As you travel away from the cities and get into the country, you will often encounter farm animals on the roads with you. We have seen herds of sheep on the road in both South America as well as Ireland, which makes sense as it an easy way to move them to market. For obvious reasons, you will often find cows wandering the streets in India and you simply have to make your way around them. In some occasions they are pulling carts, but other times they are just going along for the ride like some of the cows that we saw in Egypt. Over time, many of us have become removed from the animals that help sustain our lives, but these are subtle reminders that we are all part of the same world. So as you travel to rural places, always remember to share the road with our four-legged or even feathered friends that are on a journey of their own.
Sheep on the Road in EcuadorStreets of Chennai, IndiaDriving Outside of Luxor, EgyptTurkey and Rooster on Death Road in BoliviaSheep in IrelandAlong the Road in IndiaClose-Up of the TurkeySheep Hurrying Past Us
One of the things that we do during our travels is to try and capture images of local life and not just photographs of historic sites that we see. We often take tours where we drive through various areas of cities on our way to our intended destination and often these glimpses into the real lives of the people who live there are as fascinating as the tourist locations that we visit. It started with our trip to India many years ago where we took photographs of the stores, houses, and people who lived throughout Chennai. We have continued to do so during all of our trips, especially those where the lifestyle of the people where we are visiting is different than our own.
Streets of LuxorSetting Up ShopDonkey TransportationBusy Sidewalks Outside of CairoHeading to Work
It is an interesting way to get a sense of a culture that you might not get otherwise. Clearly, any country is diverse and no single picture can capture the entire society, but it is often a window into things that you won’t find in any travel books or brochures. Taking photographs from a traveling vehicle isn’t always easy and you often have just a second to try and capture the image that you see as you drive by. Because we are taking the photographs from a car traveling through a neighborhood, the people in the pictures have no idea that their photograph is being taken. That allows us to take photographs that capture real life, unfiltered.
Shops and RestaurantsHorse and Donkey TogetherBread for SaleCasual ConversationVery Busy Pedestrian Traffic
We were on several tours during our time in Egypt as we visited cities like Cairo, Luxor, Edfu, and Aswan. On each of these tours, we were able to catch different images of local life from these very different cities. Because we saw such a wide variety of people going about their daily lives, it did give us a sense of the overall society. Do you ever take candid photos as you travel from one location to another that aren’t about the destination, but the journey?
Motorcycles Were Not Prevalent in Cairo
Daily LifeCleaning UpCatching a RideWalking Through the Suburbs
When we travel, we almost always have two lenses for our camera with us. One that is a general, versatile, lens that can cover most photographs that we take of tourist sites that we visit. The other is a zoom lens that we use to either get a closer view of cityscapes or especially to capture animals in the wild. Having a zoom lens is a great way to see animals up close without having to put yourself in danger or actually get that close to the animal your trying to capture on film. If you don’t have a zoom lens or even a DSLR camera, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get great zoom shots. If you get yourself a good pair of binoculars, you can actually take pretty good zoom shots with your cell phone. We first learned this trick when we were in Ecuador and our guide took photos for us on our phone using his binoculars. The same was true when we were in Panama and our guide once again helped us take photographs through one of the lenses of the binoculars. How ever you get them, getting those close up shots are always interesting.
Getting a Butterfly to Pose Isn’t EasyWe Didn’t Have to Climb the Tree to See the Three-Toed SlothTropical FlowerPalm TreeCell Phone Camera and Binoculars – We Didn’t Get the Camera Firmly Against the LensSame Photo with the Cell Phone and Binoculars with the Camera Firmly Against the Binocular LensWe Weren’t Going to Get Close to HimAnother Tropical FlowerSometimes They Come to YouHe Was Actually a Tiny Little GuyLeaf Cutter AntsWith a Cell Phone CameraFlower in the Jungle
