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Travel Photography

"I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography.
It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole.
Now, how much reality can there be in that?"
-- David Hockney

Traveling and photography are two of my passions. For the last year I have been traveling through Southeast Asia and taking pictures.

I was an avid photographer in my youth. At age 10 I remember asking for a Leica or something similar for Christmas. I got and Kodak Instamatic with 126 film. It was good enough. I started taking pictures of everything in sight. By the time I was in my teens I had even won some awards. I like to think I showed promise.

For a while I even considered going to college for photography--until my parents threatened to buy an RV with my college fund if I insisted on wasting their money by pursuing such a "frivolous" career. So I took up engineering--and hated it.

Last year I had a chance to refocus on my passion for photography when I struck off on my two-year, around the world oddesy. (I am currently writing this from Manila, ten months into the trip). I started my trip with a Nikon N90s and a couple lenses. I shot a couple rolls of film a week. The passion grew to a full fledged obsession.

I now tote two Nikon bodies (F5, and N90s), A Kodak, DCS-120 digital camera, a half-dozen lenses, filters, flash, reflector discs, a makeshift lighting kit and and a Pentax zoom point-and-shoot camera for good measure. I shoot several rolls of film a day. I am in heaven. Now, if I could get somebody to pay me to do this....

I have decided to put some of these pictures up on the web for friends and family--and anybody else who, like me, dreams of travel--to view.

Some apologies for the image quality. I purchased a Nikon LS-20 CoolScan slide scanner to scan the slides I have taken. I was, however, rather disappointed by the scanner's quality. It seems it has the ability to take a perfectly exposed slide, rich in color and detail, and, in 60 seconds or so, you you get a horribly off-color, unsaturated, digital image with no detail in the shadows and bleached highlights.

The image seems to have some correlation to the original image, but not much.. If you have a half-hour to spend on a picture, you can, with the aid of PhotoShop, bring it up to the level of fair quality. The pictures I have here were mostly slides scanned on the CoolScan.

If anybody from Nikon is out there listening: I beseech you to do something to improve the scanner quality--or take your name off it. I bought the scanner in a rush and, because of my good experiences with your cameras, I trusted the Nikon name. The scanner shames the Nikon brand name. I don't know how the scanner compares to other slide scanners on the market, but it does not match the level of quality that a photographer would expect from the Nikon name.