| Don't think of return visits to a photo destination as "been there, done that." Bob Krist has traveled to Easter Island multiple times, but on his last visit, the weather conditions allowed him to capture a starry night sky behind the moai sculptures using light-painting. The result was a dramatic photograph that was much better than anything he had shot on previous trips. |
There comes a time in every travel shooter's life when he or she starts doubling back over familiar ground by returning to locations already photographed, maybe even more than once. Sometimes there's an economic incentive—there's no doubt it's cheaper to shoot in your own backyard than to hop a plane to an exotic destination. Sometimes, it's just a love of a certain place (I can't get enough of Iceland, for instance, and have been traveling there since the mid-'80s).
A lot of students in my workshops and seminars ask, "Why would you go back to places you've already shot, when there are so many new places in the world to see? Haven't you 'been there, done that?'" Well, not quite.
Here are a couple of compelling reasons why you may want to make one area your photographic specialty and how it can help you grow as a photographer.
Familiarity breeds knowledge. The difference between good pictures of a location and great pictures is often the amount of "local knowledge" you have about the place. That's why most experienced travel photographers make use of "fixers," street-smart local guides and translators who know the lay of the land and can talk you onto the rooftops, terraces and viewpoints that otherwise may be unknown to the casual visitor.
But if you go back to the same place more than once, you can start to act as your own "fixer" because, after a couple of trips full of trial and error, you begin to acquire that hard-won "local" knowledge, and it can pay off big.
Recently, I was assigned, for about the fourth or fifth time, to shoot the beautiful Austrian city of Salzburg. I've covered it in winter and summer for a variety of publications, but this time I was shooting a video story for a magazine's blog site about the pre-Christmas Advent season in early December, which is a magical time to be there. For a "winter-wonderland-in-an-Alpine-city"-type story to work, you need falling snow, and while the city was coated in snow, there was none in the forecast for the few days I was going to be there. One afternoon, however, a blustery squall came out of nowhere, and I went into high gear.
During the 90-minute snowstorm, I got two skyline overviews and about six key street scenes, all in the picturesque driving snow, and even some at the magic hour of twilight. When I handed in the video, the editor said, "Boy, you were lucky it snowed so much because that really makes the piece."
As much as I was aching to say that luck had nothing to do with it, that it was preparation and local knowledge of the best places to shoot overviews that allowed me to make the most of that brief, unpredicted storm, I kept my mouth shut. This was the same editor who once observed that, for a photographer, it might be "better to be lucky than good," so it was probably to my advantage to let him continue to think I was one of the "luckier" guys in his vast stable of shooters.
Weather anomalies. Of course, the more time you spend in a place and in as many different seasons as you can, the more likely you are to encounter those special weather conditions (like fluffy, heavy snowstorms) or events that can help elevate your pictures with a special sense of moment that you may not get just blasting through a place once.