This shot was taken in the final hours of daylight near the southern tip of Argentina and the edge of Chile, just a few hundred miles from Antarctica.

In the morning, we awoke at 4:30 AM in –7 degree cold. I doubt I slept 30 minutes the whole night. I was in a tiny two-man tent with Yuri, my unexpected Russian tent guest. The noxious fumes of our tiny prison reminded me, if you will, of the inside of a tauntaun that had spent its life consuming cognac and cigarettes. In addition, his snore had the sonorous bass and carrying power of a humpback whale with none of the beauty.

I started the day on one edge of these rugged peaks and circumnavigated them to this side so I could get this view from the glacial lake. The tallest of the four spiked mountains is Cerro Torre, and I was very lucky to see them without cloud cover. They are covered 90 percent of the time, I was told, so to have crystal clear air was fortunate. Glacier Grande, which appears on the right, extends behind many more mountains.

The day was filled with adventure and included a 45-minute, 1500-foot ascent up an icy trail that was not really a trail at all. Dima and Vulva (Vulva was another Russian gentleman who joined us on the trip—it was hard to pronounce his name due to the strange V-W sound, but he seemed to respond when I called him Vulva) accompanied me up the mountain in pitch black conditions using only headlamps. But, alas, we were able to see Fitz Roy as the sun turned the tips pink. We then began the long additional 10-km hike that brought us to this location. I stayed here watching icebergs float by until the last morsels of dusk remained.

It was a tough call on which zoom to use for this shot. When you are in a beautiful place at the perfect time, there never seems to be a “perfect” area to shoot from because usually there are several. My attention was drawn to the jagged peaks and their unusual configuration, so it would have been fun just to zoom in tighter on them. In the end, I decided the glacial lake was most eye-catching, and the iceberg kept the image balanced. So this called for a wide-angle (28mm) to get most of the lake into the shot and keep everything near and far in plain view. Because I shot this at f/16 in near dark, the five exposures had very long shutter speeds. I tried to resist the temptation to throw a rock into the lake while waiting!

After the crowds of Angkor Wat, it was nice to find a remote temple in the jungle and be alone. This temple laid under the jungle, completely undiscovered for centuries. The hallway and mysterious chambers seemed to go on forever.

Some nice warm colors are apparent in here. The oranges, yellows, and reds usually make people feel comfortable. To prove my point, if you look at all the fast-food signs, like McDonald’s, Burger King, and countless others, you’ll see these same tones used to get people in the doors. Not a lot of preplanning went into these signs, and many of the logos had thousands of iterations. But the final signs from these different companies all tend to use the same colors. Airlines arrived independently at this color solution and started using warm colors in the interior of the cabins to calm anxious travelers.

But as photographers we don’t have to “guess” what colors will appeal to people in different situations. Copious amounts of scientific and cognitive psychology research has been done in this area. The Impressionists and other artists in the past arrived at the general shape of these ideas independently, but I encourage photographers to look broadly at science texts that are indirectly related to photography. Stephen Pinker wrote a wonderful book called How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997). Philip Ball, who wrote Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (University Of Chicago Press, 2003), states, “For as long as painters have fashioned their visions and dreams into images, they have relied on technical knowledge and skill to supply their materials.”

If you like my unconventional advice of not reading photography books as your mainstay but instead exploring the realm of disparate subjects, check out my suggested reading list on StuckInCustoms.com.

In the sort of shots where objects are near and far, such as in this shot, there are two schools of thought when it comes to focus. One is to have a high f stop and keep everything in focus. The second is to focus on the most interesting aspect and make everything else fuzzy and mysterious. I alternate between the two schools based on the feeling I want to convey for the shot. Or sometimes I compromise between the schools and do something that is neither here nor there. I continually question myself about the most interesting part to focus on, and many times there is no silver-bullet answer. And that’s okay.

I love getting up to the highest point in cities to get a large-scale view. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the name of this place in Bangkok, but it’s the tallest building there. I have a good memory; it just doesn’t last very long.

It’s remarkable to see how transportation systems look biological in nature when viewed from a different perspective. It turns out that the six link concept of the famous game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon holds true for all network-oriented instantiations, including cities. When cities and towns naturally build road systems to interconnect populations for industrial, familial, or other reasons, they logically have a series of short hops to hubs that have many hops. Consequently, to get from one city to another within a contiguous area, you never really have to be on more than six different major roads. Within cities, where these hubs are interconnected, you can see these biological patterns that form efficiencies, just like this mixmaster in downtown Bangkok.

On top of many tall buildings you’ll often find bars or restaurants from which you can take photos. No one ever really seems to mind. But one big problem is the lights inside the establishment. They bounce off the windows and create an awful reflection. I usually make contact with an employee who looks vaguely important (or perhaps uniformed) and give that person a tip to turn off all the lights for five minutes while I take some photos. However, I first set up my gear so I can start snapping as soon as the lights go off, especially since a mild amount of panic ensues from the patrons.

Whenever you have the opportunity to travel and observe people with different customs (and once you are no longer stuck in yours), be sure to take photos of them. Landscapes can be spectacular and breathtaking, yes. But the photos you take of the people will stick with you for totally different reasons. The people are connected to the scenery and vice versa.

Why are people shots and landscape shots so different yet equally interesting? I don’t know, but it’s fun to think about. This further raises the question, “What is interesting?” It’s not just what is different, because in many ways this photo is quite banal. These types of questions are elusive and wonderful to consider.

It is very easy to distract oneself nowadays. With the Web, games, Facebook, and everything in between, it’s quite easy to flail about for an hour or so without really doing anything!

All the tools at our disposal make it difficult for Type A personalities to ever have a moment where we have “nothing to do.” There seems to be a steady flow of things to do whenever five minutes of spare time magically appear. We can use our phones and computers to maintain dozens of conversations, projects, ideas, games, and all the other distractions that we are constantly juggling. Whenever we are bored, we quickly look for something to stimulate us.

I wonder: Is this “addiction to nonstop stimulation” good or bad? But after thinking about it a lot, I’ve decided it’s neither good nor bad—it’s just another way of being. I’m not sure that’s the right solution to the malformed question, but I’ll stick with my solution until I figure out something else.

And then I come across men like the one in the photo, who lives several hundred miles north of Delhi in India. He has nothing but time to sit and think about things. Is he able to better figure out things? I don’t know. I imagine he has equal amounts of confusion and clarity, just like the rest of us. No matter our habits, we all spend a great deal of time in our heads.

My dad has a funny saying he picked up from AA: “I might not be much, but I’m all I can think about!” Haha! It’s a wonderfully modest, egoist, and absolutely true statement to make.

Ancient ruins are a great playground for photographers! Sometimes it’s hard to make them look alluring. Most of the ancient ruins landscapes are basically just rocks and sky, which can be tough to shoot.

This is a temple about an hour outside of Siem Reap. On route to the temple, I knew I was driving down the same roads as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge just 30 years earlier. From what I understand, his entire plan to convert Cambodia into an international rice power was based on flawed interpretations of the ancient uses of Angkor Wat. He sought to return the country to its great agrarian past and in so doing killed about two million people. My guide, monks I spoke with, and many others had relatives who were affected by his violent rule. When my host would talk about his family members escaping into the jungles to get away from the government, he would point to specific places where they made their flight.

When we arrived at the temple, I took my time setting up. While there, I asked myself the question, “How can I do this place justice?” The default photo would have been somewhat boring. I felt like it needed to look timeless and aged because mysterious things had happened in and around there. Stark direct sunlight can be pleasing, but it doesn’t leave much room for wonder. Combining the photo with other environmental elements seemed to provide a closer answer to my question.

Whenever I travel to unique places around the world, I get in close to the best textures and take high-resolution photos of them. On occasion, when the photo calls for it, I’ll apply a texture to the final HDR, as I did here. This is a very fun process. I won’t go through all the details here, but you’ll find a Textures Tutorial on my Web site.

I found this woman with her similarly hooded group walking around the back streets of Mumbai.

Usually when I see a cadre of the enshrouded, they are accompanied by a Muslim man who glares at almost everyone. This time it seemed there was no alpha around, so I asked her name. She looked at me and smiled before furtively looking around to see if anyone was watching. I got the distinct impression that she wanted to talk to me, but since I was a white oddity and we were in public she thought better of it and made a slight bow before gliding away.

Americans often become a bit caddywampus when they see one of these veiled Muslim woman. But these hooded muslimas are quite common in other parts of the world. I’ll never forget seeing a harem of them in Malaysia one time. I was having breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental in downtown Kuala Lumpur. Three hooded ones were with a rather dour-looking bearded man standing in line at the buffet. He turned to me while waiting, and I gave him a nod. He did not nod back, but I noticed his outfit—old blue jeans and a t-shirt. Written on the front of the t-shirt was “THE MAN” with an arrow pointing up. The bottom part of the shirt read “THE LEGEND” with an arrow pointing down. I grabbed my best friend Will to show him the shirt, which he wouldn’t have believed unless he witnessed it with his own eyes. We were aghast! A few minutes later, he turned to me and very seriously said, “We gotta get a couple of shirts like that.”

This shot was taken with the Nikon 70–200mm 2.8. Whenever you are in a crowd of intriguing people, this is a great lens to use because it allows for zooms, candid shots, and other sorts of shots you just can’t get with a standard portrait lens.

Keep in mind while photographing people that you can also use your photos to form a basis for questions. I try to imagine the kinds of questions a photo like this will elicit. Where was this? Who was she with? Why is she smiling under the black silk? By purposely not putting all the answers in the photo, I can keep the questions coming.

In Chapter 6, “Software” I have a short review of a Photoshop plug-in called Genuine Fractals, which is a great tool for taking a big photo and making it even bigger. Honestly, it’s a lot easier than going through the Sisyphean effort that this photo required.

Each grid spot of the panorama required three shots at +1, 0, and −1. I believe it was ten columns across and three rows high. To get good reflections, it’s best to get very close to the ground. The added benefit is that you can see details underwater, such as the rocks beneath the surface here.

This was the first giant-sized photo I ever completed. The giant TIFF is about 21,000 pixels across. I shot it on a cool, crisp morning at Glacier National Park in this crystal clear lake that is fed by glacial runoff. It is composed of 90 different photos that took a small eternity to stitch together into an epic HDR. I’ve been thinking about having a ten-foot mural printed at walk-up resolution, but I’m not quite sure where I’d put it!

Frankly, putting panoramas together takes an embarrassing amount of time. Many hours into merging these pieces I start thinking that there must be an easier way to do this! And I’m already using all the latest software to make this task easy! Then I go one level deeper into the recursion of self-tech-reflection and start wondering how much detail is enough. I mean, if I’m serious, why not take 270 photos at 200mm? Or 810 photos at 400mm?

I found this little guy in the Batu Caves just outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. These unique and enormous caverns hold various Hindu temples within, which spill over with plenty of fruit for monkeys. This was shot after a quarter-mile spelunk through the cave as we emerged into a geological oddity—a shaft of sunlight shining downward through an open chamber that had been carved through the limestone after centuries of rainfall.

I believe these monkeys are called Maquaces. My good friend Dave Sands, a geneticist and microbiologist, suggested to me a new mode of thinking about the names of things, which was further bolstered by the nuclear physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman’s book is recommended in the Suggested Reading List on my site. This mode of thinking involves the notion of not caring so much about what something is named.

Anyone can learn the names of objects via systematic rote memorization. More interesting, at least to me, about these monkeys is how they behave, how they interact, and why they do what they do. How is this monkey different from similar-looking monkeys I saw in Mumbai, India? Are their high numbers related to their proximity to Hindu population centers? Are the Batu Caves an anomaly in a predominantly Muslim country? Are their numbers related to the subtropic jungle environs, whereas it’s tough to find a lot of trees near Mumbai? These sorts of questions represent the type of knowledge I am interested in much more than the names of things.

Was I able to capture all these questions in the photo? Not really, but I do make a feeble attempt. In many ways, the photo can be a starting point for a conversation. For example, when I post a photo on my blog, I may provide some contextual questions, which become a nice jumping-off point for a conversation. The questioning bit can be quite fun, and the photo can help direct the shape of the discussion.

The day was bright and sunny, and the monkey sat alone in front of the inky blackness of the cave entrance. I took this shot as a single RAW photo. Only minor HDR adjustments were made to get the texture in the wall and the details in his fur.

This Dresden Cathedral was bombed to bits in World War II. It was recently rebuilt, and some of the old, burned, black bricks were reused in the construction. If you look closely, you can see them nestled in randomly with the newer bricks.

That’s a nice little tidbit, eh? Oftentimes, very interesting details about a photo are impossible to communicate within the actual image. Sometimes trivia is just trivia, and sometimes trivia helps a shot be better! How do you communicate a fascinating fact in a photo? I don’t know!

However, nowadays with the Internet, no photo has to stand alone. It can become one with a conversation.

Think about all the great art that hangs in museums around the world. Perceptive people with diverse backgrounds walk up to them all day long and utter insightful and reflective remarks, and make discerning observations. Unfortunately, all those comments are lost in the echoing walls of the museum!

The Internet has created a conversational web; the photo does not have to sit up in an ivory tower. Put your photos online and let a conversation form around them! Don’t wall-off your photo inside a portfolio as your only means for displaying your art. In fact, to get started, why not start posting your photos to our online discussion forums on Flickr and Facebook?

Share your photos with welcoming groups at HDR Spotting (www.HDRspotting.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com/groups/stuckincustoms_ brilliant_photographers), and Facebook (www.facebook.com/stuckincustoms).

As for the technical aspects of this shot, the camera was set to a 5-exposure shot at 100 ISO and an f stop of 4.2. The third exposure had a shutter speed of 1/15.

Many people have asked me how I took this shot. It’s not HDR. You can’t create an HDR image with people shots because they end up looking like coal miners. The background is “HDRed,” a verb form I use a lot in casual conversation, but Nathaniel’s face is not. It’s best to mask back in the original face whenever possible (I’ll describe masking later in the book).

I HDRed the background because everything about this boy was like a painting—his clothes, his hat, his eyes. I wanted a smooth transition between the painting-like boy and the painting-like farm in the background. I doubt most people notice. But then again I’m sure they notice—if you know what I mean.

Nathaniel’s dream is to get closer to God and to make sure his mom is happy. Nathaniel is four years old and is carrying wood with his two sisters down a dusty cart road in an unmarked Amish village somewhere between Allegheny and Tionesta, Pennsylvania. In pauses between talking to me, he looks sideways at his older sisters, who peacefully nod toward him. I tell him that he looks big and strong, and then I help him carry the wood to his parents’ home where he lives with his other nine brothers and sisters.

Isn’t light interesting in water? The way it refracts and reflects never ceases to amaze me. The light and tones can be difficult to capture with traditional photography. HDR allows you to be as surprised by the color and hues of water as you were when you were standing there.

Regular StuckInCustoms.com readers know that I never add color to my photos unless it is a texture overlay (as in the upcoming Great Wall of China photo on the next page). All the colors you see here were actually in the scene, as my Icelandic friends can attest, since they are used to these milky opaline displays.

I found this spot while driving lost in the southern part of the island trying to find my way to the Blue Lagoon. This deep milky blue color appears in all the tiny streams and rivulets that bubble up everywhere across the rocky landscape.

All the geothermal activity is the result of the pulling apart of the North American plate from the Eurasian plate. This rift is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Subsurface magma keeps all this water nice and toasty. It’s a very strange feeling to stand on the edge of Iceland looking south and know there is no land between where you are standing and Antarctica. If you follow the same fault line north, it makes for some of the most scenic photography in Iceland.

For a shot like this, since there are so many opportunities in our daily lives when we come across this sort of scene, I suggest you shoot in cloudy weather. I’m obviously kidding about getting this opportunity all the time, but the same advice goes for shooting a watery location. Sometimes the sun can cause lots of reflections that you might not want. I took another shot of this scene earlier in the day in direct sunlight, and as expected, it did not come out nearly as well.

The Great Wall of China is one of the great wonders of the world you often hear about, right? I have traveled fairly extensively and had comparatively reasonable expectations for the Great Wall. I thought it would be big and impressive, but wow was I wrong! It was 100 times as big and impressive as I thought it might be! This ancient relic is amazing. The sheer size, width, height, and length of this monstrosity put every other protective ancient wall to shame.

One of my little hobbies is castles, if that is a hobby. I really enjoy visiting castles, studying them, reading about pitched battles around castles, and the like. I’ve visited dozens of castles in Europe, stood on high parapets, strolled along huge curtain walls, and scaled the ruins of once-huge keeps. But none come close to even one kilometer of the Great Wall. As much as I hate to recommend that you visit a tourist location, I have to say it’s a must-see!

How do you take a photo of such a vast monument? This one is tough. I have no good answer. My only advice is to do it an honor and make it look timeless. Make sure your composition does not include modern annoyances like telephone wires, scaffolding, or clueless tourists wearing oversized football or soccer jerseys.

As with any monument, there are many angles of interest. I suggest walking as far away from the tourists as possible to get free of obstructions. Walking some distance on the Great Wall is not easy, but let’s face it, we could all do with a bit more exercise anyway.

It must have been a five-hour journey from one end of Montana to another. Not long into the drive the wheat fields start to mesmerize you. While driving along, I like to play configuration games with the clouds and the objects on the horizon. This might sound strange, but I do enjoy seeing them in Euclidean geometric formations—so much so that I had to jump out of the car to capture this shot. Because the Montana winds blow the clouds around quickly, you have to be fast. But on these bright sunny days, the bracketed exposures rattle off very quickly, and there is hardly any movement in the clouds.

Don’t be afraid to turn the car around and take a second look at a scene! Every now and then we tend to get lazy and stay in the car because it’s easy. You might pass by something and think, I wonder if that would be worth a photo? And then you get to thinking more about it, and after a while time goes by and you figure that you’ve thought about it for so long that you are now too far away to turn around. Next time, make an immediate bat-turn and go back and take a second look. It’s really not that hard, and you do have your camera right next to you, don’t you? Don’t you?

I love this shot! It came out wicked. I used to say wicked a lot in grade school, and it’s still a favorite term in my vocabulary. This may or may not make me lame; I can’t be objective about such matters.

This is the airport in Bangkok, Thailand. I don’t know who the architect is, but it is truly an inspiring building. Taking photos of beautiful architecture can be somewhat of a skill. I try to honor the lines and the textures via a smart composition and a good HDR treatment.

Sometimes I like to use a wide-angle lens to help the lines drift into interesting angles, like they can do. However, this does bother some photographers who like to use a tiltshift lens to keep the lines in their true orientation. In fact, it really bothers them. But it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I think it’s kinda cool.

Asia has some of the most beautiful airports in the world. The people who work in security are so pleasant and civil when I go through. I had become accustomed to TSA employees scowling at me and giving me more attitude than a Jerry Springer guest list. Unfortunately, the government-run TSA now seems to have the efficiency of the post office combined with the attitude of the IRS. But I digress.

So, how do I capture the beauty of something like an airport? It’s the same as any architecture. Imagine that the architect is a true artist and this is that artist’s life work. The artist has hired you to take just one shot of the magnum opus. That should put a little pressure on you to make sure you find an angle that will impress the architect.

This photo uses a special technique I call my super-double-secret “double-tone-mapping” trick. Not all situations lend themselves to the technique, but the results are amazing in certain circumstances. This technique is described later in Chapter 5, “The HDR Tutorial.”

When taking photos in religious spots, try to find the most pious of the parishioners. They make good subjects and don’t seem to mind you capturing the moment. As long as you are respectful and not getting in the way of their gesticulations, there should be no problem.

A 94-year-old woman ascends the final stairs in the 272-step climb in the Batu Caves, a pilgrimage site in Malaysia that attracts over 800,000 Hindus per year. Her hair is three meters long (about 9 feet) and has never been cut. It is so long that she folds it back and forth a few times and wraps it to keep it from dragging behind her.

Religious places make for good photography, so I’m often drawn to them. It’s a bit tricky taking photos in these places because you don’t really want to get too close and interfere while worshippers are praying to a particular saint or god in the pantheon of possibilities in their respective religion. Before taking any photos, I try to remain in the background and be respectful while getting a good vibe as I move around.

I used to be more judgmental, or stuck in my customs, so to speak, when it came to the truth of religion and the world. Obviously, my brain, and probably yours if you have read this far, is a labyrinthine series of premises and conclusions that have been solidified via a rigorous lifetime of self-reflection and Socratic reductionism. These religious-oriented photographs always ask a whole set of questions that span beyond the edges of the frame.

When taking photos of people, it’s best to simply talk with them a little first. In a series I’ve called “What They Do and What They Dream” is a never-ending collection of people shots I’ve taken from around the world. Included with each shot is the name of the person, what that person is currently doing in life, and what the person’s dream is. I believe you can see a big difference in the faces of the people who are closer to their dreams than those who are not.

This advice is also useful even when you’re not taking photos but simply trying to get to know someone. For some strange reason, if you are genuinely interested in people, their history, their background, and how they got where they are, people will convert your interest in them into an automatic interest in you! But here is the kicker: You have to be the kind of person who really is interested in finding out about people. You can’t fake authenticity. It just doesn’t work!

Whenever I am in a foreign locale, I tend to walk around as many streets as possible to take in the people and sights. Remarkable things are everywhere, but strangely enough we tend to notice them more when we’re away from home. When I am in Texas, I have to try really hard to notice people, places, and objects that are out of the ordinary!

I found this chap on one of my excursions in Malaysia. An older section of Kuala Lumpur is full of thousands of attention-grabbing elements and people to shoot. I stopped to talk to him for a while, which is what I usually do when I take people shots, unless I am trying to be clandestine.

Ranjit, now partially blind, talked sadly about his son for a bit. With his hands he seemed to motion off in the direction of his son, which reminded me of a man reaching in the dark for a light switch.

Surrounded by my cadre of Cambodians at $18 a day, I felt a bit like a sixteenth century British explorer as I investigated this site. These helpers drove me around, carried my tripod, brought me water when I was thirsty, and seemed anxious for me to colonize the area. A member of my cadre woke me up at 5 AM to get this shot.

Cambodia is very humid, so I felt like I spent a week walking around Hugh Hefner’s hot tub with none of the upside. Fortunately, where I stayed I had air conditioning—sweet air conditioning. One important fact that I learned is if you keep your lenses inside a hotel room at 21°C and then immediately go out into a hot humid morning, the lenses will stay fogged up for about an hour! You have to wipe them down constantly to get a clean image. In fact, if you look closely at this image, you can see a bit of fogginess. However, it worked out fine for this photo and seemed to add to the mornin’ mood of it.

Would a photographer of a better pedigree already know this? Probably. I bet you learn that sort of thing in school or in a book or from a mentor. But because I didn’t learn from any of these options, I can readily admit that I’ve made a whole host of stupid mistakes. Forever the optimist, I try to look at the positive side of not having any formal training. Sometimes the best and most unique things in life don’t come with instruction manuals.

So, the two lessons I can provide for you here are to 1) remember the cold to hot humid rule for your lenses, and 2) don’t be afraid of making mistakes or trying new things.

To find a good guide with whom to tour Angkor Wat, see my recommendation on StuckInCustoms.com! But you’d better like riding on the back of mopeds.

I spent a bit of time in Kharkov, Ukraine, which is on the northern border, just a short drive from Russia. It’s cold there. I still remember landing on the runway in one of those very old planes, just like Lao Che’s plane in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The runway was indecipherable from the snowy tundra, and it appeared as though we were landing in any old place. The plane slid to a stop with a bit of a side spin.

After arriving, my hosts set me up in an old, scary apartment building near the old KGB headquarters. I don’t know what those offices are used for now, but they still have a sense of foreboding about them.

I almost named this photo “Tragedy of the Commons” after the powerful 1968 article by Garrett Hardin.

Ukraine, once part of Russia, fell under communist rule for a long time. The idea in the article, which I am quite convinced is true, is that shared resources owned by many will usually fall into disrepair, even when it is not in anyone’s best interest for this to happen. This comes as unexpected news to socialist leaders who expect that it is in the long-term interest of everyone to maintain a shared resource.

Every elevator and stairwell I visited was in a deplorable state. Many latent thoughts still persist here, including a general distrust of people on the street. After generations of street-filled government informants, nobody smiles. When I naturally smiled at people on the street, I received confused looks in return.

This shot, like The Fallout Bunker photo, uses the aforedescribed double-tone-mapping trick. I took this shot because I wanted to capture the grime and disrepair of the commons. There is a strange feeling in these sorts of places, and I wanted to try to communicate the strangeness through the photo.

I was barefoot like the rest of them. The day must have been around 95 degrees and as stuffy as can be, but the cool marble seemed to keep me from being drenched in sweat. After a long walk, I had finally made it to the inner core of the Taj Mahal around the main tomb structure where pilgrims from all over the country gravitated. The faithful coiled in long lines and snaked their way around the complex, waiting patiently to reflect at the megamausoleum and communing with the god of their choice. How could a billion people be wrong?

When I travel, I enjoy talking to Indians and others about their religion. Inevitably, when I’m in a taxi or manpowered trike-mobile, there is some sort of deity that is jiggling about on the dashboard or handlebars. It ranges from Shiva to Brahma to Vishnu to Krishna to Ganesha and beyond. So, because I enjoy seeing people’s response as I probe a panoply of personalities, I sometimes ask, “Who is the god to whom you pay reverence?”

The driver will then talk for quite a while about how he has come to know that God and all the various ways this has influenced his life. Considering the billion different people in India, it amazes me that each has a unique story for the God that person worships but with certain subcontexts that are universal. One commonality, to be sure, is that there is always enough to talk about between your origin and destination.

If you get the chance to go to the Taj Mahal, I highly recommend it. All the people are nice as can be and very eager to engage in conversation about just about every topic. When moving about structures like this, see if you can find ways to illustrate how others are enjoying the monument. It can be tough to get people’s faces and the monument, since people are usually facing it. See if you can find interesting ways to pull together a shot!

This photo was shot as a single RAW HDR. Obviously, multiple shots are out of the question here because of so much movement. The aperture was f/4, ISO 160, over 1/1000th of a second with a 10mm focal length. You can see a slight amount of “stretch” on the man’s foot in the lower-left corner. The distortion did not bother me, so I left it alone.

We drove south of Yellowstone near Jackson Hole to explore the Grand Tetons. As I was taking this picture, a huge bison came up behind me and caught me unawares. I barely got the fifth exposure to this HDR! It’s amazing how big those animals are, yet they can be so quiet.

I often think about why HDR works so well with landscapes and why it is appealing to so many people. I’m sure it goes back to our anthropological roots and our need to be able to traverse a landscape and assess the terrestrial situation with as much information as possible. Over thousands of generations, we have become accustomed to scanning a vast landscape and internalizing, collating, and processing the light, shapes, and line of information around us. The details of the sky and clouds are just as important as the color of the distant mountains. For example, if the distant mountains are a bit blue, our mind recognizes that they are a certain distance away because it makes sense that the atmospheric gas in between is voluminous enough to refract a visible spectrum of blue light. Of course, we don’t hyperanalyze this on the scene, but our brain does and sends executive summaries to the decision areas.

I’ve seen surprising research where hundreds of kids around the world were shown various scenes and asked, “Which one looks like the best place to live?” They are presented with downtown areas, beaches, snowy mountains, forests, savannahs, and so on. Inevitably, no matter the children’s culture or current living conditions, they choose the savannah. This speaks to the deeply rooted visual areas of the brain and how we’ve spent many successive evolutionary cycles becoming accustomed to working inside these sorts of environments to judge a wide variety of light levels at once.

Now if I was shown that survey, I might throw off the results and pick the snowy mountains. I’m more of a mountain guy.

I arrived in Lyon for some meetings and went to the old medieval section of the city to grab some shots before dinner. This is the interior of the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière. It is the most lavish and beautiful cathedral I’ve ever been inside and even surpasses the beauty of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Sistine Chapel is probably more lavish, but I’ve not yet seen it. On my last trip to Rome I was supposed to see it, but Pope John Paul II died the day I was there.

My sage advice for getting tripods into cathedrals and shooting is this:

Whenever I look across this harbor of boats toward the volcano, I get a feeling of ancient timelessness. I wonder what this image would have looked like in 65 AD before Pompeii erupted. I imagine it was a perfect pyroclastic cone. I also imagine they didn’t have HDR photography back then.

This is the bay of Naples across from Mount Vesuvius. I was lucky enough to spend the day here shooting with my great photographer friend Valerio. It was a perfect day for photography. Valerio, like so many other great HDR photographers on Flickr, is a great inspiration to me. I am jealous that he lives in Italy!

My visit with Valerio resulted in a treasured memory I’ll never forget. One evening after taking photos, we decided to get some dinner. He took me to a local cheese shop and bought mozzarella that was so fresh it had never been refrigerated. Then we went to a tiny garden stand to purchase some tomatoes from a woman it seemed he had known for decades. Around the next corner was a little shop his family had frequented for years that sold fresh olive oil. We took all our ingredients back to his place and had the best insalata caprese I’ve ever tasted!

The next day we took a boat trip up and down the Amalfi Coast and then out to Pompeii and Vesuvius. What could be cooler than that?

Wake up early when you are in a new place. I don’t like waking up early, and those who say they do might just be lying. But the light is usually so good that you can’t sleep through it. Once you are out and about, you’ll quickly forget about how good your bed felt! Well, mostly.

This is the altar area of the Duomo in Milan, Italy. As with most churches and cathedrals, the powers-that-be do not like it when you take a tripod inside. So, as usual, I had to be very sneaky when squeezing off some shots before the security guards found me.

However, about a year later a funny incident occurred; the people from the Duomo contacted me because this photo had become quite famous. They were in the middle of rebuilding the outside of the Duomo and had already constructed the scaffolding. Sometimes in Europe a huge mural is hung on the outside of scaffolding for aesthetic purposes. Well, they wanted to use my photo to adorn the outside of the Duomo—the same photo that I was not supposed to take! Well, we negotiated for a while but never came to an agreement, so this did not happen, but it still makes for a nice story.

As you might be able to tell by the photo, this cathedral is huge! It can hold 40,000 people—as many as some sports stadiums. It’s just incredible and cavernous inside, so bizarre things happen to the light. If you’ve ever tried to take photos of church interiors, you may have noticed that your results are rather disappointing. HDR is the only way to go if you are trying to get a sense of all the light levels inside.

This photo is pretty much straight out of the HDR processing software with very little Photoshop cleanup. I don’t normally recommend doing this, but the initial result was so satisfying that I just stuck with it. You will notice, especially if you have tried HDR in the past, that daytime shots can turn out looking quite “dirty” in the sky area. The interiors of buildings also have a lot of dynamic light but not so much that the algorithms need to change the tones of interior colors. For HDR beginners, sometimes it’s best to practice taking shots of interiors because mistakes in the processing are often easier to hide, frankly.

Can you believe this is real? Can you believe how big this is? (Note the two people on the path near the top of the photo.)

This place is in Yellowstone, where I’ve visited at least five times. I’ve been there so much, I was even fortunate enough to be introduced to the Chief Ranger—Ranger Rick. What a great name! He and I became friends, and he saved my life during one trip. I had forgotten my tripod, and I stopped at his house in Mammoth. Well, he invited me in, fed me, and let me borrow his tripod. What a guy!

I’ve always wanted to get a photo of the Grand Prismatic Spring. As you can see, most people view it from that little platform, which I have also done many times. The angle is just awful from the platform. You can’t see anything. So I had to get higher! I knew from seeing a satellite shot of the place that the inside of the spring has these unearthly blues that were just calling my name.

This shot turned out to be somewhat technically challenging. I made a video in the field of the whole process. I shot it with a 70–200mm lens zoomed in pretty close. The autofocus could not grab onto the steam (it needs contrasty lines), so I leaned the tripod forward a bit to grab onto the edge of the spring. I then set the focus on the camera to manual so it wouldn’t change when I was ready for the five exposures. Because of the extra-bright light conditions, I set the ISO to 50 and then adjusted the exposure compensation to −2. As a result, the five shots were not −2, −1, 0, 1, and 2; they were −4, −3, −2, −1, and 0. There are two ways to know this:

• Experience. Once you start thinking in light and HDR, you will be more acutely aware of the light around you.

• Trial and error. Let’s say you decided to set up your camera normally to shoot from −2 to +2 (your camera may just take three exposures, not like my foolish Nikon, which won’t let me step by 2, maddeningly). You would take five shots and then look at the preview. The last one or two shots would look completely blown out—almost white-out conditions. That’s obviously way too much light. So that should indicate to you to reset the “center” or “anchor” of those multiple exposures to −2. You’ll then get the range from −4 to 0, which will give you a nice dark photo and a nice bright photo.

If all this technical information still confounds you, I invite you to view the video (it’s free) I made about it on my Web site. Just search for “Grand Prismatic” or “Yellowstone” in the search box on the right.