© Frank Melchior
PICTURE FRAMED: Frank Melchior had photographed this Doris Chase sculpture hundreds of times before using it as a window on Seattle's skyline. He exposed for3 sec at f/4.5, ISO 100, on a Nikon D200 with 80-200mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, one great photo can capture the soul of a city better than any guidebook. But to find that essence, you first need to throw the guidebook away. Want a photo that doesn't tell the Same Old Story of a city? Shun tour groups, wander the streets, prowl through nooks and crannies, get up insanely early or stay out way too late.
Here are four photographers who did it, and their tips on how you can make your travel shooting a success.
SEATTLE
The problem with skyline shots is that it's often so hard to be creative in composing them. There are only so many angles you can shoot from. Long rows of buildings get tiresome after a while. And it's hard to isolate a lone landmark.
Unless, like Frank Melchior, you compose the skyline through framing.
The 54-year-old postal worker was born and raised in the home of the Space Needle, and he's shot Doris Chase's sculpture "Changing Form" in Kerry Park on Queen Anne Hill, "hundreds of times," he says.
But every time he'd shot the sculpture was in daylight, when there were people sitting around it. He had never thought to capture it the way he did in this photograph until last winter, when he was entering one of the weekly contests for the website DPChallenge.com.
"The assignment was 'Triptych,'" Melchior says, "so I was looking for a frame with three openings." Then he remembered this abstract steel sculpture's circular cut-outs, which afford plenty of unusual views of the skyline.
Knowing that the sun rises further south in the middle of winter, he realized that it would illuminate the city skyline from the vantage point of Kerry Park better at dawn than dusk. So at 5 a.m. one day, he drove 45 minutes downtown from his home in Edmonds.
No one was at the park, which allowed him to set up with impunity. He'd mounted an 80-200mm f/2.8 Nikkor on his Nikon D200, a long enough lens to get the Space Needle in the distance. With the camera on a tripod near the sculpture, he spotmetered the Space Needle and then switched to manual. An exposure of 3 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 100, released using the camera's self-timer, did the trick. Later, in Adobe Photoshop, he sharpened the sculpture and removed noise.
The result isn't just a unique view of the skyline -- it's also about the act of observing. And Melchior credits the creative challenge of contests, along with other online resources, for helping to teach himself photography in just five years. "I plan on going pro when I retire," he says.
SAN LUIS POTOSI
Out in the country, we think of birds as a lovely part of nature. We photograph falcons in their majestic beauty as they soar across the sky. But in the city, they just seem like a nuisance.
Daniel Avilies was raised in one of the biggest cities in the world -- Mexico City. But as a child, he says, "I didn't really observe the surreal interaction between this monster of a city and the nature in it."
Now a 21-year-old graphic design student in the much-smaller Montemorelos, he doesn't often witness this unusual dynamic. So, when on a trip last December to the city of San Luis Potosi he ran across people feeding pigeons in the central plaza, he saw the human-like quality of the birds. He picked up bread to use crumbs to lure them closer, then sat down on the ground with his Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT and 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 Canon lens.
Avilies snapped at the birds gathering around him until it occurred to him that in order to really capture their personalities, he'd have to shoot on their level. So after setting the camera to autofocus with an exposure of 1⁄200 sec at f/5.6, ISO 800, and a focal length of 18mm, he placed the camera on the ground in front of him.
The strategy? Just keep pressing that shutter button as many times as possible."I was shooting with one hand and feeding the birds with the other," he recounts.
In fact, he captured about 500 images altogether. Among them was this gem. One look at it and he had to laugh. "When I saw the attitude, the fierce pigeon defying me because I got into his territory, I imagined those '30s and '40s gangsters," Avilies says. "So I converted it to black-and-white in image editing and named it 'The Boss.'"
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