Photography is all about contrasts of course. Without those variations in lightness and darkness our images would be dull and flat. Whether contrasting black and white in monochrome shots, or harmonising and contrasting the shades in our colour shots, effective contrast is key to a good result. But the term can also relate to our choice of subject matter.
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In a foreign country the everyday can seem unfamiliar. Different food, different customs, different houses, different ways of dressing and moving around. Sometimes the most familiar sights are the famous ones. We’ve already seen them so many times in films, on TV and on other people’s photos that we think we know them already.
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Of course, not everyone can travel and certainly not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to travel as much as we do. I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t realise and appreciate that. But if you are in a position to travel, it would be such a shame not to do so.
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Jane Austen is one of my very favourite authors and I couldn’t agree more with her remark that, 'If adventures do not befall a lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad'.
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It’s only eighteen months since Anne asked us to define our ‘photography groove’. My answer then was travel photography, and now that John asks much the same question about our favourite style or genre, the road we most often take, my answer remains the same.
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All of us who love to travel, and are fortunate enough to be able to do so, will I hope be looking back on a year filled with both familiar and foreign places. For most of us, 2022 was the year in which we began to feel comfortable travelling again. When, despite a few new forms to fill in and masks to be worn, perhaps reluctantly, on planes, the world opened up again and we could scratch that travel itch, relieve that homesickness ‘for the places we have never known’.
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For those of us who grew up in the sixties, groovy was the feeling we all aspired to. Groovy was exciting, fun, cool (another sixties word!) Too young to really be part of hippy culture, it nevertheless influenced my tastes in fashion and music. Getting ‘in the groove’ was where I wanted to be, even if as a schoolgirl I was probably very far from being so!
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Perhaps the next best thing to travelling is reading about travelling. Whether travelling through the pages of books, browsing internet travel sites, or reading travel blog posts; armchair travelling is a pleasure in itself.
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Sometimes people say to me, you’ve travelled to so many places, there can’t be anywhere left that you want to visit. How wrong they are! The world is full of so many amazing sights and there is always somewhere new to tantalise and intrigue.
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'Try to travel, otherwise you may become racist, and you may end up believing that your skin is the only one to be right' The above is the opening verse, in translation, of the song Viaggiate by Gio Evan, poet and songwriter. A friend posted it on Facebook and for me it sums up everything that is wonderful and important about travelling.
