We’re back with National Geographic photographer, Bob Holmes, and he’s talking about some of the challenges of travel photography.

Travel Photography Today

Travel photography as we know it is a thing of the past. I rarely get assignments to shoot travel. One thing that I always tell workshop students who are interested in moving into the travel arena, is that they should find another interest that they can concentrate on that enables them to travel. I did this several years ago through wine. I love food and wine. They seemed a natural way to go. I live just outside Napa Valley, so it’s very convenient. Wine enables you to travel all over the world. I shot in Australia and New Zealand, South America, all over Europe. Even in places like Myanmar. So it opens a whole world to you and it doesn’t stop you traveling, but it gives you something to hang your travel photographers hot on. So in the last few years I’ve specialized essentially in the wine industry.

Photo by Bob Holmes

And a few months ago, a marketing director for a winery in northern Spain and Ribera del Duero region. We were approached by this guy who was working in Oregon, but he was the marketing director for the Spanish winery and knew my work and my partners work, Andrea Johnson, and invited us to go and shoot the winery for promotion and web use, all kinds of different uses. And we jumped at the opportunity. Obviously it’s always fun to go to another country that you haven’t really shot before. Shooting in a narrow area is always difficult because you find yourself repeating yourself. One winery is very much like another, wherever it is in the world. Landscape varies, but they still grapes in a field, it’s all more of the same.

Photos in Spain

Photo by Bob Holmes

My favorite area is I guess, are some of the landscapes of that part of northern Spain. The village where the winery was, was fascinating. It was a village of 300 houses with a population of 50 people. Perfect village. Absolutely picture perfect. And you could imagine being an arts community. It could be filled with little galleries and artsy stuff, but it’s no one lives there anymore. It’s just 50 people and they nearly all work in the winery or retired. And I found the village as interesting as anything and I make some of my favorite photographs. There are one or two that I really like from the village. We’ll see. I have to live with photographs for some time before I really make a final decision. Now I used to put prints up on my wall. I still do and just live with them. Some I tire over in a matter of days or weeks and others. I’ve got one printed on eight in Egypt that I’ve had up almost since I made the photograph and I never tell her of it is one of my favorite images.

Challenges of Travel Photography

The normal challenges of travel photography, and even more so with wine photography, because a lot of wine photography is landscape photography, it’s all landscape. So the secret of landscape is, as you all know, get up early, stay out late. In Europe, in June, sunrise is at five, sunsets at 10. So you’re always up at four in the morning to get to the location to shoot. You’re out until the sun has gone down, so you get, hopefully, interesting skies. And then in Spain dinner is about 10 o’clock, wherever you are. So you’re having dinner and inevitably accompanied by wine, and go to bed at midnight and get four hours sleep.

Everybody’s a photographer now, which is a good thing. I’m not critical of that. It gets irritating sometimes because people set themselves up as experts with absolutely no experience at all. But generally I think it’s a good thing that everybody’s embracing photography as a hobby. The difference between an amateur photographer and a professional is that if an amateur photographer feels shitty at four in the morning, they roll over and go back to sleep, I can’t do that. I have to get up, however I feel. Whatever sort of mood I’m in. I have to be up and out shooting. And that’s that is a curse, but it’s always worth. It always pays off. That’s the biggest challenge.

Photo by Bob Holmes

The other challenges is finding something new, finding a fresh look. Again, as a professional, we have crutches that we use that enables us to get good, acceptable photographs even in the hardest circumstances. They don’t necessarily make great photographs. They make acceptable photographs. We always come home with the goods.

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