SNAP HAPPY
I was standing on a peak overlooking Darwin Lake on Isabela Island in the Galapagos. Beside me was Rich Reid, a National Geographic photographer.
I had my Canon and my trusty 17-40mm lens that I fancied I was finally getting the better of. I got a really good picture of an iguana earlier in the day. The Blue-footed Boobies and Frigatebirds were still a problem, and even though one of Darwin’s finches actually climbed up on my foot and looked up at me, I still wasn’t able to get a decent bird shot. But soon.
This lake was magnificent, though; more a lagoon, twice as salty as the ocean, and slightly above sea level, thought to have been formed by a volcanic tidal wave that started on a nearby island. I was having trouble framing it, so turned to ask Reid for some advice, and saw him taking a panorama with his iPhone.
He had his own big rig along for the trip, with lenses the size of elephant pudenda, but it was phone photography he was really excited about.
He put together a few shows for his fellow passengers on Lindblad’s Endeavour, the rather pleasant ship we were bopping around the islands in, and they inevitably produced two distinct feelings among the rest of us, many laden with multiple cameras, half a dozen lenses and a tripod or monopod, sometimes both on our jaunts ashore on this trip of a lifetime. More than one wife had been pressed into being the grim-faced pack mule for her photo-enthusiast husband.
Those feelings were amazement and inadequacy, both stemming from the fact that Reid’s phone pictures were inevitably better than anything the rest of us — with the possible exception of one young Saudi teacher who had won the trip in a National Geographic photo contest, and who trekked around with thick glass filters in addition to all the aforementioned gear — were able to coax out of our dozens of megapixels.
I had a phone with me, too, a Samsung Note 3, whose extra features and larger screen got Reid all set up, and though I mostly kept it in my pocket, Reid got me thinking differently about taking pictures on trips.
Over the past few years, as I’ve started going to more out-of-theway and possibly once-in-a-lifetime spots, I’ve got more serious about photography. I bought a DSLR, my first since they added the D, and bought a $1,000 lens (well, used from Henry’s for $600) for it. I got into the habit of keeping it on manual so I could control every little thing about the pictures I was trying to take.
And as I learned from more than one pro, I would sometimes sit and wait — my record is about 20 minutes — for the shot to happen. Everywhere I went, whether it was Manhattan or East Timor, I’d have my over-the-shoulder camera case sling with me.
I had started to think about the spaces around me in terms of framing and composition, would get on top of things, climb hills, or get onto my stomach to see how a shot might look, and would take extra large batches of pictures during golden hour or its bluish morning equivalent. I was, slowly but surely, beginning to think and travel like a photographer.
The thing is, I’m not a photographer. And neither, I’m guessing, are you.
And yet so many of us act like we are when we travel, making our families wait, lugging around our cool gear, and generally disporting ourselves as if we were getting Rich Reid money for these shots or, at the very least, as if anyone other than us cared about these pictures.
You could see it as a noble instinct, the desire to save, to share, to remember. But there’s the rub right there. When focus is our focus, we transform our experiences into pursuits, even measuring the success of a day on the quality of the pictures we’ve taken. We’re snapping things rather than seeing them.
This was never more in evidence than when, booked onto a trip to northwestern Australia and Indonesia on another Lindblad ship (the Orion),
I got a 300 mm prime lens, once again from Henry’s, but this time just to try out. It weighed about four kilograms and measured almost 13 centimetres across. It was tough to shlepp, but when was I going to see a Komodo dragon in the wild again?
The experience was everything the usual photocentric trips were, multiplied by about three. Before leaving the cabin for a day trip, I had to decide whether the photos I might get were of sufficient significance to warrant the heaving. I decided they were about half the time. And on those occasions, that lens became the physical embodiment and reminder of the role photography had taken on in my travels.
I definitely got shots I couldn’t have otherwise, like the humpback breeching, or the cockatoo hanging upside down from a very high tree. I got a rather nice one of a buck, too. I have those pictures now, the memory of taking them, and the memory of stalking through Komodo Island’s sparse forest the way a hunter might, looking for quarry.
But since I don’t have people over for Aperture shows at my place, the only pictures I ever actually show people are the ones on my phone, either the Note 3 or my truly nifty Nokia Lumina 1020.
And looking back, it’s like I walked through this remarkable place with blinders on, experiencing it frame by potential frame, like someone on the job rather than a traveller enjoying the world.
Travel photography is a wonderful thing and the equipment is getting better and more plentiful all the time. And if you’re a Type A with the need to produce, to get results, to have something to show for your trips, there is a lot out there to enable you.
But if you want to be a traveller rather than a travel photographer, I think we’ve reached the point that you can do that, with a phone in your pocket that can take pictures good enough for a National Geographic photographer — if you want it.