All posts tagged: photography

How to Possess Your Travels

Most people can’t help buy souvenirs and take photographs while on vacation. These two activities provide the simplest way remember the journey taken and take a piece of it home. Yet do they really enhance our experience? In an earlier post, I wrote how the impulse to document our lives with photos increases when we travel to beautiful places. The connection between buying souvenirs and taking photographs became clear to me as I sailed to the Manchones Reef on a small dive boat in Isla Mujeres, Mexico off the coast of Cancun. Not long ago, it was a tiny fisherman’s island. As Cancun turned into the decaying resort-town it is today, the island’s sand streets also gave way to paved roads and shabby hotels. Nevertheless, Isla Mujeres still remains a haven of calm in comparison to the degenerated concrete that is Cancun. So I jumped on the ferry and sailed straight to the island as soon as my flight landed. The plan was to get over my jetlag while relaxing on the beach. The only thing I wanted to “do” while over …

On the Obsession of Travel Photography

A few weeks ago, I ate dinner with Barbara—a woman also staying at Hostel La Candelaria in Valladolid in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Valladolid is frequented by travelers and backpackers alike for its proximity to Chichen Itza, Ek Balam, and breathtaking cenotes–natural sinkholes–scattered about the Yucatan state. Barbara showed me Google photos of Rio Lagartos, a coastal town north of Valladolid where pink flamingos roam free. Even though she failed to recruit any other hostel dwellers to join her day-trip, she was determined to take the two-hour bus ride to the lagoon and photograph the flamingos. “I will go there and take photos of pink flamingos. And they’d better be there or else I will Photoshop them into the picture!” she said. I couldn’t be sure whether her priority was to actually see the flamingos or possess first-hand photos of them. I had previously written about the transformative effects of being filmed on the experience of diving. Barbara’s excitement to possess images of pink flamingos prompted a renewed contemplation over a subject that has long agitated me. As …

Pictures, Memories, and Lots of Fish: Diving in Koh Tao

Last October I completed a diving course with ScubaShack in Koh Tao, Thailand. The four-day course which was offered for a bargain price of 8,500 Baht certified me as a PADI licensed Open Water Diver and equipped me with a lovely little booklet in which to record the colorful fish I shall get to see in my future dives. The last day of the course was of course the highlight: two 18-meter dives in Chumphon Pinnacle and Hin Pee Wee. In anticipation of our first dive that morning, my friends Levent and Seda, and our instructor Claus boarded the dive boat at the unbearable hour of 05:45 am, thinking: “Why this Thai torture? Aren’t we on vacation?” ScubaShack is one of the earliest risers among tens of diving schools on the island famous for licensing the highest number of new divers. They torment their students with a 05:00 am wake-up call so that they may relish the wondrous magic of underwater Koh Tao, undisturbed by the hundreds of other divers who arrive at the very late hour …