There’s a lot that goes on behind the final images that you see on this website. I am not normally a ‘snapshot’ shooter, but since I got a mobile phone with a decent camera, I’ve tried to capture some photos of my trips for my school friends who request that I send them home some images, so they can get a feel what what it is that I do.
So the images below are from this year’s tour to the Bolivian Altiplano. We travel in three Land cruisers with our own guide and three drivers. The guides are exceptional in terms of their knowledge and I’m always impressed with the driver’s capability to fix a failing land cruiser in the middle of nowhere.
Here’s a little video, which I hope will convey the scale of the landscape in Bolivia. My guide and driver are in the front, and it’s just after sunrise. I’ve been told they are discussing food, and my friend Kathy who organises this tour for me each year tells me they are ‘typically talking about food!’. There are no real roads as such in Bolivia. Just a myriad of dust tracks sprawling out in all directions, but the drivers and guides always know where to go :-)
I always prefer to shoot in the softer light, and since Bolivia is a high contrast, cloudless place most of the time, that means gearing the trips up for getting to the places for sunrise and sunset times. But we did get some cloudy weather this year on the Salar, and that allowed me to work with much lower contrasts, to produce the Salar images you see of the islands below.
But I think sometimes, I feel aware that participants wonder just how much the images I make, are true to what we see when we are there. Well obviously there is my own artistic take on the places, but you can’t put in what wasn't there, and one of my participants this year told me (I paraphrase) “I thought the colours in your images had been put in later during post-processing, but now I see that they truly are very special when we are there at sunrise and sunset”. The light is indeed special in Bolivia, and I find that it starts to ‘glow’ at the times when most photographers tend to retreat. For me, the special light is just before sunrise, and just after sunset, at the point when most folks think the light show is over, it is just getting started.
Looking forward to next year’s tour. I have decided to change the itinerary so we spend only one day in Chile, and the rest of the time in Bolivia.
