My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
Travel photo notes
Certainly, having water in some form as part of the image adds some an aspect of interest to the photo. This is a well-known fact in landscape photography, but I recently came across a surface-tension-related subject on a street in Amsterdam – two street performers creating giant soap bubbles using a rope dipped in soap water. Incidentally, I found that I could temporally resolve burst of the bubble using a 10 frames per second burst of my Canon EOS-1D X
We visited the palace-fortress-gardens complex of Alhambra in Granada in 45-degree (C) weather with our three-year-old daughter and with no particular plan for photography. I wanted to try to capture our subjective impression of the sizzling heat through close-up portraits, but I also wanted to take some descriptive photos of this famous tourist attraction. The place is so overwhelmingly beautiful, with its lace of stone carvings and bubbling fountains, that I quickly ran out of creative ideas of what to photograph besides the cliche shots of people posing in front of the pools receding into the background, framed by orange trees. 
Street artists were hard at work at Plaza Balcón de Europa in Nerja (Spain) every night during our stay there. Their popularity among tourists obviously varied. The cartoonist who drew funny caricatures of models was, by far, the most popular artist. His skill was great, both in observation of the distinguishing features of his clients and in the drawing technique itself.
This time, observing the cartoonist, I was wondering how this artist was able to maintain his motivation to set up shop on the daily basis. Perhaps, the difference in the production processes between his “analog” drawing and digital photography is the key. Even though he worked very fast, he still spent considerable time on small details (which is the most fun, in my personal experience) and on what would be referred to in photography as “post-processing” – adjusting and manipulating the image that he had captured in his mind. Maybe, the way to stay motivated and to have fun with photography is to allow sufficient time to think about and work on individual images – something that is easy to lose in the digital workflow. 
I find that our perception of air temperature is not only subjective, but also relative, i.e. it depends on what we experienced recently. My recent trip to Europe was unusually long and included stays in Italy, Russia, Netherlands, so I had an opportunity to compare summer weather in these countries. Genoa in May seemed very hot. There were a couple of days when people flocked to the beach in the neighbouring Boccadasse, a Chinque Terre-like idyllic town, and the purple-coloured fountain in the middle Genoa looked like an oasis in the hot maze of the narrow streets. 
Eighteen degrees (Celsius) in Amsterdam felt cold after hot and humid Voronezh, and it set a stage for the 45-degree heat of Madrid to be almost shocking. The good news about Spanish heat is that the humidity is low, which makes it tolerable. Also, further South, in Nerja, the temperature was much more comfortable 35 degrees, and the breeze from the sea made for exceptionally nice warm evenings – something that I miss in Victoria.
Perhaps, it would make an interesting project to try to show different kinds of weather, from nice to nasty to dangerous in a single series of photos.
Rick Steves
In terms of photography, I tried to change the style of my landscape and street photos a bit, by focussing not so much on the composition, but specifically on patterns of light and colour. Using an analogy with painting and drawing, I wanted my images to be more like sketches that capture the impression of the scene, rather than studies of the subjects. My intend was to take care of the composition in post-processing. Hopefully, these visual patterns will become a sort of bookmarks for more detailed memories. Otherwise, the amount of new information that we are exposed during any trip (if we are paying attention to it, which itself cannot be taken for granted) is so tremendous that keeping it all at the same level of memory, with direct access to every tiny detail, is simply impossible.
Sitting in airports during flight connections or in the planes during the flights themselves had an unexpected positive side effect: it gave me time to think about and process quite a bit of information that piled up earlier in the trip. This information was diverse both in form and in subject. It ranges from talks that I listened to at the conferences, meetings with colleagues, pictures I took, museums I visited, food I ate, conversations with parents that I had.
This processing mode was kind of forced on me, similar to the trip itself – a forced track back from Madrid to Voronezh to pick up a passport. I planned to make use of the airport time by reading and writing papers, and I did some of that, but travel is inherently tiring, so I often found myself staring out of the window, thinking about my travel experiences.
It is not surprising that thinking without trying to be productive is quite useful, but this work mode typically does not occur naturally. There are certain conditions that are conducive for it. In the case of this particular trip, they were:
Unfortunately, replicating these conditions in everyday life is not easy – one almost has to be shaken out of the routine and forced into the “deep work” mode.
On my second visit, which unfortunately includes only Amsterdam (there was not much free time around the conference that I attended), the weather once again proved much colder and rainier than what I expected for the end of June. Just like the first time, though, the sky just before a thunderstorm was absolutely spectacular.
On my first outing, I did not have my DSLR with me, but I took a couple of photos of thunderclouds over Museumplein with my iPhone . The next day, I brought a proper camera, but the sky was covered with grey clouds, which turned out to be washed out due to the huge dynamic range in just about any frame that included sky. This diffused light, however, is good for portraits and architectural closeups, so I snapped quite a few shots of tourists striking crazy poses in front and on top of the “I AMsterdam” sculpture by the Rijksmuseum.
After a very impressive circus performance in Voronezh, which our three-year-old daughter enjoyed tremendously, the entire family, including the grandparents, went to a children’s cafe called “Lakomka” (which means something like “sweet tooth” in Russian) located just across the street from the circus. There, we experienced a bit of a culture shock – there was no ice cream on the menu, but there was a bar with a large selection of alcohol.
To be fair, we enjoyed the pastries, coffee and juice, but the mismatch of the child-friendly branding and the “grown-up” drink menu was a little funny. It seemed like a perfect set-up for a Russian anecdote – “A man walks into a bar…” type of a joke.
Perhaps, years of living in North America shaped my expectations of what “child-friendly” means a bit too heavily, but every time we travel, I generally find it refreshing that in Europe (e.g. in Ireland or France) parents can bring their kids to pubs and restaurants and enjoy a pint of beer or a glass of wine, while children are picking at the kid’s plates (or even sleeping in their strollers).
An interesting feature of Milan, for me personally, was the very prominent presence of armed military personnel on the streets. They were part of “Operazione Strade sicure” – an ongoing initiative to use armed forces to preserving public order and to fight crime. This is certainly not typical of North America, and I thought it would be interesting to photograph the soldiers. After all, it would be a kind of “men at work” type of a photo series.
However, for some reason I found it awkward to take photos of the soldiers most of the time. I guess, this was some kind of self-censorship at work, where I was projecting my expectations of not being allowed to take pictures of security-related activities (e.g. near luggage-screening areas in airports, some bridges in US, etc.) To be fair, I have never seen any signs prohibiting photography of the Italian soldiers, and they gave an impression that they probably would not mind a photo opportunity.
While enjoying the incredible views from the terraces of Duomo in Milan, my instinct was to snap some cliché images of the Gothic statues superimposed on the modern skyline, without any human element or significant emotional content. This is a typical reaction of a photographer to a famous (i.e. often-photographed) tourist attraction.
I think that analyzing my subjective experience of a famous site produced a greater variety (and perhaps even quality) of shots than trying to reproduce iconic shots taken by someone else would have allowed.
