Recently on Twitter we were asked if we had taken part in the “My 7 Links” feature from Tripbase. A week or so later we appeared in Wired2theworlds post and they nominated us to do exactly the same. So we both sat down together and decided what previous posts fitted the following criteria…

Your most beautiful post…

The post that sprung straight to our minds was our Koh Kong Island tour in Cambodia.

We loved everything about this part of our travels through Cambodia…Bartering with Mr T to arrange our own personal tour with two other travellers Carl and Ali, we arranged a tour that doesn’t usually happen over 2 days. We had two devoted locals one acted as our tour guide, the other as the boat driver. We visited the most desolate, untouched beaches either of us have ever experienced and swam in crystal clear blue water. We had every beach completely to ourselves and ate amazing fresh seafood, barbecued and prepared by our two trusty Cambodian friends. To top this off we stayed at a very local floating fishing village, played with the children, visited their school, played pool with the locals and eventually stayed in one of their family homes. This was a truely authentic Cambodian home-stay experience, far far away from any tourists.

The second part of the blog post for Koh Kong is featured here, just in case you didn’t see enough beauty in the first one!

Your most popular post…

We were pretty happy to discover that our most popular post (according to Google Analytics) was from our Yuanyang Rice Terraces visit in Yunnan Province, China. The bus journey from Kunming was as ever a little scary in parts and often delayed along the narrow mountain roads, and when we arrived in Yuanyang there were no views, only fog! This is very normal for this part of the world though, often the valleys are deep-set in very thick fog, but when the fog lifts the rice terraces reflect all the light around in their pools of water stretching out for miles. This is a breathtaking part of the world, with a very strong traditional and cultural heritage stemming from ancient hill tribe minorities. It is one of the highlighted things to do in China so perhaps this explains why it has been our most popular blog post. Sunny’s Guesthouse is also recommended in the Lonely Planet so this may have helped!

Your most controversial post…

We haven’t really gone into too much controversy whilst travelling through Asia, there are many areas we could have touched on with regard to Communist run governments but we weren’t there to be political journalists! However whilst we were in Vietnam staying in Mui Ne on the coast we did experience first-hand a little bit of uneasy Police action. Two policemen decided to stop us not long after we had set off on a hired motorbike for the day. Their reason being that we didn’t have a Vietnamese drivers license! To cut a long story short, TET was one week away and we were told after our shared $50 dollar fine with the bike owner that this sort of thing does happen quite frequently around the National Holidays as the Police are in effect collecting their beer money in the form of fines!! Thanks for that one! This story features in the second part of the post.

Your most helpful post…

We’ve written a few tips and tricks posts, reviews and recipes from our cooking course experiences and even offered the chance for one lucky follower to win a print from our travels! But the most helpful post would be our Top 5 tours in Asia. We’ve gone into who we booked it with and why, the costs, what we thought was good, bad and so on. We didn’t always choose the obvious tour with the obvious tour operator so we were really happy with the tours we chose and wanted to share this with the rest of the travelling community.

A post whose success surprised you…

Not an obvious choice when it comes to written content and the response we received, but the post focusing around our stay in Luang Prabang, Laos has proven to be very successful. This is down to the imagery that we shot whilst we were staying there. We ended up staying longer in this quaint World Heritage town, and shot some really atmospheric photography centred around colour, texture and mood along with some great documentary work of locals and tourists in and around the place. We’ve also had one image accepted for an International Award and our first print sale came from some imagery contained within this blog post.

A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved…

We were blown away by how magical a place The Summer Palace really is. We loved our imagery from our day here, very atmospheric with layers of mist encompassing ornate hand carved palaces, bridges and pagodas. Very easy to get to if you take the metro there which means it only costs 20p each way!! The site is huge, and we could have easily spent 2 days if not longer to capture the sheer essence of the Summer Palace site. Most people visiting Beijing will focus on the Great Wall, Tiannamen Square and the Forbidden City but we think The Summer Palace should be way up there on that list!!

The post that you are most proud of…

Perhaps an obvious choice but we are truly proud of our very first post from Japan! This shows us setting off from the UK and records our first day as we arrived in Tokyo. We were both jaded from jetlag and the Leica was still an exciting new tool for us to photograph with. On the Tokyo metro we snapped away discretely at our fellow passengers, managed to go the wrong way, and had our first taste of authentic Japanese noodles! It was all so new and exciting back then and we were on a high with street photography, getting the first travel blog-post out and starting our journey.

Thanks to wired2theworld for the nomination, we both hope you enjoyed our 7 links. Here are our five nominations…

• Totaltravelbug.com

• Worldtravelguide.net

• blog.networkosaka.com

• Good.Is

• weblogtheworld.com

Shooting for the Creative Marketplace is the preferred used term for shooting stock photography according to Commercial Photography Consultant Zoe Whishaw. Before I moved away from Leicester I attended a seminar led by Zoe at the AOP Gallery in London. I decided to attend the seminar as shooting for stock is something that Dave & I are interested in whilst we travel along & soak up what we see. I guess it’s a way that we can hopefully make some money back on the trip, but also a new challenge from a photography point of view…shooting with an idea in mind, perhaps thinking about how some of our imagery can be used in this “creative market place”.

Along with other AOP members & a few non-members I went with open ears & mind to see whether I could go away feeling inspired & with a fresh approach to shooting for stock. I knew the seminar wasn’t going to be focused on bland stock imagery, imagery sold in bulk from micro-stock agencies such as i-stock or Shutterstock because the introduction to the workshop described it as offering a more creative approach & thinking about more innovative ways of shooting stock. So in many ways my expectations were high.

Zoe introduced herself as a Commercial Photography Consultant, a title that belongs to very few & one she practically thought up for herself. Her previous 17 years with Getty as a senior creative & current profile of mentoring professional photographers & photo-agents certainly allowed for an insightful & imaginative approach to this workshop.

So what did I learn? To summarise, for Dave & I to be serious in our approach to shooting stock whilst on our travels we need to challenge ourselves creatively, have conceptual meaning behind our imagery, be playful with our subject matter, think more laterally about what we’re attempting to shoot & re-invent previous ways & concepts of shooting. These are just a few things for us to think about. We can place this in any part of the world as long as we look at the usability of the image. When it comes to travel stock photography the main thing we need to focus on is what draws us to a place i.e; the mood, the feel, the atmosphere, what is iconic about it, re-inventing old cliche’s & believe that there is real beauty or emotion within a place & the people that we encounter either constructed or un-constructed.

We will seek inspiration & advice from other well-known creative stock photographer’s & it would be great if our work was accepted for rights managed or royalty free usage by stock libraries. Photographer’s that stood out in Zoe’s seminar were Tim Flach, Susana Vera & Tim Macpherson because their work emphasises character, real-life moments, controversy & often imperfection. Photographer’s who not only sell their photography through macrostock channels, but also would use them in their portfolio. That is what we want to do, create imagery that we are proud of, have fun with & would include in our portfolio as well as see it distributed through a photo agent.

There are many areas to investigate further such as model & property release & also which agency we think would want to sell our work. So let the research begin because this is a venture that will inspire, re-form & challenge the way we shoot.

It was great to meet Zoe & be able to discuss options, think up keywords for usable imagery & brainstorm around how certain brands would use that type of imagery.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0, processed in Photoshop)