Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Time Thieves

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Last week I received an email from a person who uses the nickname TimeThief – really! I’m pretty sure everyone has their own time thief of one sort or another. How many times have you said or heard someone say ”where has the time gone”, “if I only had a little more time”, “how can I get more hours in my day?” and even “just a second”.  I’m sure you get the idea. Sorry I don’t have the answer to any those questions. But if it’s any consolation, you are not alone in wondering!

Last week, my latest time thief project was selling our RV trailer and pick-up truck and then buying a new car. Wow, does that take up a lot of time! BTW - The car that we bought was the only one that I could find with a name that has anything to do with photography. Any guesses to the make – model name?  The truth is, I didn’t think about the connection with the name and photography until today.

Some people have asked what the interior of our trailer looked like, so I’m included a few photos in this post. 

 

 

 

FOR SALE – 5th Wheel and Truck – Ottawa Ontario

Friday, July 16th, 2010

28ft 5th Wheel and GMC Pick up Truck for Sale

 

As we are now travelling  to international destinations more often, this is the 3rd year in a row we haven’t used our trailer.  As a result, we have decided to sell it as a package with the pick up truck we used for towing .

TRAILER:  2001 28ft 5th Wheel – Citation Classic by General Coach  – Very Clean and in Excellent Condition, Non-Smoking

Sleeps 4 - Fully Loaded – Dining Room Slide Out – Table with 4 Chairs -  Pullout Sofa – A/C – Walk Around Queen Size Bed with Residential Mattress – CD Player AM/FM Stereo - Microwave -  Full Oak Interior Cupboards and Trim – 19 ft Awning – Gel-coat Exterior – Outside Shower - Lots of Storage

TRUCK: 2001 GMC Sierra 2500HD  in perfect condition. SLE - Extended Cab - 6.0 L engine - Automatic – 174,000 kms. Including Reese 16 K  5th Wheel Hitch and Brake Controller.

$23,000. For Both - Ready to go camping or head off on a trip.

 OFFERS – Can be Sold Separately if Trailer Sells First.

If you are interested call, 613-824-9295 – or Email

 

Citation Trailer 5th Wheel

 

Citation Trailer 5th Wheel - For Sale - Ottawa

 

Citation 5th Wheel Floorplan

Citation 5th Wheel Floorplan

Yassou!

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Yassou, Bonjour or Hello???

The reason for the multiple international greetings is that I’m a little disoriented right now with jet lag – Where in the world am I? Last night we returned back home to Ottawa after being away for nearly a month, while on a photography trip to France and also conducting a photo workshop in Greece. What an incredible trip!  Now, I have to pay the piper and  spend some time in the office catching up with unglamourous side of photography.

Greece Workshop – Sold Out

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Greece Photography Workshop

This year’s workshop to Greece is now fully booked.  Send me an email if you want to be placed on the wait list for this trip, or if you would like to have your name added to our  mailing list for any of the other upcoming workshops. For 2011 it looks like Newfoundland will be one of the workshop/tour destinations, Dale Wilson and I will be the instructors on this trip.

Greece Photography Workshop

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Greece photo workshop classes

In May 2010, I’ll be returning to Greece to conduct another photography workshop on the islands of Mykonos and Santorini and a couple of days on the mainland in Athens. This will be the 4th time that I’ve gone to Greece and I have to tell you that I just love this place! It’s one of the top places in the world which I would consider to be a photographer’s dream come true. On the workshop we’ll be slowing down and spending lots of time exploring and photographing the locations and towns. Here’s the web site with further information about this trip.

Trip Planning

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Travel Book Cover Tears Sheets

Before we head out on any trip there’s a considerable amount of time spent in researching and planning the itinerary of that trip. As a stock photographer, the first and also the most important decision is where to go? I have a few favourite places in the world that I’ve visited several times over the years and also some others that I’d like to return to. But if I keep going back to the same locations over and over again, I’ll end up with a fantastic (huge) collection of photos from that place, but then on the other hand that will also definitely limit my sales to only those locations. Since I’m self funding all of these trips, I have to think about the potential financial returns from the photographs that I’ll take on any trip and whether it’s worthwhile to invest my time and money on that trip. To date I’ve chosen wisely, every trip has more than paid for itself.

Once we’ve decided on a location, my work is pretty well done at least until we start packing for the trip and I’ll hear are your cameras packed yet? However up until that time Valerie will have spent endless hours in researching the trip. She uses the Internet (who doesn’t) but I mean she really uses it, she has travel magazine subscriptions and she also buys travel guide books. The funny thing about all of this, is that usually on the next edition of those guide books one of my pictures is being used on the cover, as in the 4 covers above.

Right now I’m at home in Ottawa trying to make some headway on the backlog of pictures I’ve taken over the last couple of years. While I’m doing that, Val is doing some preliminary research for potential trips to either Brazil/Argentina, Egypt/Jordan or Indochina. I’m not sure which one of these we’ll go on, hopefully we’ll get to all of them some day.

Architecture of Chicago

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Chicago skyline and “The Bean” in Millennium Park

Last night we returned back home from a week long trip to Chicago. Rather than being called the windy city, I think a better name for Chicago would be the overcast city (at least from what I saw last week). Despite the weather there are certainly lots of photographic opportunties. The only really good weather that we saw during the entire week was yesterday morning, and I really took advantage of that blue sky. I was out at sunrise and shot until 9:30 am when I had to return to the hotel, check out and head for O’Hare and the flight back home. I shot over 800 images in 4 hours yesterday morning, which is just over 3 images per minute. A lot of them were bracketed exposures for HDR, so that accounts for quite a few of them, but apart from that I still took hundreds of images.

While I was photographing “The Bean” at sunrise I ran into the group on Bryan Peterson’s Chicago Photo Workshop. Apart from saying hi, I didn’t stop to chat as I was trying to race around to make the best of the light and my limited amount of time.

We’ll be in Ottawa for the next week and a half before heading off on our next trip to upstate New York, which will be another short trip.

Los Cabos, Mexico

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Turkey vulture landing on cactus, Baja California

Los Cabos was everything that I had expected it would be. It’s a place of striking contrasts.  Sandy ocean beaches, a desert landscape with pockets of manufactured lush green paradise around the hotels, traditional Mexican towns and then there’s the luxury shops and million dollar condos. The variation and diversity of photographic subjects was amazing, so it’s not surprising that once again I’ve added to the backlog of images that I have to process. What was best of all about the trip aside from photography?  Wearing shorts and sandals all week long in the 30 °C (high 80′s F) sunny weather!

Hola!

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Snow Drifts 

For the past 3 months we’ve had nothing but snow and bitterly cold weather, I’ve had enough of this winter! I’m also getting a little blurry eyed from sitting in front of the computer monitor post-processing images. I have to get out with my camera and do some shooting. OK, I’ve been out shooting in this sub freezing weather with my frost bitten fingers, but in all honestly, I really don’t like cold weather. Is that unpatriotic for a Canadian to say? So for some serious photography, we’re off on another trip, this time to Cabo San Lucas, at the tip of the Baja peninsula in Mexico. It’s a short trip, only a week away from Ottawa’s winter. But what great therapy it will be.

Summer’s Over

Monday, October 13th, 2008

My sincere apologies to those readers who haven’t found anything posted here for the last 3 months! It’s not that I’ve been off to some remote world destination for an extended stay, in fact quite the opposite. After returning from France in June we had decided to stay in Ottawa for the summer, something that we had not done for the last 13 years. We had some house renovations and upkeep maintenance to do, I had a large backlog of images to edit and post-processing and finally I also thought this would give me the opportunity to get out and shoot around the Ottawa area during the summer.

Well now that summer is over, what did I accomplish? All of our home projects are finished, that was big and expensive. It ended up that I hardly did in photography in Ottawa, the weather here was horrible. So with the cameras sitting on the shelves most of the summer we decided that we just had to get away. We had a couple options, either taking the 5th wheel RV out on a road trip or flying away somewhere. A decision that I’m sure anybody would love the opportunity to have to make. We ended up choosing on returning to Europe and on this trip to explore Southern Germany – Bavaria, Romantic Road and the Rhine and Mosel Valleys. We left in mid Sept and returned back home last week. It was another great trip, and now I have lots of material to process from this trip. This only adds to the mountain of other work that I still have to edit and process. I’ve come to the realization that I will always have a backlog of images, but I no longer feel guilty about it. The reason that I got into photography many years ago, was that special feeling you get when you look through the viewfinder and everything just comes together and you know you’ve got the image as you release the shutter. For me that’s what photography is all about!

On the subject of editing and processing of images, this is probably what I spent the majority of my time working on this summer. I finished all the images from our 2 trips to New York City last year (spring and Christmas) as well as the images from a fall trip to Las Vegas. I’ve now started on the photos from Paris and France, but I still have all of the images from last summer’s road trip to Colorado and Utah as well as several thousand images from the road trip the summer before (2006) to New England.

I now have over 6000 images on Masterfile’s web site, I’m ranked as the third highest artist with the most number of images out of more than 300 contributing photographers.