Well, we finally made it Down Under, but let’s just say it wasn’t exactly uneventful. We were up at 6:00 AM, needing to do umpteen things prior to our afternoon flight. Flying  from BWI to Toronto on Air Canada on a Havilland Dash propeller plane was uneventful, as was our brief layover.
Our cross-country flight to Vancouver was quite pleasant, mostly due to a terrific flight crew who were collectively attentive and engaging. Then we descended into Vancouver International, precisely at the same moment that a large bird decided to greet …

We’re ready to leave and I’ve already given instructions to our house sitter… multiple times (I’m beginning to envy his carefree life over the course of our trip).
It’s T-minus-2 days. The Australia and Fiji segments are wrapped up, leaving just a few loose ends on our New Zealand adventure. I’m determined to allow that part of the trip to stay loose, in order to take advantage of the photo ops that present themselves.
Right now I’m doing my photo organizing and cleaning. I like to start a trip with clean equipment, …

Okay, so the Australia-Fiji-New Zealand trip and assignment is exactly 15 days off and I’m feeling rattled. A few items in the itinerary have been nailed down since my last blog post, but there’s a heckuva lot more to go.
So far I have the flights to and from Australia and New Zealand finalized, as well as one flight within Australia. Getting to Fiji has been set for months. I’ve got two car rentals arranged and a couple of nice lodging properties lined up and almost finalized, a good thing since …

Right now I’m in the throes of prepping for a month-long assignment that will take me to Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand, three places on my bucket list that I’ve never visited before. As with my recent Canadian Rockies adventure, I plan to blog my way through this.

First, if any of you have favorite photo spots in any of these places, please let me know. Our plan is to fly to Sydney and spend several days driving along the coast to Brisbane and back, writing and photographing along the way. …

I thought I’d do a wrap-up of my Canadian Rockies trip. There’s no way to soften this; photographically, it sucked! Oh, I snagged some decent images, but not one-tenth of what I had hoped. But, as far as family-bonding time went, that was wonderful, so I’m really not complaining. Okay, maybe a little bit.
The photography challenge was a combination of rainy weather and forest fires. More than 300 fires were burning in British Columbia during my visit, casting nearly every scene in a brownish haze that not even my Singh-Ray …

Every so often someone sneaks a photo of me. As with many photographers, I’m terribly non-photogenic, so I kinda like it when someone candidly catches me at work in the field. Here I am at exquisite Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada, in a position I often find myself, contorted over a must-have image. In this case the pickings were slim, as it was a cold, rainy, overcast day. I wasn’t even going to bother with a picture. I don’t particularly like Lake Louise for the huge crowds it draws in …

We’re sitting on the aft deck of the Northern Expedition, a BC Ferry en route from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy, British Columbia, Canada, when I notice my granddaughter, bless her 16-year old heart, staring at my hands, which were at that moment, clutching my camera and a telephoto lens.
“Pop-pop,” she says, perfectly seriously. “I think you should be a hand model for AARP.” Then she bursts out laughing.
So, my question for you, dear reader’s, is this: Is she right? (Please be kind!)

Share

Right now it’s the mid-afternoon lull, the time when any decent photographer is bone tired, having arisen before dawn to snag those incredible sunrise images. I’m onboard the Northern Expedition, a British Columbia ferry traveling between Prince Rupert and Port Hardy, a 15-hour journey through the spectacular Queen Charlotte Islands of the Canadian Pacific coast. God, they’re beautiful! Dense evergreen forest covers the mountains from summit to sea as we weave through narrow channels along our 500km route.
Actually, I didn’t get any sunrise pics, but I’ve got an excuse a …

First, to be clear, I’m talking here about taking photos on and from a train, not of a train. There are lots of train enthusiasts out there and I’m often blown away by the quality of the better amateur and pro train photographers. I love grainy black and whites of trains, old train stations, even the expressions of people waiting in stations for their trains. But I’m not a train photographer.
So on this Grand Loop trip I’m taking, I face the challenge of getting decent photos on and from a …

We’re on a two-day train trip from Vancouver, British Columbia to Jasper, Alberta, what many of my fellow passengers are calling the trip of a lifetime. This trip I’m joined by my wife and granddaughter and we are aboard the Rocky Mountaineer, an upscale riding experience that winds through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, a never-ending smorgasbord of mountain, stream and meadow eye-candy.
For me, one of the joys of travel is chatting with my travel mates and, in the case of the Rocky Mountaineer, I find …