Because the photographer is ignorant he or she can’t really specify what they want and don’t know exactly how to ask for what they want.

So, they leave it to the web designer.

Web designers often like to show how good they are at web design.

In my opinion, the results are often dreadful - very complicated long, flash based intros, slow down loading times and a need for extremely fast connections.

So I really do think that there is a case, even if you do not intend to build your own website or have your own web presence designed by yourself in some way, to at least look at some of the basics.

So here I think we go to how you can get some presence on the web for free but where some degree of skill is needed.

For this in my opinion one of the traditional ways now is to look for a free website host provider.

There are lots of around, almost all of them have some advertising.

The only place for advertising on your own site is advertising things that you want to advertise and talk about.

Clearly nothing could be worse for you than to have a site with your photographs and adverts for fake watches or some other product that had nothing to do with photography.

I think that one of the reasons for having a website on a free Host is that you can use it to experiment.

It means that you can learn to use a bit of HTML.

You can work out how things would look and at the very least would then be able to brief your web designer better.

There’s one other thing, I think I should say at this juncture, and that is that there are a host of new products appearing which are free and are very interesting.

I haven’t tried them and the reason for this is that I have finally made up my mind to create a blog based site.

This has good and bad points.

And it means you’re not likely to have one of those flashy sites but more of that later.

In my next post I’ll briefly discuss two free resources that I have found helpful.

Wastebin in Oman

Some parts of the world are considered far flung or “exotic” and this is emphasised by tour companies and others with an interest.

I think one of the greatest mistakes a photographer can make is to buy into this concept.

The fact is that everywhere you go, in most cases, people are going about their business as usual and everyday things are going on - these are the facts of enduring interest.

I think Auden’s Poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts”, captures this pretty well.

…even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

My photo of a wastebin in Oman shows something completely ordinary in the Sultanate of Oman.

Just goes to show that you never know what will sell.

From the photographic point of view I wanted to emphasise the strong primary colour contrast and the simple shapes.

One particular point about Alamy is that photographers do their own editing so it’s possible to try photos that might not be obvious sellers.

So - back to subject of this blog post:

Getting your Photos on the Web - Free and Easy Ways

Ok then, let’s look at how to get a presence on the Internet - on the World Wide Web today.

There’s quite a lot to talk about and it’s changing all the time.

After all, I was photographer long before 1989 when the English scientist Tim Berners, first brought the World Wide Web to us.

Today about 1.5 billion people worldwide are using it so there’s been a massive explosion.

And this explosion has gone together with the technology of the digital camera, digital devices and the desktop computer.

Now, when I started using the web there were, basically, two options:

One was to design a website using tools like Dreamweaver or look around for some free editors or you could pay somebody to do it for you.

Those options are still with us.

But it’s worthwhile, I think, having a look at some of the other ways that, as a photographer, you can have a presence on the Internet and I’m going to break this down into several ways of looking at it.

First of all I want to look at ways which are free and need either no skill or very little skill indeed.

That’s because one of the great problems in my experience for a lot of photographers, is that they are great photographers. They’ve had a good background in film photography, but the transition to the digital world, especially when it comes to the questions of computing, web design, and photo editing and so on is is quite difficult.

So let’s have a look at some of the free and no skill ways of having a presence on the Internet.

Now, my approach is not to review the whole thing, because I don’t have that kind of knowledge.

I’m just going to go through some of the applications and types of applications that I personally use.

First of all, one of the ways of getting onto the Internet is by photo sharing.

Photo Sharing

You can do this personally, or you can do this on a more commercial basis, but photo sharing is very popular today.

And there are many sites which will host your photos to share with others.

Perhaps the largest, the most famous and one where I do have an account is Flikr.

• Flikr (http://www.flickr.com/)

which is owned by Yahoo.

Now, lots of people take advantage of these sites, and there is indeed some crossover commercial interest with agencies like Getty getting interested in the photos that appear on Flickr.

However, in my experience you need to be a bit careful - there are some pitfalls.

One is that they are almost always funded by advertising.

The advertisements that get on these sites are not under your control. You may not like them.

Another concerns the terms and conditions.

Read these very carefully. You may find that you have signed away some of the rights to your photos.

So I would be very careful when looking at photo sharing sites.

Another type of photo sharing is aimed more at users of certain camera users or particular types of equipment.

Now I’m a Canon user, and when I bought a Canon compact I found it gave me access to the Canon Image Gateway.

This is some web space provided by Canon, where I can put up photo albums and share them with who I like - public or private.

Now, I think many other camera makers and some other companies have this kind of facility.

Photo Forums

Another way that you can put your photos up is by joining photo forums.

There are literally hundreds of these around.

Some are based on camera makes like Canon or Nikon, some are even based on things which are nothing inherently to do with photography at all like, for example, keeping fish in aquariums, but they have a photo forum section for specialist photographers.

If you go to these photo forums, you may very well find lots of really great photographers who you can share advice and interest with

My particular favourite in this category is a site called

• Passion For Pixels. (http://www.passionforpixels.com/)

One reason is that it’s Australian and that takes me to the other side of the world.

Another reason is that you are not allowed to post a photo unless you give a review or a comment on another photo first and this means that everybody has to have something to say.

There are also some more what you might call magazine based sites like:

• Think Camera (http://www.thinkcamera.com/)

or

• ePHOTOzine (http://www.ephotozine.com/)

which have reviews and tutorials as well.

• PopPhoto (http://forums.popphoto.com/)

Is a forum run by the well known American photo magazine.

Blogging

If you’re at all interested in the Internet, you’ll know that there’s been an explosion in what is known as blogging.

This is a diary approach to using the Internet where the diarist or “blogger” gives an account of what they’re doing every now and then. Maybe daily, weekly or monthly.

As you’re reading this you’re reading my blog,

I decided some time time ago to turn my site into a blog to make it more interactive.

Now far as free blogs are concerned, the one that I have experience of is:

• Wordpress (http://wordpress.com/)

WordPress comes in two flavours, and the free one hosted by Wordpress has got many many advantages for photographers.

I’ll say, right from the start, that the way that Wordpress deals with posting photographs is not in my opinion quite as good as it might be but it doesn’t take a great deal of skill to get round this.

The advantage of the free system is that Wordpress hosts your blog and so they will update it and look after it for you.

I consider this a very good idea if you want to get a presence on the web.

Quite a lot of photographers also use what are known as

Web2/Social Networking Sites

These are not created primarily for photographers .

Still, sites like:

• Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/)

and

• MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)

for example, do have procedures for adding links to your websites and your blogs and for posting photographs.

(A word of warning: Be very careful what personal information you put on these sites! Do not give your credit card details for example)

So, I would suggest that if you want to have a web presence you might consider some of these free ways in which you can put your photos up on the web.

Some other ways are free but require some skill - so I’ll leave those for another time.

Dandelion Clock

Some time ago I promised to come back to what you might call the non photographic aspects of photography - particularly Stock Photography.

Perhaps looking at some of the wider issue such as a workflow involving computers and computer programmes, storage and websites, Stock Agencies and so on.

As this is a photo site I decided when writing this sort of post that a good idea might be to start with a picture of a successful Stock Photo and then go on to the post theme.

This post starts with a photo of a Dandelion Clock.

I’ve taken hundreds of dandelion photos over the years but this one shows the influence of digital imaging techniques.

It’s a studio shot taken using electronic flash against a black velvet background.

I used my sensor cleaning blower to puff a little and loosen a couple of spores as I took the picture.

Later I made several layers and created a pattern based on repeating the individual spores.

No point in pretending that this is a straight shot - nevertheless the final image matched very closely the image in my mind’s eye.

And so to the “business” side of Stock Photography.

This was originally inspired by a comment from a reader called Mary - I responded to her personally but it seems to me that her query opens up a number of interesting avenues that I have had to encounter over the years.

My husband is interested in starting his own website for his photos. Because there are so many sites available, how did you choose yours? Did you find others just as good or are you satisfied with this one?

One of the main problems is the ever changing nature of photographic practice in a digital age.

I think it’s fair to say that this comment is pretty vague - the expression “sites available” is a bit confusing, perhaps it’s webhosts.

Anyway, I thought it was worth looking into a bit more.

First of all, I think it’s certainly helpful for a photographer to have web presence but exactly what sort needs a bit of thinking about.

If you want to have a presence of your own, you’re going to need to host it somewhere.

So, next time let’s have a look at some hosting options

Oops! I thought I’d arranged for this post to go out in the middle of my holiday! It didn’t. Still, don’t worry, Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

In my last post I emphasized how important it is that people in a stock photograph should be either:

Not be recognizable
or
Have signed a model release.

The reason, as I said, is that photographs with recognizable people in them cannot be used for commercial purposes such as advertising.

In my photo “a stroll through the park” we removed the two men strolling by using a rub out and replace technique.

Now we are still left with the man sitting on the bench, It’s clear from the blow up that he is recognizable.

We have a number of options:

We can crop the picture to exclude the recognizable figure - this will not work in every case and will always alter the composition and reduce the picture area.

We can use copy and clone techniques to eliminate the figure altogether - this needs some skill and will, of course, alter the composition and content of the picture.

We can replace the recognizable figure with information which will be acceptable from the legal/commercial point of view.

The key to this approach is to have a collection of faces and figures which can be used legally.

One source is pictures of friends, family and other model released pictures - we can shoot a whole variety of these especially for this purpose.

Another source is royalty free pictures with the appropriate rights. These are widely available and need not be large or high resolution.

For this image I have used a royalty free image obtained from the disc provided with Steve Caplin’s must read book “How to Cheat at Photoshop”.

The final, corrected image, depends on two procedures:

First - replace the original head with an appropriate model released/licenced head.

Next - as a finishing touch, select appropriate items of clothing and change important features such as shape or colour. Here I have selected the blue clothes and changed them to green.

The final image is no longer recognizable as the original figure, but the basic information and composition of the picture is preserved.

This is a post in haste as I’m off for a family holiday. See you when I’m back.

Anyway back to rubbing people out. We had two layers so let’s go and choose the upper layer.

We’re going to use a destructive method for this on the upper layer using the Eraser Tool.

Choose a soft round brush and rub out the people you don’t like! The result should be something like this.

Now we’ll go down and choose the background layer.

We’re going to make a selection here that will cover the same area and a bit more. There are several ways of doing this but for the moment let’s try the rectangular marquee.

and make a section covering the area we want to replace.

Then we can copy and paste this selection above the bottom layer so it looks like this:

Now we can go up and select the top layer again.

Our pasted selection will show through under the top layer but because we didn’t use a tripod it will clearly be misaligned and won’t match up properly:

so we’ll have to move the selection about a bit. For this we must choose our pasted selection and use the move tool to position it correctly.

If we carefully move the selection about we might get the correct result straight away like this. And then we’ll have successfully rubbed out the people we don’t like.

Exactly how easy this is depends on how accurately aligned the two original images were.

It really is better to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by digital imaging by thinking ahead and preparing in advance.

Of course we’re still left with the person sitting on the bench - but that’s a story for another time.

If I survive the wedding, I’ll be back soon.

Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing, China

This is just to show how I managed to wait long enough to get a clear view of the wall. But I had to crop it fairly tightly still.

OK, let’s get down to eliminating people we don’t like.

Let’s get back to a Stroll in the Park.

two variations of a digital photograph a “Stroll in the Park”

One of the great things about digital imaging is that there are so many new approaches to solving problems and if one doesn’t work you can try another.

As I said in my last post, you often can’t wait until there are no people in your picture. So here’s another approach:

Take a series of pictures which are basically the same except that the people have moved on.

(There’s a ‘right’ way of doing this which is to put the camera on a solid tripod, set manual exposure, and use a cable or remote release to trigger the shutter. This will ensure that all the main elements of your scene are accurately aligned.)

In this case I took the pictures handheld.

The idea is to replace elements from one picture with some from the other until you have the perfect composite.

This will need some computer manipulation and just to emphasize that any programme with layers will do I’m going to use my Photoshop Elements version 2.

First of all, I’ll have to open both the pictures.

When I’ve opened them I’ll want to see them both together on the screen and so I’ll choose the tile option.

Then I’ll choose the move icon so that I can copy one picture over the other.

If I drag the move tool with my mouse over the second picture while holding down the SHIFT key, the pictures should align perfectly on two separate layers.

The cursor changes to show I’ve copied the image and can release the SHIFT key.

Voila! I now have my two pictures on two separate layers.

Now I have the pictures in position and I’m ready to get on with recreating the single composite.

One way of doing this will be in the next post.

A Stroll in Boris Gardens, Sofia, Bulgaria

Is this a travel photograph?

I suppose it depends if you believe that a travel photograph can be taken, where you live, even more or less just across the road from where you live in your own backyard so to speak.

In other words, to take a travel photograph does the photographer have to travel? And does he or she have to travel any particular distance?

This is something I think worth thinking about because the stereotype of travel photography is where somebody visits some far-flung location and brings back pictures to their home turf.

Now, obviously lots of people live in these places and quite likely there are photographers living there too.

And if you go to any country - go to Greece - go to Italy - go to China anywhere you’ll find that the local photographers have been busy.

Many manuals on travel photography advise you to look at the local postcards so that you can see the standard views.

Really, that’s just a thought, but I’m not dealing with this photograph just as whether or not it’s a travel photograph but because it’s got people in it.

You can have a lot of views about people in pictures.

I suppose many of you have stood in front of some well known world site - I well remember many years ago standing in front of the Nine Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing in China while crowds and crowds of local Chinese stood in line to have their photographs taken.

Sometime they roped me in to photograph their groups.

And I was just hoping there might be just a moment when I could take a photograph with nobody in it.

As it happened I was successful and I was quite pleased about this because I wanted a photograph simply of the wall itself.

I also remember many many years ago when I was very young photographer, and I was a member of various photographic clubs and societies, and there was a lot of discussion there about how people brought scale to the picture.

How people in just the right position would make the picture

How the right kind of people for example, some old peasant walking down the track in Tuscany rather than somebody in jeans and a baseball cap would give the appropriate local colour.

I also read in the photo press about how successful photographers would take their family members around with red coats on so that they could ask them to pose discreetly in various parts of the picture.

All of this deals with what you might call the aesthetics and integrity of photography.

This blog is at least partly concerned with Stock Photography.

One of the great problems in Stock Photography is people.

It’s a simple problem.

The stock photo that is the most successful is the one that can be used in every possible circumstance. It can be used in both editorial contexts - that is in newspapers and magazines where it is considered reasonable and acceptable to have people in the picture going around their everyday business and they have no cause for complaint and in commercial contexts.

If, however, a photograph is used in a more commercial context and particularly in advertising, then you simply can’t have a photograph of a recognizable person unless that person has actually given their consent to be photographed and has a clear understanding of the particular rights of the photographs.

Let me give you an example.

I remember reading of a photographer who had not done this when he described how he took a picture of his friend, a young woman, and later on, it was published in a newspaper with an advertisement for birth control pills.

If I remember rightly this young woman was a devout Roman Catholic and she was very very unhappy about this and quite rightly so. Being a friend she didn’t sue!

So the rule is no people in photographs, unless they have signed a Model Release.

A Model Release is a legal document, where people clearly and explicitly say that they have agreed that the photograph can be used in certain contexts.

Quite often the contexts have to be specified quite clearly.

Now, it’s fairly obvious there are going to be some problems if you go in for people photography.

There are those, I suppose, who believe that if you take a picture of a mountain shepherd in Bulgaria. or a camel rider in Egypt, that is unlikely that they are going to either see their photographs used for publicity or that they are going to complain about it.

On the other hand, even if you could talk to them and get them to sign a form it might be very, very difficult unless the form were in a language they understood.

And this is where there’s only one or two people.

When there’s a whole bunch of people it’s clearly quite impossible to get a model release from all of them.

So one of the things that you sometimes have to do is to see how you can take a photograph with no people in it.

My photograph has I think three people in it.

Usually the rules of commercial photography are that the people should not be recognizable.

(Anybody who has seen the cult Antionini film, “Blow Up” with David Hemmings playing the fashion photographer will know that recognizing people in photographs taken in parks can be quite a tricky business.)

If we take the three people concerned in my picture, you might argue that the figure sitting on the bench on the left could not be recognized but I would not want to be on the receiving end of a legal argument on that.

The two men walking along the path in front of the trees are clearly recognizable.

Now the question is, how can we get rid of them?

There are whole range of choices and some of them are made possible only now that we have come to the age of digital imaging.

What are the options now?

Once again, I could wait.

The trouble with waiting is that while some people disappear from the viewfinder frame, other people soon appear and if your pictures takes in a very wide sweep, it’s really quite difficult to wait for a moment when there are no people there.

If you have somebody sitting on a bench, and you don’t want them to be in the picture, one of your choices is to wait until they move

This might be a very long time and meanwhile of course, the whole lighting situation might have changed.

If the people are walking along it seems to me that there are a number of options that you can take.

The most obvious way of dealing with people in a picture is to use various copying and cloning techniques to take them out.

This needs quite a high level of skill and if the people are fairly prominent in the picture it really isn’t easy to do this in a way that makes it absolutely undetectable.

So, I think that now that we have digital imaging there might be other ways of dealing with this problem.

Does digital imaging make photography too easy?

It’s certainly something to think about.

There are lots of photographers who have found making the switch from film to digital very difficult. And some of them just don’t like it.

And of course digital is still not the obvious choice for some types of photography.

There’s nothing new about this.

The influential Victorian photographer, Charles Dodgson, better know to many as Lewis Carrol, author of the famous Alice books, gave up photography in about 1880.

It’s not quite clear why but one reason seems to be that he had mastered the painstaking wet collodion process.

When the new dry developing process was developed he didn’t want to use it. Perhaps photography had become too easy. Anybody could do it.

We’re in a similar situation today. There is an explosion in photography and all sorts of people are taking photographs today using digital cameras who couldn’t, wouldn’t or just didn’t before.

From my point of view, I welcome this. I personally have had no trouble switching.

I think it’s worth thinking, What makes it different? What are the new opportunities created for us as photographers by the current technologies?

And, this take me back to the Sphinx

I’d like to concentrated on three points which are related

• Composition
• Size
• Cropping

Clearly, every time you crop an image to improve or change the composition you take away information from that image. Perhaps in the days when I used a medium format film camera this didn’t matter so much.

But once I made the switch to digital capture it was clear that I didn’t want to do much cropping because the image would get smaller and smaller and small images become pixalated and noisy.

And this is a time when you have to start thinking. Take as an example, the Sphinx.

There is a sort of riddle. I’ve finished with this picture in more or less the square format which I felt suited the subject matter. And to do this I had to crop.

And so I thought that while I was in Giza I would try some things that I wasn’t well prepared for.

Photographers who are well up in taking panoramas and stitching pictures will know that ideally you should have a firm tripod and a panoramic head to ensure that the nodal points of the lens are properly adjusted.

I wasn’t prepared like this so I thought I’d just have a go.

My shooting position was behind quite a high wall at a long distance from the Sphinx.

I was able to balance my camera on the wall. I was using my Canon 350D SLR - a camera with an 8.5 megapixel cropped sensor. Lens choice was my Canon 70-300 IS zoom - a lens which maintains quality at the telephoto end.

I took my pictures as usual - first of all on Programme, shifting the shutter speed when appropriate and then on Manual, carefully checking the histogram to make sure my highlights weren’t blown.

While I was doing this I decided to something else as I didn’t want to end up with small, cropped images.

I switched the camera into portrait format and zoomed in closer and took two images of the Sphinx side by side with some overlap. These are the pictures at the top of my post.

I was careful to use exactly the same manual settings for both.

Because I was a long way away I took the chance that this would have a very small effect in parallax terms.

When I got home I stitched the images manually and using various programmes - some from my local friends. Programmes such as Realviz Stitcher, Arcsoft Panorama Maker and Photoshop.

I found that just for these two images the Photoshop Merge facility did a great job.

So this was my experiment: I wanted to produce a picture which had:

• A square composition

• A high pixel count - ensuring good quality.

I think it worked out pretty well and for me there are some lessons to be learned and this is obviously a technique that can be refined with other static subjects - some more examples later.

The most important lesson is not to become too bogged down by technicalities. It’s the final picture that matters. So,

Have a go.

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?