travel

Where do I need to be to take new images?

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Now the UK has started to ease on the latest lockdown, and we can start venturing out a little further, where do we go and what do we do?

I have had so many conversations with people, where they have said that they need to travel again, see new places and get some fresh air. For sure this is important, and something that I’m also very much looking forward to doing. Albeit within the UK for the foreseeable year but, it will be great to rediscover my own country. This got me thinking; what am I going to photograph when I get to these new locations?

The answer is, I really don’t know and that ok, it’s all part of the excitement for me. It’s the unknowing of what’s around the corner. I have a bag of tricks, and by that, I mean that I have been building my way of seeing locations. I have taken the time during lockdown to photograph one place constantly. That’s not without its challenges and like physical training, you become conditioned to the exercise. My exercise is to make new images from very little and try not to repeat myself. Indeed, this is hard and I’m far from perfect but that’s why we exercise. I keep working at it and finding new ways of approaching a problem. Sometimes when I’m lucky, I figure a new frame out.

My goal is to be able to take a photo anything and of anywhere but still in my own voice. What I must try and do, and this is the difficult part – finding the things that interest me. It sounds so simple but when we start traveling to new places everything becomes overwhelmingly interesting. The trick for me will be to start zeroing in on that thing that attracts me. That can be anything at all, but once I have found a little something, then I need to make a frame that speaks in my voice.  

I really don’t know what is going to happen but ill take my camera and capture what makes sense to me. Hopefully, this will lead to something creative.

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Dubrovnik - Croatia

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Street photography and travel complement each other, it gives me the chance to experience a whole new place and react to it in my own way. I’m not saying that to produce ‘street photography’ you need to travel, in fact producing images around your own environment I believe speaks more about your experience than traveling to a new place to speak from your own voice. On the other hand it’s always nice to get away and experience new things plus immerse yourself into a new situation and react to it with a creative process. And let’s not forget that if I travel to somewhere as beautiful as Croatia I’m defiantly going to react to it photographically.

I didn’t know what to expect from Dubrovnik other than a few people that had previously visited the region had expressed just how beautiful that they had found the city. I don’t tend to do too much research on a place like this before visiting as I don’t want to taint my view (photographically speaking) or take influence from what other photographers have produced, as then I start looking at a place from their perspective instead of my own. So having arrived on the shores of Dubrovnik I was first struck by the intensity of the light and then by the beauty of the historic walled old town that decorated the cliffs above the blue shimmering Mediterranean waters.

As we started exploring Dubrovnik I was drawn towards the historic charm of the place and much of the region had retained its roots without subsiding into today’s commercialism. I very much started to see the art of the city and allowed myself to become absorbed by the light has it ornamented the people and stone.