 | |  |
|  |
A lot of my clients think that this photo-travel stuff is really great (some would say "cool", but they're a lot younger than I am). Many would like to duplicate the experiences, and I get a lot of questions about how to go about taking a nice photo-adventure, so I thought this would be a good place to get some of them answered.
Let's start with a very basic point. There are vacations and there are photo-trips, but there really aren't any photo-vacations. By that I mean that it's very difficult to balance the "having fun" aspects of travel with the technical requirements of photo-journalism. We've seen examples of this while viewing the polar bears of Churchill, where the professional photographer tours often sat for hours watching a single bear sleeping in the snow. If you want to have an exciting bear viewing, that's not going to cut it for sure. But if you want to get impeccable pictures of bears, you have to sit for hours and wait for just the right lighting and position. We saw similar scenes in Katmai, a national park in coastal Alaska.
The point is that you need to decide at the outset whether you're on vacation or on a photo-safari. It will have a big impact on how you answer the other questions that relate to creating your own adventure travel.
If you are a photo-bug looking for a bunch of professional opportunities, you'll need to take some preliminary steps to decide just where you want to go and when. Each location you might visit will have its own set of charms and challenges for every season of the year. In particular, one season or another, or even just different months, may be either unusually good (polar bears in Churchill in November) or unusually bad (polar bears in Churchill in December; there aren't any). For professionals, the value of a given time and place has to include an assessment of whether there's potential for a lot of good shots, and whether there are already a zillion such shots out there in somebody's stock files. This is particularly true where scenic shots are the goal, because the Grand Tetons or the Matterhorn don't change much from year to year. Animals can always give you a new and unexpected photo-op; mountains just kind of sit there.
Once you decide where you'd like to go and when, the pro will probably want to either join a group of professionals or set up something that's self-guided. Pro tours can be wonderful if you want the company of like-minded travelers who might be able to pass along a tip or two. If you want that unique picture, a pro tour gives you a dozen or more competitors to share in its uniqueness! On the other hand, self-guided tours will often be more expensive because you can't spread transportation and local guide costs across multiple travelers.
I do not recommend joining a general adventure trip with a pure photo mission in mind. Not only are you probably not going to get the shots you'd like, because getting shots isn't the primary objective of the trip, your attempts to do it will cause a revolt among your fellow travelers and possibly some downright unpleasant comments. Certainly your circle of future companions will shrink considerably. We've traveled with people who had a complete focus on their own photography; we don't travel with them any more.
Our own approach is to forget the pro stuff completely and have an adventure vacation. We don't plan photo-trips, we plan fun trips that we'll then document with photographs to the extent that we can do that without losing out on the fun. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't go out of our way to get a great shot, it means that we'll balance the effort of getting that perfect shot with the need to have an overall positive experience in the spot we've chosen. It also means that we expect that most of our companions aren't on a photo mission and we'll respect their interests by not trying to co-opt the agenda for the trip (well, maybe co-opt it only a little).
One good adventure/photo combination is the small-ship cruise. Cruise West (www.cruisewest.com) has a flotilla of cruise ships that hold less than about 100 passengers. The small size of the ships makes for a completely different kind of cruise experience, where you not only get to know your fellow travelers, you may actually want to know them! No danger of getting trampled to death at a meal seating, either. The small ships go deep into places you'd never get a traditional cruise liner, including coves and rivers in Alaska, Canada's coastline, the Columbia River, Baja, and Central America. On these trips, you'll see plenty of scenery and wildlife, and you'll also have a good chance to take pictures.
For dry-land travel, we've found that booking an adventure trip through an established travel organization like Natural Habitat Adventures (www.nathab.com) is the perfect solution. The NHA trips are well organized, guided by professionals, and set small group sizes so that you don't get trampled in the rush. Many of the guides are themselves photographers, so they'll be sympathetic with the needs of someone who wants to get a lot of shots but also wants to smell the local roses. In nearly all the cases, the groups will be made up of fun people with varied interests, and it's virtually certain that there will be other photo-junkies among the group. You hang out with the people you share interests with, so you can find others who want pictures and pal around with them. It may be possible to split groups up between the photo-types and the others, or to arrange after-hours photo stuff for those interested.
But while booking an adventure trip through an outfit like Cruise West or NHA will go a long way toward assuring a favorable experience, there's still the issue of picking just what trip you want to take. Here are some of the things to consider:
- What are your objectives? Do you want to see wildlife? If so, what kind? If you want scenery, what season and weather are you looking for? As silly as it sounds, there are people who think that taking a trip to see the rare spirit bear (an albino black bear of the British Columbia coast) is like taking a trip to see Mt. Rushmore; you arrive and you see what you came to see, grab a couple of shots, and go home. Wildlife trips aren't like that, and so if you want to guarantee that you'll see animals, go on a trip whose objective is to show you animals that are common enough to make sightings likely. Polar bears in Churchill in late October and early November is almost a slam dunk, and seals or otters on an Alaska cruise are likewise; spirit bears are another matter. Most travel disappointments begin with unrealistic expectations.
- Are you in reasonably good shape? Most wildlife and adventure tour companies will provide you some guidance on what to expect in terms of physical requirements, but it's possible that some might tend to underplay the potential difficulties, and also possible that having physical limitations will prevent you from seeing some of the things you'd booked the trip to see. It's best to be very specific in your questions of the tour group regarding just how much physical activity will be involved and what might be missed by those who can't scale cliffs or ford rivers. Cruises, which tend to cater to an older crowd, will probably work better for those with physical limits, but even cruises will often involve excursions that everyone won't be able to handle.
- Do you have the right personal clothing and gear? Winter in the Arctic or summer in the Africa are awesome, and there's probably a shortage of good pictures from those particular combinations of place and time, but the average traveler is probably not prepared for either extreme heat or cold. We hit -65F with wind chill in Churchill and 118F in Africa. They require some planning for dress. If you don't want to buy a lot of gear that you may not use until you've gained so much weight the stuff won't fit, think about going to places where conditions fit your existing wardrobe and equipage.
- Do you have the right camera gear? Take a nice four-thousand-dollar digital outfit on a white-water rafting trip and watch it turn into junk. Even a dry bag may not help. Heat, cold, wet, and a bunch of other conditions will impact your ability to take pictures or protect your results (in digital or film form). While I shudder to think of scanning film again, if I wanted to white-water raft, I'd take my Nikonos, an underwater camera that's pretty darn rugged, instead of my D2X.
- Can you commit to the scheduled time? Unlike hotel bookings, where 24-hour cancellation is the rule, most adventure tours will start holding at least part of your deposit if you cancel later than about 90 days prior to the trip. Many really good trips have to be booked six to twelve months in advance to get the prime slots, and some require even longer. We weren't able to get our first choice dates for our Katmai Coast bear adventure even booking a year ahead.
If you do a couple of adventure trips, you'll probably begin to zero in on the experiences that you really like, which means you have a better chance of making the right choices on later bookings. We found, for example, that we like cold-weather locations far more than warm-weather ones. Humans don't like the cold, and cold climate sites are usually under-populated and under-developed. There's a wildness to them that's hard to duplicate in other warmer-weather locations, and adventure travel when soccer moms are driving by in their mini-vans just doesn't seem very adventurous.
So how do you go about making your choice? Start by going over the websites of the tour companies you like, preferably ones that someone has recommended. If you see things you like on their websites, order brochures or (if they offer it) videotapes of some of the trips. If you haven't used the company before, try to get the names of some earlier travelers that you can talk with about the trip and the company. If you're a repeat customer, try to stay with one sales rep so you can build a rapport with them, and count on them for good advice.
Look over the trips and try to pick out three or four that you think you'd be willing to do. For each, ask the following questions:
- What's the real attraction of this trip? Why do I like it?
- What's the risk that the thing that attracted me to the trip won't pan out (remember the spirit bear)? Given the risk, and given whatever secondary values there might be to the trip, is the risk excessive?
- Are there gear issues, activity issues, weather issues, or health issues that might impact my ability to enjoy this trip?
- Will I be more out-of-touch with family or work than I'm comfortable with?
- Is the cost of the trip bearable?
You can rate all your choices based on these criteria, and then use the results to make a final choice.
Once you've decided on what trip to take, find out how far in advance you'll have to book it. We always put a deposit down to secure a date as soon as we know we want to take the trip; it's easy to shift the deposit to another date or even get a refund if you work well in advance. Putting the booking off may cost you a good time slot, or even an opportunity to take the trip. Many of the adventure tours can handle only a small group. Our Katmai trip took only six people and repeated perhaps five times in a given year, so only 30 people in total could experience that unique bear area in a calendar year. You move fast for those sorts of trips, or you don't go.
The advance planning requirement tends to make travel insurance almost mandatory, and some of these trips are extremely costly to boot. If somebody gets sick and you can't go, you could be tossing ten to thirty grand for two people. Buy your travel insurance when you make your deposit and you'll generally avoid a pre-existing condition hassle.
About six months before your trip, you'll need to get your logistics in order, meaning get your flights and any hotels and transportation that the tour doesn't cover. We recommend getting to your starting city a full day early to insure you don't miss your trip because of flight problems, and we also recommend laying over at the end so you don't have a death march to get home. At this point you should also inventory your gear and start filling in any gaps in your equipment list, especially photo gear. Don't buy film this early, but decide just what kind and how much you'll need.
At the 90-day point (or whenever your money-back deadline happens to be), take stock and make a final decision on whether you can go forward. If the answer is "Yes", it's time to start getting the last of the gear in order, including film, batteries, tapes for the camcorder, etc.
About a month prior to the trip, companies like Cruise West and NHA will send you a briefing book describing where you're going, what you'll do, and what you should take. Look this over and check online weather resources, then make your final selection on gear. Order any film, batteries, and tape you'll need so you have them well in advance and can check them out as needed.
Two weeks prior to the trip, pull out all your photo gear and clean the lenses, perform any other routine care your manufacturers recommend, and test everything out. Be sure that you have chargers for any rechargeable batteries, and be sure that they work. We did a trip once where a fellow traveler had a bad charger for his camcorder; he had to have one expressed from a distant location at a cost greater than that of the charger itself.
Two days before you leave, pack everything but the photo gear. Charge all your batteries, and organize your photo-pack so you can put the stuff away. When the batteries are charged, carefully pack away the photo equipment, and you're ready to go.
Any special things to watch out for? Things that will make or break you?
Footwear. Most people don't have any really decent outdoor shoes or boots. No, vinyl high-tops don't count. In cold or wet areas in particular, there is no single thing that's going to mess up a trip as badly as a bad pair of shoes/boots. If you're going to be in snow or rain, you'll need something fairly high and waterproof. If you're going to a cold climate, you'll need something warm. A good rule of thumb for whether your boots are warm enough; could you wear them on the airplane? If you said "Yes" then the boots probably won't keep you warm in cold conditions. On our really cold trips, those with good Sorels rated at -40 degrees were comfortable, and those who didn't have that kind of boot had cold feet. This was true even though we never saw conditions nearly as bad as -40 degrees. Don't take the fact that your boots are rated at -15 degrees or -25 degrees to mean that you'd be comfortable at those temperatures; we found that most people with -25 boots weren't comfortable even at ten degrees F.
Cotton. Most outdoors types will tell you that you don't wear cotton clothing when it's cold. The term "Killer Cotton" is often used, and in very cold conditions that can be literally true. For most situations, it won't kill but you'll likely be darn uncomfortable. Cotton holds moisture, and that will then create a real chill. My own view is that you don't wear cotton clothing on adventure trips, period. It gets too wet when it rains, and then feels clammy. It takes forever to dry, so you can't wash it out when you spill drink on it or kneel in the mud, or sit in a stream bed because you slipped on a rock, or whatever. Buy poly or nylon everything, from socks and underwear outward through microfiber fleece. "What's not poly is Gore Tex" is a good rule, but decent wool socks in the colder climates are also good.
Chargers and batteries. Modern cameras don't run without power, and it's really easy to forget to bring a charger or extra batteries. When conditions are good, figure about 300 to 400 shots per battery set, or whatever your camera manual says. Cut that to a third the value if it's cold. If you're traveling internationally, be sure that you take a charger that will work in the country you're visiting. Many chargers are 100/220 volt rated and all these will need is a plug adapter. If you have a dual-rated charger do not use it with one of those adapting power converters. They'll never figure out which voltage is needed and they'll burn out on you. Don't laugh; I've seen it happen twice on trips so far.
Medicine. If you take prescriptions, be sure they're in the pack. Same with over-the-counter products. When we were on the Katmai coast we were living on a converted tugboat two hours by air from the nearest store. Get the picture?
Adventure travel and exotic destinations aren't for everyone, but for those who fall under the spell of this type of travel there's no going back to a weekend at the beach!
Well, maybe Rio….
|
|
|
