HAVE CAMERA, WILL TRAVEL

TIPS ON TRAVEL WRITING

Years ago, I took a small photographic group to India during a petrol shortage. When our coach driver told me he would have to queue up all night to get petrol, I asked our guide to arrange alternative transport to the Taj Mahal so we could arrive for the 6 a.m. opening. We set off in half a dozen tuk tuks and were rewarded with a magical dawn light painting the iconic building.

This was the icing on the cake of the whole trip. While we had no control over the weather, I am a firm believer in attempting to make your own luck by being in the right place at the right time. By rising early to capture the dawn light, we had been rewarded with striking photos and a fresh-angled account of one of the world's most visited buildings — and there is always a market for that.

GETTING STARTED

As a child, I was taught the names of wild flowers on my grandparents' Suffolk farm, which inspired me with a zest to learn more. So it was a natural progression to study zoology and then take up marine biology, which I assumed would see me through my working life: neither photography nor writing was on my list of ambitions. But when my father gave me my first camera as a twenty-first birthday present, a new interest was triggered.

Initially I used my camera to document the marine life I was studying, then realised I could use some of these pictures to illustrate the articles I was beginning to write. During this time, I sold my very first article to Animal Life (no longer published). Before submitting, I spent time in W H Smith's thumbing through magazines to check out the ratio of text to pictures and the length of articles each magazine preferred. As a penniless research student I was thrilled to get (what I thought then) the princely sum of 25 guineas for an article on sea anemones — the only subject for which I had plenty of photographs. It was some years later, when I began to travel to remote islands to study their marine life, that I began writing on a regular basis.

If you are serious about pursuing this genre of writing, the first thing you need to do is what I did — research your market. Find out which magazines take travel stories and buy a few to study in more depth. Many have regular writers and columnists but there is always scope for fresh faces. The features editor of any travel magazine will welcome original text and eye-catching pictures on a popular or novel location: it makes their work much easier than if they are presented with just the text and have to find suitable images to marry with it.

Find out who to submit to: get a name from the switchboard or check the website for contact details. Then send off a proposal with a snappy title, outlining how it will appeal to that particular magazine's readers and including a few low-res (100dpi) images. (Some magazines now produce Contributor's Guidelines, which are a big help.) Never send a complete article, or even an outline, to an unnamed person or generic email address.

When I started writing, I travelled first and then approached a magazine when I knew I had the photos. Nowadays, my articles tend to be spin-offs from my book assignments and I prefer to wait until I have the images in the can, as it were, before making an approach. Once I have the pictures, but before writing a word of the article, I either call or email the editor or features editor to confirm an interest in my idea. At this stage he or she may ask to see a few images, which I send as low-res files.

However, I know of other people who like to get a nod before they set off. Many professional travel writers expect to have all their expenses paid if they are writing about a resort such as an upmarket tented camp in Africa but as a beginner you will have to fund your own trips until you can produce some published articles. An economic way to start is to glean a story from a holiday — without being so obsessive that you antagonise your travelling companions!

When you get a commission, don't whatever you do blow it by not meeting a deadline. Many articles I have written late at night for a desperate editor who has called saying he has been let down — could I bail him out? I am always happy to do this providing I can squeeze the fee up a little for burning the midnight oil.

PREPARATION

When you are about to go on a trip, don't leave where you go and what you see to chance. Researching the best time is easy via the internet, but be sure to check more than one source, for by no means everything on the web is 100 per cent accurate.

Then research what you want to photograph. If it is an annual festival, make sure you know what date it is this year: the Pushkar Camel Fair in Rajasthan, for example, is usually held in November but the precise date depends on the lunar calendar. If you use anything other than right up-to-the-minute information, you may turn up to find that it happened last week. Also remember that your article may not be published until the festival comes around next year, so check the dates for that too.

Bear in mind, also, that other writers and photographers may well have the same idea as you. Make your approach more original by combining a special interest with your travels. In my case, this could range from garden designs to local vegetables on sale in markets to following in the steps of plant hunters.

Whenever I travel to Africa, India or China, I always request a naturalist guide from my local ground agent. They tend to be enthusiastic and generous in passing on their invaluable knowledge. I take photocopies or make sketches to show my guide of any unusual plants and animals I particularly want to find. I did this once with a bizarre insect native to Madagascar. Quite unfazed, my guide produced the small red and black beetle with the distinctive giraffe-like neck the following day, because he knew which shrub it fed on. Whatever your main interest, it is always fruitful to talk to local people and, if possible, get and use a quotable quote. Don't be shy about asking questions because you never know what spin-off leads may develop as a result.

WHAT IMAGES TO TAKE

The quality of the images is, of course, crucial and for reproduction you must provide high-quality jpegs saved at 300dpi, preferably at A4 size (30 × 21cm or 3543 × 2480 pixels) with Adobe RGB colour space, which is the industry standard.

When faced with a plethora of possible subjects in a new location, I adopt a two-pronged approach. On the one hand I make lists of prime locations and species I want to find; on the other I am always on the lookout for the unexpected. Like the time I spotted a huge pile of rose blossoms beside a street in Hotan on China's Silk Road. Quite fortuitously I was given a glass of mei gei (rose wine) that evening. It took two more days to track down the rose bushes and early one morning I entered the back garden of a family home to take pictures of women and girls plucking rose heads at first light, specifically for the wine production. It was pure luck that my visit to Hotan coincided with the peak time for the rose blooms and only by asking lots of questions did I get the chance to produce a colourful photo story.

The chances are that anything which catches my eye will also appeal to other people, whether I use the pictures to illustrate an article or accompany a lecture. It makes sense to make your research pay dividends and get as much out of a journey as possible. Indeed, as a result of that single trip, a large feature on Silk Road traditions appeared in World Magazine, with annotated photo essays on wine production, hand-made silk (my main objective), hand-made paper (stumbled upon) and hand-made noodles (ditto).

No matter what your subject is, be careful to change the pace by taking different types of shot — wide-angles to set the scene, with or without people; detailed cameos to add colour or texture. Shoot both landscape (horizontal) and portrait (vertical) formats. It is always worth remembering that a striking vertical shot with empty space at the top for the banner and room at the bottom sides for the dreaded barcode and teaser text could be a contender for a cover. The fee for a cover shot is much higher than for a picture that appears inside a magazine.

Automatic digital compact cameras keep getting better; even images taken with camera phones are used on television news if no photo-journalist was on the spot, though these images won't normally be ‘reproduction quality’ for a magazine. Before buying a camera check the maximum jpeg file size it can produce, since this will be the main limitation to getting a cover shot published. Compact digital cameras with a single zoom lens are lightweight and easy to use and can produce some great shots. Digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras come with a higher price tag but enable you to see precisely which part of the image is in focus, so are best for critical close-ups and wildlife. They also allow you to interchange lenses.

SO WHAT ABOUT THE WORDS?

Writing came later for me and at the outset it was laborious. Then a chance encounter fired my imagination to write more and in a different way. On a whale-watching trip off the coast of Mexico's Baja California, I met an author who told me she never left home without paper and pen so she could jot down thoughts that came to her in cafés or on trains or planes.

That was when it dawned on me how much downtime I had spent at airports, on long-haul flights or steaming south to Antarctica in an ice breaker; so the first thing I now pack in my hand luggage is a thick A4 pad and several pens. Because I think so much faster than I can type, I prefer to jot down ideas for articles or a synopsis for a book or even to write a complete article which can be tidied up later. If you are a better typist than I am and are able to travel with a laptop, then you can compose directly on to that. Either way, the more you write the easier it will become.

TAKING NOTES

My bible is my field notebook — one for each trip — with the country and date written on the spine. As I write this I can see hundreds stacked up on a shelf above my desk. My favourite is a plain paper Moleskine (www.moleskine.com) which can be closed with a strip of elastic — as used by artists and authors including Van Gogh, Picasso and Hemingway.

In addition to writing down local names of places, plants and animals, I record smells and sounds, which cannot be captured in a photograph but are invaluable for painting a verbal picture. It can also be useful to refer to the weather at a particular time, so I write a brief daily weather resumé. And I keep notes on bizarre food such as jellyfish, giant salamander or sea cucumber — all of which I have eaten in China — which can be woven into a story.

After years of working this way, I was able to write almost all the text for my Green China book while I was travelling in China getting the photographs. My hand-written copy was faxed back to my office peppered with ‘check date’ or ‘more info here’, so that Lucy, my researcher, could fill in the facts and figures before I returned.

I cannot think of a more congenial way of earning a living than travelling to photograph and write about my experiences off the beaten track. As a frequent visitor to Japan, I have become fascinated by haiku and have begun writing my own — but that's another story!

• Research, research, research … before you fix a date to travel.

• Find out about annual events by googling or contacting the relevant tourist board and make sure your information is up to date.

• Check out the average weather for the time you plan to be there on www.bbc.co.uk/weather/world/country_guides, and try to avoid the hurricane season.