I mean, I kinda know what I expect, or at least hope to get, and that’s awesome photos of people. I can photograph vistas or buildings and get some pretty good shots, but CS04 captures people he doesn’t even know going about their business unlike anything I’ve seen.
Thanks guys! I’ll try to throw in a good variety, although most of my favorites are from Asia. And the photos of/with people are definitely my favorites because they really just dial in that sense of place and culture that’s so important for a killer travel photo. Anyone can take a photo of a nice sunset or some mountains! Although a lot of great travel destination are more about the landscapes or the animals, so I’ve got lots of those too.
Fossil, these were all shot on a camera from 2008, a canon 5d mk2, which you can buy used for like $450. The two lenses I primarily used you can buy used for $400 or $500 as well, so its really not crazy expensive if you’re buying older, but still high quality gear. Prices for DSLR’s have really gone down a lot since people started switching over to mirrorless cameras.
But that being said, you can definitely get some great shots, especially wide angle ones on a good camera phone, the tech has gotten so much better in the last few years. And if you don’t know how to edit, a photo on a camera phone will usually turn out better than on an unedited DSLR. In this set the photos of the hikers in Tajikistan or the biker/volcano would turn out great as they’re in broad daylight. Now if you blew them up, you’d clearly see they are not as high quality as a larger camera, but for a smaller photo they’d look totally fine.
Other limitations of camera phones are shooting in low light, scenes with high dynamic range, harder to edit, and you definitely can’t take as good of telephoto shots. The editing flexibility I have shooting a full frame DSLR is huge and soooo important for professional looking photos. But it’s a pain! God damn is nice to be able to shoot a basic shot, do a couple of quick edits on the phone, and upload it online!
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Some kids skipping rope on a pier on an island in Raja Empat, Indonesian Papua. We had a lot of fun with the local kids here, it’s a very isolated place, so the kids are always happy to play around with the tourists. Also one of my absolute favorite places of all time. If idyllic unspoiled beaches, no wifi, lodging in little wooden bungalows, and world class scuba diving and snorkeling are your thing, definitely look up Raja Empat :)
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What if this was your wooden bungalow?!
Most divers just pay for an expensive liveaboard to get through the islands, but that’s not nearly as interesting!
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Dude you have it. Seriously.
I have a youtube mix that Ive been working on forever that is gonna do well when I put the finishing touches on it.
It’s gonna be non monetized but I’m confident will end up with a lot of views. I’m gonna be begging you to use some of these photos when I finish.
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Ha sure, I’d be happy to :)
Speaking of camera phones, you can get some pretty nifty underwater scuba diving cases for them rated to 200+ feet, so no need for a real camera and big bulky underwater casing. Here’s a bull shark cruising around off the coast of Playa del Carmen, Mexico. They do feed the sharks to keep them around, but it’s pretty wild having 4-5 of these guys swimming around you. This is from an iPhone 11 and almost no editing.
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hey i have an iphone11, thanks for giving me an idea!
btw, i have had a canon ae-1 since college, but never shot anything on it. i got it because it was similar to the pentax camera from my high school photography class. i bought a whole set of three lenses and accessories with it on the cheap because the owner saw the world converting to digital. so this beautiful cultural artifact has just been sitting in my closets along the way. any idea what i can do with it now?
Look up Dive Volk for the underwater casing, it’s a little tricky to get used to underwater but you get used to it.
As for the old camera, I mean you could always buy some film and play around with it a bit. I’ve never shot film before, it might be interesting to see how some shots turn out! Or stick on a shelf as part of vintage motif?!
Taking a train up north in Myanmar, which was kinda cool because they had just opened up this route up for tourists, as the separatist violence had died down in the Kachin State. I didn’t know what ticket to buy so I just bought the common one with all the locals. At some spots it rocked back and forth so hard that anything that wasn’t securely fastened up top was coming down on your head! This guy and his friend across from me literally chewed betel nut (something similar to chewing tobacco, wrapped in a leaf) and chain smoked the whole ride. I did try the betel nut with them, but eww, not a fan. Interesting photo op though.
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Getting out of the way of the yaks on the way down from the Everest base camp trek. You gotta watch out for these guys on the narrow mountain passes, and always stay on the inside or they can push you right off the trail. This was kind of a fucked up time to be up near Everest base camp because it was the same time that an avalanche killed 16 sherpas who were setting ropes between base camp and camp one. So we were watching bodies being helicoptered down into the villages, brutal.
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A woman strolls through a smokey section of the local market near Kande beach, Malawi. We were staying on Lake Malawi, and did not realize that once you get dropped off in town the only way to get to the lake is to walk two miles on a dirt trail with all our luggage, heh, oops. Fun fact about Lake Malawi, it’s home to more species of fish than any other lake in the world, mostly cichlids, which sounds like it would be really cool if you’re a scuba diver! It was not.
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Heh, I did know that fun fact, because I attended a talk by a woman who studied some of those cichlids. They’re apparently a pretty important model system in biological research, but they usually just keep them in tanks rather than being on site.
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Yeah they are surprisingly interesting fish! Just not that interesting to see them in a cold murky lake
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yeah, it’s currently collecting dust on a shelf. i was hoping to make use of the optics somehow, maybe in a few years or something.
First look at the granite monoliths at Torres Del Paine National Park from the ranger station. These views really get your heart pumping! We were here to do the W trek, which is a famous 5d/4n hike, and I’d heard that you had to book these refugios/campsites months in advance because it’s so popular now, but if you have all your own camping gear that’s not totally true…
I started hiking with an Israeli guy I had met in Punta Arenas, and he’d never really traveled much before, very conservative, was super strict about the kosher laws (I thought it was just not eating pork!) hardcore zionist, so it was interesting! We kept politics to a minimum lol. Then we picked up a German guy, and then another Israeli guy, which was fine at first, but that eventually devolved into them arguing for hours on end in hebrew, so fun times! Anyway, the hiking was fantastic!
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It’s melon season in China’s Xinjiang province. This was the big fruit market just outside of Kashgar, obviously this is the watermelon section! Traveling in Xinjiang is a bit of a pain in the ass, but at least most places within in the vicinity of Kashgar (which is the defacto Uyghur capital) are devoid of the police checkpoints that you find everywhere else in the province.
I had just met up with an old travel fling who lives in Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang) but now she had a serious boyfriend, so it wasn’t so exciting. But at least she hooked me up with a chinese sim card + data plan, which you can’t just buy as a foreigner in Xinjiang. From Urumqi I hopped on the train down to Kashgar and stopped at two cities along the way before arriving a few days later. Kashgar is an amazing city for randomly wandering around, as I like to do :)
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amazing photos, thanks for sharing.
shark photo gives me insta anxiety … really great stuff
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