The Last Hike

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In April 2019, we took a great tour through South America. It’s a relatively well-worn path through some of the more prominent sites of South America. Our final destination over the 2.5 week trip was a 5-day stay in the Atacama Desert in Chile. We stayed at the Explora Atacama, which was fantastic as there were daily activities including horseback riding, hiking, mountain biking and others. We did something everyday, it was one of our more active holidays ever. This shot was on our final hike, the day before we left. It was a relatively easy hike, we had to cross a stream a few times, but ended up basically walking a ridge overlooking the mountains in the distance. That was a really good day.

Sony RX100 VI | 24 mm | f/10 | 1/125 | ISO125

Ta Prohm

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It has to be one of the more famous portions of the Angkor Wat complex. As seen in the Hollywood film, Lara Croft : Tomb Raider. I loved it there.

Sony A7R II | Sony 70-200mm F2.8 GM | 70mm | f/2.8 | 1/250th | ISO500

Angkor Wat

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After many years of nearly always going to new places, we purposefully went back to somewhere we have been before. We went back to Angkor Wat a decade after our first visit. There were so many differences.

I loved going back. It really is a truly unique place, and it was fun mentally going back 10 years to my younger self and seeing the same site. I will say, going over the Christmas / end of year holiday was probably not the best idea, given it seemed everyone else was also on holiday and touring. I was also nice the revisit our old photos and see some of the improvements to the site the restoration has accomplished.

This is one of my favourite photos that came out of our day at the site. I believe this is the southern entrance. We got a ride to the east entrance, and basically walked around the southern side, then went into the complex. We didn’t get up super early for sunrise or anything, had an early breakie and got there around 8:30 AM. We were done with this complex by midday, and took a short break in the middle of the day, to come back to the surrounding complexes closer to sun down.

Sony A7R II | FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM | 31 mm | f/3.5 | 1/500th | ISO250

Wat Arun Ratchavararam

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I don’t remember exactly, but I’ve been to Bangkok around half a dozen times. We’ve done weekend trips, a few days of business combined with a few days of touring, we’ve stopped in Bangkok on our way to other places in Thailand, and our most recent stay was over the Christmas holiday 2019. This was the first time that we have travelled and actually hired a photo tour / photo guide – a company called Moments When. Interestingly, the business seemed much more geared toward people that wanted to have a photographer follow them around and take their picture in front of some of the most interesting (read : most instragrammable) places around Bangkok. We booked in for one evening walk, mostly through Chinatown that also highlighted some of the different foods of Bangkok, and the next day we booked in a “highlights” tour of some of the better known temples and sites around Bangkok. Both of our photo guides were actually pretty excited that we were photographers ourselves. At any rate, they were both great guides, and gave us some good photo tips along the way – I highly recommend them both.

On the second day tour, we ended our day at a rooftop bar / restaurant that was right on the river and this beatiful temple was directly on the other side. We had a few drinks, waited for the sun to go down, and I snapped this photo.

Sony A7R II | Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM | 73mm | f/2.8 | 1/20th | ISO320

Beaches of the South Coast

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There is a saying in Sydney, if you want to go away, you either go
up the coast, or go down the coast. Last year for our anniversary (late August), we went down the coast to Mollymook. When we lived in the US, my birthday (mid-May) was generally associated with the unofficial start of summer and our anniversary would be sort of the end of summer. Obviously, in Australia its backwards. So now, most of the time that we go away for our anniversary, it’s winter weather.

This year, we went ‘down’ the coast to Mollymook, which is a lovely small town about 3 hours south of Sydney. We stayed in the hotel most of the weekend due to rain, but when we went out for lunch on Friday, this was the look of the ocean, one of the few sunny breaks that Friday.

Sony RX100 | 10mm | f/5.6 | 1/1000th | ISO125 

Uyuni Salt Flats

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Back in April, we want to visit the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia. This place is like no other place that I’ve visited in the world. There is something like a 10,000 square kilometers of salt which can take over an hour driving to get across. We stayed on the salt flats for two night. On our final day before we deported, we drove up in the hills and you were able to look over the salt flats with the land falling into what almost appear to be clouds, which really just doesn’t make any sense.

This picture is looking down as the earth is melting into the clouds. It was very surreal and is hard to get your bearings with that much white and that little like the differentiation in the landscape.

Sony A6500 | Sony FE 24-70mm F4 | 26 mm | f/6.3 | 1/2500 sec | ISO100

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

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Tallin has to be one of the most underrated old towns across Europe. At least, I had never really heard of how nice it was. We had a short stay in Tallin, only a couple of nights. We stayed at Kreutzwald Hotel in Tallinn, which was a nice enough hotel, just a few blocks from the old town. We bought the Lonely Planet guide to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and one of the best parts of the book was a recommendations for a walking tour through the old town of Tallinn. It really set the whole thing up perfectly.

One of the first few stops was the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It was a perfect walk up, through a park and we saw the onion domed cathedral just up the hill. The entire walk was ~3 hours and hit a bunch of great spots around the Tallinn old town. Highly recommended.

Sony A7R II | FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM | 46mm | f/4.5 | 1/125th | ISO100

Ellinjaa Falls

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A little over a year ago, we spent a week up in Palm Cove. I’m not sure why I haven’t done this before, but this trip I researched and found a photo tour guide to take us out for a day. We had a couple of options, but we decided on doing a tour of a few waterfalls in the hinterlands. Our guide was great and we visited four waterfalls that day. I was really interested in testing out my neutral density filters and getting some long exposure shots.

This waterfall is Ellinjaa Falls and we stayed for a while getting shots of both the falls as well as the river below. There was a party of about 15 people swimming in the falls, but I got ahead of them long enough to get a few snaps.

Sony A6400 | Sony FE 24-70 f/4.0 | 24mm | f/11 | 6 seconds | ISO200

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

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You simply can’t get away from this church if you are on the western part of Moscow. Officially, it’s called Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and even though it looks to be hundreds of years old, it was actually completed in 2000. There was a church on the same site that was originally built in the 19th century, which the current church was modeled after. Interestingly, after the Soviet Revolution after WW1, the church was demolished and finally in 1958 there was a large public pool on the spot.

Sony A6500 | Sony FE 24-70 f/4.0 | 43mm | f/9.0 | 1/100th | ISO100 

Leopard Tracking

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During our stay in Botswana, we spent about a week split between two separate camps in the Okavango Delta. While the first camp was more populated by water buffalo and elephants, the second camp had many more big cats. On one of our last days, our guide spotted a female leopard, and then spotted a juvenile male, who we assumed was the females cub. We spent most of the morning tracking these two through the bush, culminating in the female tracking, hunting and finally catching a squirrel as a snack.

This particular shot was near the end of our tracking, and caught the little male weaving in and out of trees. We stopped near a large tree, in hopes that we could catch him paying on the branches, but no luck, he wasn’t interested. It was really fun to just watch these two as they walked and walked in search of each other, or their next snack.

Nikon D600 | Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 | 200mm | f/3.3 | 1/1500th | ISO800