One of the best parts of photography is the chance to experience numerous epic locations and use your skills to document them in all their majesty. This excellent video features a photographer discussing three of his dream locations and why he loves them so much.
Coming to you from Nigel Danson, this great video features him discussing his three dream locations and why he loves them. With most of us stuck at home right now, it can be fun to reminisce about past locations or to plan future photography trips. In fact, your planning is a skill you can work on right now. Planning a landscape shoot can actually be a fairly complicated thing that involves forecasting the weather, checking how the light is going to fall on the location based on the time of day, making sure the right things are in bloom, etc. Now is a great time to work on those skills so you can get lots of fantastic shots at those special locations when things are safe again. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Nigel Danson.
What are your dream photography locations you hope to visit one day? Tell me about them in the comments!
I have a few bucket list locations. As a wildlife specialist, they are species-based, rather than landscape-based.
British Columbia for Stone Sheep during the autumn rut
Texas or Florida for Black-bellied Whistling Ducks
Arizona or southern California for sidewinders ..... a.k.a. Crotalus cerastes
The Tian Shan mountains of Xinjiang for Ili Pika
Colorado or Utah for Gunnison's Sage Grouse
Of course, there are many other species in many other places that I would love to photograph, but these are the ones that I have wanted to shoot very much for many years, and remain a priority.
Like you, most of my locations are decided by the wildlife available, the landscape and also to a lesser extent the food.
I'd love to go back to parts of the Li river (Southern China) during late summer/early autumn. Would be a nice contrast to the late winter images.
I was supposed to go to Kuching and Hoi An (Malaysia and Vietnam) and then COVID-19 closed things down. That was to shoot wild Orangutans, Proboscis Monkeys, Waglers Pit Viper, Painted Bronzeback and Bornean Keeled Green Pit Viper (Malaysia) and Red Faced Langurs (Vietnam), as well as various other species of snakes and some scary looking spiders and as much street and landscape that I could fit into a whirlwind 15 day trip (incl travel time to and from NZ of about 30-45 hours).
Also on the list is heading back to Hong Kong (landscape, street and maybe macaques again), Taipei and possibly Myanmar and/or Laos. Also Harbin, China during winter (hello -30C temperatures!) - All of this in the next 3-5 years.
You had me at "pit viper" :)
I was actually going to add "African deserts for Horned Desert Viper" to the list that I posted, but didn't want the list to be too long, so I edited that out.
I also removed "Western Capercaillie anywhere in Scandinavia", also because I wanted to keep my list relatively short.
Now that you have listed several viper species that are so important to you that you have them on your bucket list, I have to Google them to see what it is that you are so interested in!
I don't find many other wildlife photographers who are also interested in both herps and mammals, as I am. I sense a kindred spirit.
The snakes are in the bucket list only by virtue of being in the same area that I wanted to visit for the mammals :-)
I love animals and was looking forward to the challenge of trying to capture some of the "spirit" of the viper, which wasn't going to be easy for a snake that mostly hunts at night... I guess India would be better for daytime snake photos.
Living in New Zealand, our wildlife selection is rather limited. I actually got pretty excited earlier this week when I found that we now have established Barn Owl populations in the hills both sides of the city. Even more excited to learn that they don't compete with our native species, the morepork (which would result in an eradication program pretty damn fast) - Hopefully they'll help control the leporidae and mustelid populations, neither of which are native and both of which are incredibly damaging to our environment.
Only bad thing about our barn owls that is the Hunuas (East) has perhaps only a 1/2 dozen individuals and the Waitakeres (West) even less... Makes it super hard work to try and find them for a photo. Especially since most of the Waitakere ranges are closed to prevent a fungal disease killing our native Kauri trees.
Greenland.
What is it that you would like to photograph in Greenland? Is there any specific subject matter that you have in mind, or any specific locations within Greenland that you would especially like to visit?
The epic vertical mountains which run straight into the ocean, and ice/icebergs
That sounds awesome, Walter! I also love the ice, cold, and snow.
Currently anywhere outside of lockdown. That being said, I would love to go to any of the places he mentioned. I can't help thinking though that I would suffer sensory overload, similar to how I felt when I walked into a supermarket after a long stint working in the Soviet Union.
But aren't there still lots and lots of dream locations that have perfect, wonderful views right from the road, or from designated vistas with parking lots nearby? I never thought that hiking was something that was necessarily required in order to take in the full majesty of astounding landscape locations.
Iceland, Scotland, the Yukon, the North West Territories, most of British Columbia and the mountain parks in good old Alberta. That just about covers my landscape photography yearnings for now. Yes, I would like to head up north.
Yeah, I live in Alberta, Canada.
I'll throw a different spin on this. Great Sand Dunes National Park (Colorado) and White Sands National Park (New Mexico) are a photographer's dream. In morning light or late-afternoon /evening light, the range of contrasts, textures, and dynamic fluid forms are a playground that never becomes boring. One can take grand sweeping vistas of stacked dunes, or close-up photos of individual grains of sand being blown over the lip of a ridge, arty photographs of abstract curved formations. Each place is like a giant Etch-a-Sketch, with the wind shaking it up and constantly reshaping the dunes, and especially the textures in the sand. To see the change of, and blending of textures from one dune to another, or from a flat to a dune creates the opportunity to take such interesting and unique photos. What I most like about these places is that one can apply huge array of techniques and visions, in both color and black and white, wide angle and telephoto, that most landscape locations just don't have enough variation to afford. Neither of these parks inspire the type of awe that one experiences at Yosemite in the autumn (when the tourists are gone), or in the Alps in winter, so they aren't necessarily what most people would think of as spectacular places to visit. But I've never been anywhere else that I can find myself having fired off hundreds of photos in a day and still feel like I've left so much more to photograph.
That's what it's all about, Mitty! Finding your own vision and getting creative with the opportunity ..... that is what should fuel us as creators. The post you wrote is one of the best I have ever read on this forum. I love your mindset!
As a photographer for over 65 of my 78 years, I have been to a lot of locations both as a professional and now as an amateur (life as an amateur is much more fun because you are your own client). Of all the places I have been I have a favorite that I return to time and again -- Terlingua Texas and Big Bend National Park.