Another Direction—Photography

by | Sep 1, 2020 | Photography

Screen Shot 2020-09-01 at 7.56.25 AMSome of you may not realize it but about a year ago I started posting what I considered my best photos on Instagram. I had just taken a fantastic photography workshop taught by the amazing Scott Kelby.

Scott told us that if you want your photos to be noticed you need to post the best of them on Instagram. So I started an Instagram feed (you can click any of the photos on the right and the link will take you to my Instagram feed) where I posted one travel photo per day. I feel like it has done pretty well as far as garnering attention. Scott also said that it would help me choose which pictures were the most popular and he was right.

All of this is leading to my next direction. A lot of my Instagram followers have been telling me that I should consider selling my photos and I totally appreciated that feedback. I also felt so gratified that they would think I was a good enough photographer that people might want to hang my work in their homes or businesses. So this morning I put my photo store on line. This is something I have wanted to do for a very long time.

If this interests you at all, you can find them by clicking here. The photos can purchased in a variety of sizes and those photos are printed by professional photo finishers associated with SmugMug, where the site is hosted. I hope you will check it out and maybe even tell your friends who might be looking for something to hang in their homes or offices.

Just a note for the photographers out there. One thing that really saddened me in doing this was having to eliminate so many of my favorite photos. You see I can’t sell photos of recognizable people without their permission. Since so many of my photos were taken on the streets of so many cities that means that most of the people in them are strangers. Which means I have no way of getting their permission. I have an entire folder of more than 100 photos of street photography in places like Hanoi, Leeds, London, Auckland and so many more others that I can put on Instagram but not sell. Makes me sad because I love them a bunch.

And to my number one reader (you know who you are), I cannot sell the pic you think is my best because it is too wide to be printed by any of the suppliers on SmugMug. Sorry. Here it is again so you can see it one more time. Best Pano Ever

Thanks for reading my little commercial for my new venture. Hope you check it out and come back here soon for a post on travel. I do have other things to write about even though we can’t go anywhere.

BTW: The quote below says everything I believe in about photography.

Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography. —George Eastman

How we fell in love…with travel

by | Aug 4, 2020 | Uncategorized

Venice in the sunshine

Tomorrow I am going to post the photo above on Instagram. I have been posting one of my best travel photos there each day for 249 days and I have been saving this one. Knowing that it is coming tomorrow as my 250th photo it made me want to write a little about it. Because it has a lot to do with the moment I truly fell in love with travel.

Some background first. My father did NOT like to travel. As a kid, the furthest we ever “traveled” was to visit our grandparents in the LA area (about 100 miles from our home in Palm Springs). I honestly can’t remember staying in a hotel before I was in my teens and I went away for school speech tournaments. My first international travel was driving six miles into Mexico to see an orphanage that our church supported. Other than that, I never left California (except to attend a speech tournament in Phoenix) until I was well into my late twenties.

In my previous life (before Kathleen) I didn’t travel either. Not necessarily because my first wife or my kids didn’t like to travel, but because we really couldn’t afford to go anywhere. We were living in the Northwest by the time we had kids and of course we drove them back to California to see their grandparents and maybe even took them to Disneyland. Once, when they were in their early teens, we actually took them  to Disney World…on an airplane…for four days.

Speaking of airplanes, when I turned 30, I had still never been on a commercial airplane. I had taken a short and scary ride in a Cessna piloted by my at-the-time brother-in-law but that really doesn’t qualify as traveling. We started and ended at the same airport.

When I was 30 we were living in Rogue River, OR and I was teaching school. I got a call from the best manager in my lifetime, Gil Duncan, asking me if I could come to San Francisco so he could interview me for a job with Jostens. He said he would send me an airline ticket. To be honest, that totally freaked me out. The idea of flying someplace was totally not something I did. I was not the guy who flies.

Once I started with Jostens in 1982 I flew all kinds of places in the USA to attend company meetings and teach yearbook workshops but these weren’t really travel. They were just business trips. I never saw anything except the airport and the insides of conference rooms and college classrooms. My first wife really didn’t have that much interest in joining me and in the 23 years we were married, I think she came with me to one of these meetings/workshops (wives were usually welcomed) once. We had no one to take care of the kids.

So when I met Kathleen one of the first things we did was go someplace. It was one of those yearbook workshops. This one was in Montana. We decided to rent a convertible and drive there, I would teach the workshop and then we would continue on our road trip visiting Jackson Hole, Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone and Glacier National Park on the way home. Except for the fact that she HATED being left alone at the motel while I taught yearbook, it was an awesome trip. (Note from Kathleen, we were in a teeny tiny town with nothing to do!) But we didn’t fall in love with travel then. That was just a nice road trip.

Over the next few years we continued to travel sporadically. Went to Canada (me for the first time—now we go there all the time), NYC, took a short Alaskan cruise but that was about  it. Until 2002 when we both turned 50. To celebrate, we decided that what we needed was a “great adventure,” and that the adventure should be in Europe. I had always wanted to explore the country of my ancestors, Italy. She had always wanted to do the same in Scotland. So we compromised, decided to do both and I went first.

We booked our first overseas flight to Italy. We did a ton of prep. This was going to be BIG! It was going to test us to see if we could actually travel to a country where they didn’t speak English, where we would have to try different foods, different customs. We knew we could do it. We signed up for an adult-ed class called, “Italian for Travelers” that not only taught us some basic language but also about what it would be like to be in Italy. We went to Edmonds and listened to lectures by Rick Steves and read all his books on Italy and museums.

In November 2002 we headed to SeaTac to board our flight to Italy. We were on Delta and flew first to Atlanta, changed planes and then took our flight to Milan. By the time we got to Milan we had been awake in airports and on the plane for more than 20 hours. Not being a good flyer and not having the money for anything but the cheapest coach seat, we had not slept a wink on the plane.

When we arrived in Milan it was 7:00 am there. We were exhausted but we had a long way to go. We took a bus to the train station (dragging our bags) and got on the train to Venice. I am sure I could have gone to sleep on the train but by this time I was way to excited. I wanted to see everything out the windows of that train that I possibly could. And to be honest, I was kind of disappointed. I thought Italy would look different. Instead it was kind of gray (the weather) and foggy. The train travelled through some pretty dirty and gross industrial areas. I was not sure exactly what I had expected Italy would be like, but this was NOT it. In the four hours on that train we were just not that impressed.

About an hour before we were scheduled to arrive in Venice, I think we both finally succumbed to our exhaustion and fell asleep. The last thing I remember was going through Padua and it was still rainy, gloomy and commercial-looking—disappointing.

We woke up as the train began to slow coming into Santa Lucia station in Venice. In fact I am pretty sure that we were already under the cover of the station itself when I became fully aware that we had arrived. I couldn’t see what the weather looked like, so I assumed it was gray and gloomy just like the rest of the trip. We disembarked with our luggage and made our way to the outside of the station where it happened. We fell in love with travel. The first thing we saw when we came out into the glorious sunshine is the photo at the top of this post. I can still remember that moment like it was yesterday and I am pretty sure I shed a tear because it was so beautiful. I actually still do whenever I think of this story. The rest of that trip was magical. We saw Venice, Florence, Sicily and Rome before we headed home and loved it all.

So that’s how we fell in love with travel. We loved that trip so much we went to England, Scotland and France the next year, took a Panama Canal cruise the year after that and the rest as they say, is history. Since then we have traveled to forty-one countries, thirty-one states and six Canadian provinces. We have done land trips and cruises that put us on five continents and we have loved each and every (well almost but you forget the bad stuff) moment of it. We have met the most amazing people. We have friends in so many places and we can’t wait to go to more places and meet more wonderful people.

BTW: Hemingway said it right below. I can’t imagine having done all this alone without the person I love most.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love. —Ernest Hemingway

 

We really are traveling this time

by | Jul 22, 2020 | Uncategorized

Yes, it’s true! Kathleen and I are currently sitting in the living room of an AirBnB just outside Langley, Washington on Whidbey Island. We decided to do a four day weekday getaway (Monday—Thursday) while the roof is being replaced on our townhouse. The place we are staying (click here to see it) is incredibly secluded and the silence is almost deafening in itself. Nature is everywhere. A deer and her fawn were just off our deck this morning. Rabbits run amok…and there are so many different colors of bunnies. Never seen so many in one place and they are truly not afraid of humans. Here’s a quick montage of all the bunny pics I took yesterday (there were actually a lot more but I spared you).

Enough about bunnies. It was so wonderful to do some things on this trip. For instance, this place is less than 90 minutes from our house…if we take a ferry. But we were in no hurry coming up and will be in no hurry going back, so we drove around. That means going north for about 90 minutes and then going onto Whidbey Island at the north end by crossing the Deception Pass bridge. We opted to do that since we couldn’t get into the AirBnB until around 3:00 pm anyway and they started on our roof at 8:30 am. And not only did we drive north first, but we also did not take a freeway to get there. Instead of the usual drive on Interstate 5, we took Washington Highway 9 pretty much all the way up. It is a beautiful drive but almost an hour longer.

Then another wonderful thing we did…ate at a restaurant. Yes, we have been doing a lot of takeout since this started but we realized (while having lunch) that we had not been IN a restaurant since we had lunch with our friends Bob and Judy, on March 2 in Florida. And even worse (for us restaurant snobs ?), we went to Cracker Barrel for that lunch ?. Monday we went out of our way (by about 10 miles) to visit Anacortes which is the gateway (ferry departure point) for Washington’s amazing San Juan Islands. We haven’t been to Anacortes for quite a while but the last time we were there, we had lunch at an outstanding deli that just happened to be open last Monday so in we went. Everyone was wearing a mask (made us feel much safer) and they had a bunch of outdoor seating that was completely social-distanced. We wore our masks to place our order inside (where everyone stayed six feet apart) and then took them off at our outdoor table. But they went right back on whenever the server brought our drinks or food. Even with masking up, it was quite liberating to be able to eat out again.

We even did it again last night for dinner, here in Langley. Found a place where you again; ordered at a counter, sat outside, every table was six feet or more apart and they brought you your food—fully masked. Again, a liberating experience. Of course now we will head home tomorrow and not eat out again for a few weeks I am sure. Maybe on our next planned trip to the Washington coast with the grandkids (and their parents) in August.

As I love to do when we travel, I took an early morning photo walk around Langley. They are doing their best to survive this pandemic as they are a town mostly supported by tourism and as we all know, that’s not happening this year. They are doing it right with the entire downtown posted as a “Mask Zone.” No one is allowed anywhere downtown without one…except me at 5:30 am when no one else was around. I did this walk yesterday (Tuesday) and I am so glad I did. I got some beautiful sunrise light then while today it is overcast and gray. A true lesson in how your light totally effects your photography. Since most of you can’t travel, I will share my walk with you below. There are captions on most of the pics. And FYI: I took four times as many photos as I will post. These are just my favorites.Make sure to run them as a slide show (Click the first one, then use your arrows keys or swipe to advance) for maximum effect.

Pretty sure that’s about it for this trip unless something else amazing happens (like we see a bear or an elk). Promise to be back soon with more fun stuff on your favorite travel blog (when you can’t travel ??).

The journey is part of the experience — an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca. —Anthony Bourdain

My latest travels

by | Jul 17, 2020 | Uncategorized

You probably read that headline and said, “WHAT TRAVELS? I want to travel!” It is so long since I posted that I thought I would show you my daily travels. I have been sharing them with my best friend who shares his bike ride shots with me. And another friend (funny they are both Canadians) takes a walk every morning and posts those photos to Instagram and Facebook where I get to comment on them. She has no idea that I am doing that I am walking every day as well because I don’t share my pics on either platform.

But today I decided I should share my travels. Six days a week (missed a few due to weather) I have taken a walk around Redmond. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I walk 6.5 miles and Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 3.5 miles. That comes out to about 30 miles a week. I figure that by the end of this week, we will have been in lockdown since we got back from New Orleans in March I will have been walking for 20 weeks…which means I have walked almost 600 miles. Too bad I kept coming home. If I had just walked and kept on walking, I could have been in Redding, California, Butte, Montana, fifty miles beyond Prince George, BC or about one fifth of the way to Hawaii…but I would have to swim.

As I said, I have been sending my buddy Bob pics when I walk. One of the things Bob tells me when I send him pics is how beautiful Redmond is and believe me, I know. We are so lucky to live in a place where everything is walkable. And where nature is less than three blocks away. So here’s where I went today. Today is one of my short days. Just a less-than-an-hour 3.5 miles but I think it is a rather beautiful walk. Can’t wait to see what you think. Here’s the route. The numbers on it correspond to some of the places I will describe below. Map copy

 

 

As you can see, I start and end where the red and green dots are together. That’s our house. If you are wondering where I got the map, it comes from a wonderful app called Map My Run (but you can specify a walk—more about this app later). It keeps track of my walk via GPS and then lets me save it, upload it and keep track of all my walks online. It’s a free app so if you walk or run try it out. Here’s my first set of photos up through number 2 on the map.

So if you read the captions on the photos, you know that I love living within walking distance of all of this. I can get to any of the places above in less than five minutes. In fact when I go to the supermarket across the street, it takes me longer to drive there than it does to walk. And excuse my caption rant about losing my health club to apartments. Since late 2014 more than three thousand new apartments have been built in the downtown Redmond core. Believe me, these apartments don’t rent for cheap. A one bedroom/1bath, 800 square foot apartment in the pictured building rents for a little over $2600 a month. It sits at the number 2 on the map.

This part of the walk cuts through out municipal campus (again, about three blocks from our house). The big grassy area above is used all year for all kinds of festivals and celebrations. This is all between 2 and 3 on the map.

The scenes pictured above are just before I get to the number three on the map. I get to see the river on all of my walks and it is beyond photogenic in almost every season. I used to walk on the paved side of the river but had to stop once the pandemic hit because it is just too crowded. I should add that the paved path is part of the Burke-Gilman trail that you can take all the way from Sammamish (about five miles up river) to the Puget Sound on the other side of Seattle. That’s a total of more than 20 miles.

The scenes (above) are all between numbers 3 and 4 on the map. It’s all forested but close to business on the left. Check the captions for more info.

As you can see from the pics, this part of the walk is open and I can see the river for most of this section. It is also out in the sun with very little shade which means on a hot day, I want to get through it pretty quickly. This is the section between numbers 4 and 5 on the map.

This is the section between numbers 5 and 7. I took the bunny pic at #6. The church lot is great because it is seldom used. Also, it is not well know because everyone sticks to the river trail. It’s the perfect Covid walking trail. I should mention that I do NOT wear a mask when walking. I rely on social distancing and as you can see, I hardly ever pass anyone. I do carry a mask in my pocket and if I have someone coming towards me that I cannot avoid, I put it on and ask that they mask up as well. There are very few places on this walk that I can’t avoid others by at least eight feet.

All of the above show up between numbers 7 and 8 on the map. A really nice trail on the Burlington-Northern railway line called the Redmond Connector. Again, since most cyclists, runners and walkers would rather take the River trail, this one is usually empty. It suits me just fine. It is also part of one of my longer walks as well.

This section is between 8 and 9 on the map. At number 9, I am on the bridge looking down at the Sammamish River. Almost home at this point.

And finally, 9 to 10 and back home. It was a really nice walk except for being a little warm at the end. But I shouldn’t complain. I am finishing this on Friday (took this walk on Thursday) and it is drizzling and somewhat cold. I wore a jacket for the first half and I have been back for two hours and so far—no sun in sight. Next week should be interesting as we are supposed to reach ninety degrees on Wednesday. I will have to walk at 4:00 am to beat the heat. I don’t know how my friend Susan does it with all the humidity she has in Ontario.

I want to give a quick endorsement to the app I mentioned above. It’s called Map My Run and it is from the clothing company Under Armor. It is available for iOS or Android. Not only does it use GPS to show me where I have been, it gives me mile-by-mile updates of distance, time and pace (spoken out loud) and it has an Apple Watch app as well so I can always just glance at my watch to see all the info. It has a place in the app for you to take a photo to add to your daily walk. It also lets you save your walks/runs to the Map My Run website where you can see your entire walking history along with the maps and photos. You get a weekly update of how you did for the week with a lot of other great data. If you walk a lot like I do, download and let me know if you like it. BTW: You can also use this on a bike since it measures by GPS and not by steps.

That’s about it for my “travels.” Thanks for following along. Next week we are having a new roof put on our condo so we may just head out on Monday and not come back until it is done on Thursday so look for some possible travel tales next week. But wherever we go, I will be walking.

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress. — Barack Obama

Off-season travel

by | Jun 29, 2020 | Uncategorized

Hello again! Sorry about no posts but it is kind of hard to write about travel when NO ONE is traveling. And it looks like it will be awhile until any of us do. Personally, our August Celebrity Flora cruise in the Galapagos was cancelled. We immediately rebooked for next year when we sail on the 4th of July. Our next chance for travel is our European Christmas Market river cruise in December. We shall see what happens but we are now thinking we may be taking that one in 2021 as well.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASo let’s talk about off-season travel. I was posting on Instagram this morning and I added the photo at right and explained where it was and how I took it. Here’s what I said:

“Many people who have been in this hallway will recognize it but everyone I have ever shown it to is blown away—that it is empty. This is the hallway that leads from the Vatican Museums to the Sistine Chapel. People who see this shot are amazed that it is not PACKED with people. And it was completely packed about three minutes later. This is photographic testament to the idea of going off-season (it was mid-November) and getting up early (we were the first one in line when the museum opened). This also meant that for a few brief moments, we were ALONE in the Sistine Chapel (where they do not allow photos). It was an amazing experience. We had the same experience the next November in the Louvre while in Paris where we stood, all by ourselves, in front of the Mona Lisa for about three minutes when we were the only ones in the room.”

We love to travel off-season. We have had some of our best vacations when we go in the shoulder seasons in the spring and fall. The weather is usually OK for touring—we have been able to dodge bad weather. We were also lucky enough that Kathleen could take vacation-time when she wanted and owning my own business, I could schedule around times we wanted to go. And now that Kathleen is retired and I am headed that way, we try to never go when everyone else would be there.

One thing we would never do is go to Europe in the middle of summer. We will admit we have done European cruises in August but that was because that is the ONLY time you can see the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (which was totally worth it) but never on a land trip.  Not only is the weather a bit hot for our taste (it gets hot walking around) but there are so many people touring that you spend too much time standing in line. If you want to see the real Alaska on a cruise, go early in the season or late.

While we have enjoyed our June and July Alaska cruises we have truly loved our late August, early September Alaskan cruises when there are less people. And our BEST Alaska cruise ever was when we cruised there in late April. The weather was OK (especially the last day when we sailed through the Canadian Inside Passage) and we could walk everywhere in Skagway, Ketchikan and Juneau without feeling crammed. It was awesome. We were the only ship in port in some places while in July, there would have been three or four ships in port which means almost 12,000 people in a town of 1,500 (in the case of Skagway) which is crazy crowded.

Another thing we suggest is getting up early. Go out early, be first in lines. Then go back to your room, stateroom or wherever you are staying and take an afternoon nap and then you can go back out in the evening. You will see so much more. We did exactly the same thing when we went to Disneyland with our grandkids a few years ago. We got up early, hit the major rides, then went back to our rooms and took a nap (especially the kids) before going back for parades and fireworks.

So some advice for your future traveling…when you can, go off-season and get up early.

I am a family man, and I have to find my priorities. During the season, it is to race. During the off-season, it is to spend time with my family.  —Jens Voight