How to Travel Through Urban Landscapes with a Camera in Your Hand

I’ve never bought into the big travel gig. I simply desired to meet lots of new people — and learn about who they are. So I bought a Camera.

I’m an introverted type. I’ve always sought new places within the mind.

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Pathways of thought that lead away from mundane routines, then carry us across plains and valleys to fresh ideas. Books, other people’s ideas, well formulated and written down as an experience, to share with people like you and me, that’s travelling. That’s being in motion.

Non-Fiction and Fiction, alike, both offer the recorded human experience that we can learn from, we glean new ideas that lead to new ground.

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I’ve travelled by hook or by crook around some parts of Europe. Thumbing lifts from Bavaria to France late at night in the teeming rain. I took the milk-train to Switzerland on a 10 Deutschmark ticket, and arrived exhausted. After umpteen line changes, being backed into a shunting yard — and not told the train terminates here. A dark little village with no connections.

Then back to the thoughts that moved my boots, and motivated me to stick my trusty thumb out again and hitch a lift to the next big town.

That worked, except, the lift I got was on the electric village milk float, we whined our way through the village, the milkman stopping for deliveries, and happy to have my unexpected company early in his shift. A two-hour ride through the misty morning vistas of a village that remains unknown to me.

Later that day, a series of Mini Coopers, VW vans with painted flowers, and Opel Mantas took me piece meal across the countryside to my destination.

Finally, back on the fast-moving train to Switzerland. The countryside became a blur of green, yellow, and blue, reminding me of a smeared canvas of oil paint. I opened a book and read all the way.

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The reason I first picked up a camera and walked out the door of my apartment, was for similar reasons that I took the train, and thumbed lifts around Germany and France, to walk out the door and go find interesting sights. To discover things that I could reflect on, and if they were that interesting, I’d be moved to photograph them as best I could.

I do this. It surprises me ever more, each day when I wake up I think about one of two things, “do I have time to go and take some photos, or should I sit and write?”

I probably have to earn a crust and teach, but there’ll be time to capture moments, and write stories.

I try to go with the weather and the season. Right now summer is folding in its wings, and autumn leaves are already falling onto the city streets. This puts me under pressure. I don’t want to be the fool who allows all those beautiful experiences to pass me by — no time to get on a plane, and search in distant lands for something new, my city beckons with its rapidly changing landscape.

I know that within the next two weeks I’ll walk through the streets of Berlin, and I’ll pass locals and the late tourists standing close to a clump of trees, the occasional gasp, Smartphones, cameras, gazes, and watery eyes wondering at the multicoloured sights of wet streets and autumn leaves.

A camera is a portal to worlds we might not know about. It allows us to examine strange occurrences that we see as we stroll around the city. The sights we capture are moments of human experience, the most important thing, when humans interact and feel emotions.

To gaze about the street, and to look through the viewfinder, are two different experiences.

If the beauty of a falling leaf is important to the solitary photographer, then it is a moment of nature and human experience interacting.

Our cameras can’t capture emotions as things, but we can recognise the moment when it is expressed in laughter and tears, even the flat pale faces of workers travelling home, tired and hungry, can’t hide their humanness. It’s worth capturing with the black box of magic that we love to carry with us.

When we take photos, and feel the moment, we are discovering not only the external world, but ourselves.

The emotion that arises when we see something. We feel moved without wordy explanations as to why we want to capture the moment. So, we say things like, “I love to chase the light and shadows”, or, “I’m seeking the truth in small moments of life.” And we are right with the explanations of why we photograph.

Pathways lead us away, and we follow them, then, as time passes, we discover that these pathways are parts of ourselves. We are exploring life.

While others ponder the meaning of life in the philosopher’s bar, elbow leaning on teak, frowning face, and pint in hand, we tend to travel with our minds, even two kilometres from our homes, no words, and the silence in the pathways of thought only interrupted with a ‘click’, our button finger moved by creative thought, to capture a falling autumn leaf. An interaction with nature, a feeling of awe.