In 2023, I traveled extensively, frequently visiting cities and discovering new countries and cultures. Despite all my travel being within the EU, I feel like I’ve learned a great deal. I will share all my travel insights in this article.

Introduction

Ah, travel – don’t we just love to go out and explore new places? Sure, we do, especially on holidays. However, traveling for work is way more common than traveling for leisure in my life. In fact, I can’t say I traveled for leisure in 2023 at all. Besides going down to a few cities in Hungary for a few days, the rest has been for work reasons. In 2023, I crossed borders in all ways possible, except on foot: airplane, sea, train, car. Each trip was like no other, and I experimented with bringing little to no kit to bringing several lights, stands, and the rest of it. Here are my findings and the things I will be implementing in 2024.

Kit To Bring

Starting with the kit, assuming most photographers will find that most interesting. As a photographer working with off-camera lighting a lot, I must bring a flash. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I normally take two camera bodies and two lenses: my primary Canon 5DS body and a backup Canon 5D Mark IV. As for lenses, I take the 24-70mm f/2.8 and rarely a 16-35mm f/2.8. Recently, I was lucky enough to get a 50mm f/1.4, which will be replacing my 24-70mm f/2.8. I learned that I can cut down on what I bring. While I want redundancy in my setup, two camera bodies and a 50mm f/1.4 are all I need. Regarding flash and modifiers, I experimented with bringing a single A1, a B2, and a B1X. Of the three, the one I liked the most was the B2, as it is lightweight and can fulfill many tasks. However, the pack and head system means more footprint on location. For this reason, I will be bringing the B1X. Modifier-wise, a Magnum reflector and a 3’ Octa will do most jobs. If there is not enough space for an Octa, an OCF dish can comfortably provide similar lighting. Things such as a laptop, tether cable, drives, and other small bits are to stay.

When traveling, you need to keep your kit to a minimum. If space is tight, settle on taking a single camera, lens, speedlight, tether cable, and an SSD. You can really do most work with that setup. If space is less of a problem, grab a bigger light, but don’t take several. Chances are, whatever you are shooting can be done with a single good battery-powered strobe. While I can’t speak for camera and lens brands, I can speak for lights. Having traveled with my Profoto lights far and wide, they work just fine. I am not afraid to break anything if my bag bumps against a train step. The same with modifiers: the 3’ octa has been assembled and broken down hundreds of times, and it holds up like it was bought yesterday. While some readers will go against me and say that I am sponsored or paid by Profoto to say this, this simply isn’t true. I have bought my lights and have made a conscious choice to use that brand. I will switch as soon as there is something better, trust me. There just isn’t anything better.

Organizing Shoots in Foreign Markets

Organizing shoots in foreign cities can be quite a challenge as you want to find interesting people to photograph or ways you can photograph various important events. This comes with outreach. Around a month before your trip, start reaching out to people in the city you will be visiting and try to set up a shoot. This can be done via looking at hashtags on Instagram, but an even better way would be to find a few key photographers working in that market and then seeing the team credits. Follow the team, and voila, you now have a small list of possible collaborators. From then on, it becomes easy, as local people can be very helpful in finding cool locations, etc.

Networking

Travel inevitably involves networking. I won’t spend much on this point as I cover it extensively in another article, but I do want to say this. Batch meetings, dinners, possibly even relevant events. While an hour-long meeting with generally shallow conversation may not seem like the best way to spend time in a new city, it can lead to some promising jobs. Who knows, maybe the next time you will be visiting that city, you will be flown in.

Safety 

When you travel, you are inevitably taking tens of thousands of dollars of gear with you. I recommend packing your bags in a way that makes it hard for possible criminals to get inside them. Another great safety measure is AirTags. You can get a pack of five and put them in various bags that you will be bringing. I can only wish for photography brands to start implementing this technology into their products. One can simply dump the bag itself and take the contents. I advise against checked baggage. It is best to take your most precious possessions on board and keep an eye on them. If you really have to put your bag underneath yourself, use AirTags and have contingency plans in case it gets lost. When going by train or bus, keep your bags over your head. Should you have a large bag that the driver won’t allow inside, put it under the bus, but from the opposite side. Typically, you’d place your luggage on the same side as you’re entering. If someone exits at a stop, they will have all the chances to steal your stuff if it’s there. By placing it on the other side, you are making it much more difficult.

In Hotel Rooms

In hotel rooms, I keep my gear in a bag and then hide the bag someplace. Under the bed is an obvious one, so don’t put it there. One way is inside a sofa, another is in one of the little kitchen cabinets, and so on. Once again, AirTags are your friend. If you are extra paranoid, you can hide your gear but leave the bag with various small items out. Should someone want to take your gear, they will grab the first thing they see: your bag. Always check you locked the door and take other obvious precautions. I always take my laptop with me, as the data stored on it is what’s most precious to me. Should it get stolen, I would lose passwords, the ability to work, and many more other things.

On The Street

All camera bags I had were the ones that lock from the back. This way, the only way to access the camera compartment is by taking the bag off and then taking the gear out. This is the safest way. When in London, Paris, or Barcelona, you might be a victim of pickpockets. I generally put my passport, phone, keys, money, and so on inside the bag with all the cameras and have them on my person at all times. Your phone should be in your inside breast pocket, with the garment zipped up. This is not a 100% way to stay protected, but it will stop most pickpockets.

There are more than one million notes placed in the cracks of Jerusalem’s Western Wall each year and one photographer has captured them in a way not seen previously.

Also known as the Wailing Wall, it is part of the ancient Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism. Ofir Barak’s project Chrysalis explores the powerfull pull of the wall.

Barak has captured other holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but between 2020 and 2023 he began to focus on the Western Wall.

To capture Chrysalis, Barak had to find a macro camera setup but found it difficult because of the Leica M10 Monocrhom rangefinder camera and the M-mount system it utilizes.

“Since macro photography was unfamiliar to me, I had to find the right equipment to help express my vision for this project,” Barak tells PetaPixel.

“I chose a macro 85mm lens from Laowa that can focus up to 0.163 cm (0.5 feet). After some testing, I learned that the minimum focus distance gave me the proximity distance I was looking for, yet it cast a shadow on the object since it was this close. I needed to address that, so I compensated and illuminated the scene with a ring light.”

The resulting photos are abstract shapes and textures, some of which barely look like notes at all — it is easy to see where he got the name Chrysalis from.

“The age of the notes on the Western Wall is unpredictable, ranging from a few hours to several months or even years,” explains Barak.

“However, due to the limited capacity of the wall to contain these notes, the spaces between the stones fill up every few months, causing some notes to eventually fall from the cracks.

“To address the issue of limited space, a decision was made to clear the notes from the wall twice a year before the Rosh Hashanah and Passover holidays.”

Barak says that these notes are “profound, personal, and meaningful” to the people who placed them there and they come from not just Jewish people, but people of all faiths.

“Bound up in the physical act of writing a private prayer or request on a small piece of paper, folding it up, and placing it into a crevice in the surviving remnant of the ancient Temple Mount is a deep spiritual intention between the worshiper and the hallowed place where they keenly feel God’s presence,” says Barak.

“There is no particular format or style for writing a note to be placed on the Western Wall. The notes and texts are silent prayers from the heart, expressing one’s most intimate thoughts and feelings. They can be a single word, a few words, or many.

“They can be written in any language on any kind of paper, on a scrap of paper ripped from a notebook, on a bus ticket, or even on paper currency. The practice has become widespread for Jews and non-Jews alike, and it is common to see people from all beliefs participating in this tradition.”

PetaPixel has previously featured Barak’s work: his documentation of Mea Shearim one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem outside of the Old City.

More of the photographer’s work can be found on his website and Instagram. Chrysalis is available as a book and can be purchased here.

Image credits: Photographs by Ofir Barak

Aaron McKenzie Fraser is an editorial/commercial photographer with over 20 years of specialising in location-based environmental portraits for national/international magazines and advertising clients based in Nova Scotia, Canada. Since moving to a rural community outside the city centre, he has been enchanted by the beauty and spookiness of the place he calls home. What started as a personal project has transformed into establishing a tourism centre and self-promotional campaign celebrating the haunting beauty that defines the region.

Sketch Harbour is a mystical and spooky photography series featuring landscapes, portraits, and still-life compositions. The collection is currently on display at the “Sketch Harbour Department of Tourism & Social Club,” housed within a 100+-year-old registered Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia fishing shack situated on the edge of the treacherous North Atlantic Ocean in Ketch / Sketch Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada, which might as well be the middle of nowhere.

The exhibition, set against the backdrop of the historic shed, offers an immersive experience that transports visitors into the enigmatic world of Sketch Harbour. Aaron’s masterful use of light and shadow captures the essence of the harbour, revealing its ever-changing moods and mystical atmosphere.

In addition to the physical exhibition, the Sketch Harbour Department of Tourism invites global audiences to explore the collection online here. The virtual gallery offers an opportunity for art enthusiasts worldwide to experience the haunting beauty of Sketch Harbour from the comfort of their homes.

Showing a different view of the Maritimes than what you’ll see from glossy tourism campaigns, Aaron hopes to draw creatives from near and far. To attract them and help them remember their visit, we created a photo zine, postcards, t-shirts, toques, matchboxes, stickers, and necklace vials of harbour water.​​​

Kramerville, Sandton, South Africa

‘A group of Namji dolls in a shop called Amatuli. They are very good at grouping products together, and the result is a place that you can spend quite a while in just enjoying the visual treats.’

Photograph: Peter Austin/GuardianWitness

The Photography & Video Show is making its return to the NEC in Birmingham from Saturday March 16 to Tuesday March 19. 

And, to celebrate the biggest imaging event of the season returning to its traditional March slot, the Show is teaming up with Canon to give away an amazing camera package: a Canon EOS R6 Mark II with Canon RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS STM lens. A combination that’s worth £3,130!

Canon will be one of over 200 exhibitors currently announced for The Photography & Video Show, covering all aspects of imaging and image making. From mirrorless cameras and DSLRs to action cams and film cameras, lenses and lighting to bags and backdrops, image editing to video post-production and of course, the biggest buzzword of the moment: AI. All bases will be covered at the supershow! 

And that’s not all. There are hundreds of free talks, demonstrations, workshops and seminars, featuring some of the biggest and most exciting names in the industry. From Royal photographers to YouTube personalities, BBC journalists to brand ambassadors, there’s an amazing amount of knowledge, wisdom and anecdotes to soak up. 

You can find all the details on , and buy your tickets, over on the official website. 

And if you want to be in with a chance of winning that amazing Canon EOS R6 Mark II with RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 package worth £3,130, you can enter the competition via the link below! Full terms and conditions can be found on the competition page.

The Photography & Video Show is organized by Future Plc, which is the parent company of Digital Camera World. 

I first used a hydraulic platform to take photographs when working on my Playground series in 2011. I’d been trying to capture training sessions atthe facilities in the Netherlands where members of the fire brigade, police and Ministry of Defence are put through their paces. Initially I was balanced on a stepladder. But when I sent through some of the pictures, I was told they worked aesthetically but lacked a sense of where these ghost towns actually were – away from civilisation. To achieve that, I knew I was going to have to get higher.

As the camera I was using was bulky and expensive, I didn’t want to risk attaching it to a drone. Besides, drones attract attention. A cherry picker offered the perfect solution, allowing me to shoot securely from much greater heights. I’ve been using them for my high-perspective work ever since. Some of the people from the company I rent the equipment from now follow me on Instagram. They always get it squeaky clean for me, because they know I’m one of the few clients who will bring it back in the same condition.

This picture, taken 10 years ago, is part of my Park series. In the Netherlands, we’re quite cramped for space, meaning the parks in Amsterdam and Rotterdam are used pretty much as people’s back yards, gathering points for city-dwellers. Terrible things are going on in the world, but here is proof that within Amsterdam, a vibrant city full of people from all over the world, we can coexist peacefully next to each other.

I’d visit each park on my bike first, to work out my shooting position, check for solid ground for the crane, and work out where the sun was going to be throughout the day. The season, the weather conditions, everything had to be taken into account – it’s quite mathematical. When it comes to actually setting up, I don’t get permission first. In the Netherlands, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness afterwards than to ask for a permit beforehand. I would just turn up with the cherrypicker wearing an orange vest and a white helmet – I’ve found the brighter you dress, the less visible you are. If people do ask questions, I usually say: “I’m making a 3D scan.” It’s a boring answer that helps deflect attention.

This is Westerpark. What you can’t see is that there’s a huge festival going on behind the fence to the left, which made it even easier to work without anyone bothering me. Because the landscape, for me, is as important as the people in it, I always try to make sure the people are equally divided around the frame, to balance the image. Once I did ask a family: “Would you mind going a little bit over there?” But then they constantly looked at my camera, so that’s not something I do any more.

As a kid, I was dragged to museums and galleries by my parents, which I’m now very grateful to them for. The way 17th-century Dutch masters painted light ended up influencing my work. Sometimes, on a cloudy day, I’ll wait an hour and a half for a beam of light to burst through, as if the sun is painting on the landscape. When everything comes together, it’s like one symphony orchestra, with all the elements working together.

I become very focused and will wait as long as it takes. When I was shooting Playground, I’d sometimes be working in the snow. People from the army would be calling up: “Please come down. You’ve been up there for nearly five hours, you must be freezing.” The height I shoot at depends on the subject. For the Park series I wanted to give a sense of what people were doing, so I worked between 10 and 15 metres up. In some instances, I’m 20 metres up, because I want the figures to show the scale of the landscape. Above 15 metres, I can barely hear people below. It feels like I can reach out and grab birds flying by. I move around in an “in between” layer, a kind of a divine perspective. It can get lonely, though. I always say: “When I start talking to myself, I have to go home.”

This image is part of Human.Kind, a group exhibition at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva until 14 April, in collaboration with Prix Pictet.

Jeroen Hofman’s CV

Born: 1976, Brabant, the Netherlands.
Trained: The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, graduated in 2002.
Influences: Edward Burtynsky, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky.
High point: “My first big solo exhibition in The Hague’s Photography Museum in 2022.”
Low point: “I am a fanatical snowboarder and got stuck in a glacial crevasse in Austria. The mountain rescue service got me out.”
Top tip: “This advice from Nadav Kander back in 2013: ‘Never try to be someone else.’”

Ávila, Spain

Horse riders charge through a bonfire made of pine branches after the animals were blessed by a priest to protect and purify them for the coming year, during the annual Las Luminarias festival

Photograph: Burak Akbulut/Anadolu/Getty Images