Talking Travel with Pico Iyer and a book give-away

by Jamie Rhein on

When I first read Pico Iyer’s book Video Night in Kathmandu, I was hooked. Reading Iyer’s words is a trip down streets that you may have traveled before but have not found the words to describe. When you read his prose, the tendency is to say, “Yes, that’s it.” For places one hasn’t been, he draws you into the scenes as if you are there looking at the world through his perceptive eyes.

Seven years ago, I met Iyer, who lives in Japan when he’s not traveling the world, at a writers symposium in New Delhi. As usual, there was a bit of trepidation in saying hello to a person whose work I admire. Like, what if this person I think so highly of turns out to be a jerk? There was no need for such concern. Iyer is as gracious and warm as his writing.

As fate has it, I was able to reconnect with him this past summer via e-mail. In between his recent trips to Sri Lanka and New Delhi to attend literary events earlier this year, Iyer answered my Talking Travel interview questions. In subsequent e-mails, I found out that we have a mutual admiration for Kentucky, Thomas Merton and Johnny Depp. Yes, they are connected. More on that later. That post is percolating.

In the meantime, here’s the interview where Iyer gives his impressions of honing into the essence of place, the Country Bear Jamboree, Atlanta, and more.

Bonus: This Talking Travel interview comes with a bonus for Gadling readers. This month Iyer’s book The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama came out as a Vintage Books paperback. His publisher, Random House, will give away two copies of the book (shipping included). See the end of the interview for contest rules and how to win. Look for the book review on Wednesday.

1. What are your earliest memories of travel as a child that captured that sense of excitement and wonder?

I am walking down the street in Oxford–a grey street of red-brick houses–towards the local sweet-shop, and something in me recognizes that, though this place is the only one I’ve known, and though I feel the same as every one of the five year-old boys around me, it’s not mine, and therein lies a promise, a possibility.

I am being driven by my parents through the Alps, the first massed snow I’ve ever seen. I am stepping into a fancy lobby in a big hotel in Belgium (my father must be at a conference), and realizing the pleasure of rooms not one’s own. I am setting foot in Reykjavik Airport, during a transit stop on the cheapest flight then across the Atlantic, and faces are crowding in against the window to see a woman dressed in a sari, an extraterrestrial, as she might be in Iceland. She is my mother.

[photo taken by Alefiya Akabarally at the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka this past January.]

2. One quality I’ve always admired about your writing is your ability to tap into the personality of a country. What advice do you have about tapping into the essence of a place?

Places are like people, with personalities just as distinct, and a travel writer, of course, is someone who aims to create not just a photograph of a place but a portrait. My advice would be to walk and walk and walk, as soon as you arrive, when the place is still new to you and every perception is fresh–the mind has not yet begun to settle into prejudices or arguments.

Take down everything and remember that anything (an Internet cafe, a Golden Arches, a shop selling TVs) is interesting, and revealing of the society around it. And try, wherever possible, to remember that you’ve come all this way–even if it’s only to another state–to enter a foreign state of mind, a different sensibility. The joy of travel is not being reminded of your assumptions, or being confirmed in your beliefs, but in being led out of them, to something utterly other and, perhaps, unfathomable.

3. As a person who is a master at picking just the right words to evoke images and moods of a place, how have you observed a particular country’s use of language influences the personality it projects? Or, do you notice these differences?

Alas, I travel only with English, broken or occasionally patched together again, and I’m not sure I am sensitive to the words around me at all. As you know, I did write a whole chapter in my book Sun After Dark on how India has remade the English that the British Empire brought to it, so as to create a new language, thoroughly Indian, richly spiced, funny and charming and freighted with innocence, that is the first step towards the remaking of English literature we’re seeing in countries such as India. People worry that the world is growing smaller, but my experience is that, even as two hundred countries speak English, that simply leads to 200 often mutually incomprehensible forms of English.

[photo of Iyer talking with writer William Dalrymple at the Jaipur Literature Festival this past January. ]

4. Although most of the time I read your work, I feel a certain aura of safety. In Sun After Dark you give an account of your trip to a prison that did not go so well. Was your danger radar off that day? What WERE you thinking?

I travel in search of difficulty (or at least of contradiction and unease and challenge)–and apart from that prison trip, that book describes a night-time drive through the mountains of Yemen, from which I thought I’d never emerge, visiting Ethiopia, where I was staying in a hotel next to the most wanted man in the world, bumping through the haunted night in Cambodia and walking into privation and near-revolution in Haiti. I have been lucky enough to live in relative safety–and comfort and peace–all my life, so when I travel, I am trying to go to places as different from my gated privilege as possible. I want to see what the world is like for the 99% of my neighbors in my global village who are not lucky enough to live in a resort town in California or in placid and very protected Japan.

That’s why I’ve spent 26 years now in war-zones and revolutions, as a journalist, and why the places I seek out are generally places of great strife or seeming suffering (I write this in Sri Lanka, where my guide here from my last trip was gunned down on his way to work three weeks ago). Some people work very hard in an office, and when they travel they want nothing but peace and ease. Many refugees, propelled out of their homes by war or threat, long only to get back to the places they’ve been obliged to leave. I am just a regular person who’s never had to fight for my life and who isn’t burdened by the pressures of the office, so when I travel I want to go to South Africa, to Beirut, to Cuba, or to anywhere that will remind me that my cosy life is not the norm.

5. What do you do to hone your senses so that you avoid bad situations, or do you think you’re more likely to go with the flow and hope for the best?

I do listen to my intuition, and assume that it always knows more than I do. Though I do seek out difficulty, I don’t want to place myself needlessly in the way of danger; I see no value in people from relatively safe places courting death just for the thrill of it. But travel is not about physical movement; it’s about trying to journey out of your assumptions into the eyes and shoes of another. If it can be done without harming the other, or yourself, it can only be good; if not, then one has to ask why one’s doing it.

6. As much as traveling can create the sense that one is connected to the world, it can also create the feeling of being unsettled. What do you do to stay grounded and keep track of yourself in the process?

I tend to be too settled, so I seek out being unsettled–at the very least, that can test the ground I have. Everywhere man is settled, as Emerson says, and only insofar as he unsettled is there any hope for him. I hope I have solid ground within me–I do after all spend two months a year in a monastery, and eight months in a monastic life in Japan (a two-room apartment without cellphone or printer or World Wide Web or car or bicycle), and I have been living in these simple cells now for more than 16 years, so I feel that I am rooted, as much as I need to be, in what is real and stable.

But to stay too long in these places that I know as well as my heartbeat would be to risk complacency, blindness and inertia. So I try to force myself out of my grooves, feeling that groundedness is what I have, unsettledness what I need.

7. With all the locations you’ve written about, what location totally surprised you-a place where you expected one thing, but found something completely different? Either for the good or the bad.

Atlanta, Georgia is, on paper, one of the great global players on the planet–the home of CNN, Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn and Delta Airlines. But spending weeks and months on end there in 1996, at the time of its Olympic Games, I wondered if it was global beneath the surface. I suppose I expected, I hoped for an easy acquaintance with the larger world of the kind one finds in a Miami or a Vancouver; but I found (with apologies to those who know Atlanta better than I do) a small town’s idea of what a big town should be, and a sense of power without a corresponding sense of confidence. Atlanta began to seem to be a force on paper more than in its heart or global imagination.

8. Is there a piece of travel wisdom someone told you that you took to heart? What was it?
The Dalai Lama always suggests that there’s no virtue in looking backward–the future is what we can change–and I suppose that is what has guided me in my traveling life. Most of the travelers I love and learned from are in some ways journeying back into the past, to explain the present; I, by making most of my central travels to places like Los Angeles Airport or the state of jet lag (or even to the monastery) have always pointed myself towards the future. My interest is not in what the world has been but what we can make of it, especially those 21st century citizens who are, to some degree, children of possibility (alarming or pretentious as that phrase might sound to some).

9. Wherever you go, from what I gather, you seem to feel comfortable. Are there settings that feel odd to you? Ones where you ask yourself, how did I end up here anyway?

I like being by myself, so I’m not always at ease at big parties or among large groups of people. And, having grown up with movement, I haven’t always excelled at placing myself within a home, a family or a community. But I see any of these discomforts as something to be cherished, ways of confronting what, left to myself, I’d try to avoid. I suppose I do see every situation or setting as a possibility, and to fight against it would be to do it, and myself a disservice. Better to see what one can produce together.

10. When you arrive back home after a long trip, what are the things you do to slip back into your at home routine?
Alas, my home routine very quickly slips back into me. Within 36 hours of my return–certainly after one full day at home–I am back at my desk, taking walks (on foot and in the imagination), gobbling down tea and yogurt, going to sleep again at 8:30 p.m. Jet lag helps keep one unsettled and out of joint for a while, but left to my own devices I can very quickly resume the routine that I took the trip to break out of. Indeed, it’s the persistence and power of routine that probably these days moves me to travel, as I would never do otherwise.

11. I tend to see you in unusual locations-the almost off the map sort of locations. Let’s talk about mainstream.

Have you ever been to Disney World or Disneyland? If so which ride was your most favorite and why?
I go to Disneyland–and to Tokyo Disneyland–all the time, and I grew up on Space Mountain, while sustaining a lingering affection for the Country Bear Jamboree. My traveling life was probably begun in the frenzy of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and I screamed for a good (or bad) eight years or so at the Matterhorn, but it’s the country-and-western jingles of the fiddling raccoons and drawling bears that may have made (or unmade) me for life.

I should say that I do spend most of my life in mainstream locations–if monasteries count as such–and I think that they are just as interesting, rich and rare as Easter Island or North Korea. In my experience, the destination has never been very important; all that matters is the awakened eye you can (or cannot) bring to it. As Thoreau famously put it, to paraphrase a bit, “It matters little how far you go, the farthest commonly the worst. The only important thing is how alive you are.

12. And one more. Is it a small world after all?

It’s a huge, heterogeneous, endlessly various and surprising world, only made small by our illusions that distance has disappeared. I think the differences and distances between places are now perhaps as great as they have ever been, partly because of the illusion of closeness.

To enter the contest for the chance to win a copy of the book The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

  • Simply leave a comment below telling us one of the places where you’ve traveled that made you wish you could capture its essence on paper.
  • The comment must be left before Monday, March 23 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time.
  • You may enter only once.
  • Two winners will be selected in a random drawing.
  • These two random winners will each receive a copy of the paperback book The Open Road, (valued at $14.95)
  • Click here for complete Official Rules.
  • Open to legal residents of the 50 United States, including the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.

Plane Answers: How a pilot’s flight time relates to their experience

by Kent Wien on

Welcome to Gadling’s feature, Plane Answers, where our resident airline pilot, Kent Wien, answers your questions about everything from takeoff to touchdown and beyond. Have a question of your own? Ask away!

Ted asks:

Due to the latest streak of incidents and accidents I have seen the pilot’s experience written down in flight hours – the captain on the Turkish plane that crashed at Amsterdam had ~15,000 hrs experience, Capt. Sullenberger almost 20,000 hrs and his first officer 15,000+ hrs while the first officer on the ill-fated Colgan Air flight 3407 only had 774 flight hours experience.

However, I would like to know how this translates into years of experience; how many flight hours does a pilot accumulate in an average year; what are the differences between a long-haul pilot (747,767,777 etc), a pilot that flies shorter flights (737/A320) and a pilot for a regional airline.

If possible, I’d like to find out how a pilot’s career looks in flight hours; from moment 0 when he/she takes the first flight lesson, to the PPL and so on all the way to a Senior Flight Captain with the hours attained at the most important milestones. (I know these vary greatly from case to case, but how would it look like on a more or less approximated average?)

Oh, and one more thing: are the flight hours calculated from take-off to touch-down or do they count ground time as well?

Hi Ted,

That’s a great question.

As you mentioned, the milestones in one pilot’s career can vary wildly from another pilot’s. But I could probably give you a general range.
The researcher Anders Ericsson claims that to be an expert in any field or subject takes 10,000 hours of practice – a milestone in flying I’ve only recently reached.

Here’s a breakdown of the typical flight times for various pilots.

Student pilot

A student pilot can solo whenever an instructor is comfortable signing them off. That can be anywhere between six and twenty hours, typically.

Private Pilot

The private pilot license takes at least 40 hours to accomplish, but most finish it after 60 or 70 hours. That license allows a pilot to carry passengers with them, but not for hire.

Commercial, mult-engine and instrument rated pilot, with instructor ratings

After about 250 hours, a pilot can work toward their advanced ratings which are a requirement to flight instruct or to fly for hire.

Regional Co-pilot

Regional airlines that hire pilots for twin-engine turboprops and RJs (regional jets) typically hire pilots into the co-pilot seat with between 500 to 1,500 hours. After some time in the right seat-as little as six months and as many as ten years-the co-pilot would upgrade to the captain position.

Regional Captain

To be a captain at a regional airline, you would have to have an ATP or Air Transport Pilot license. This license requires at least 1,500 hours, along with a significant amount of cross-country and night flying time. So the typical regional captain could have between 1,500 hours and 30,000 hours.

The large spread in flight time is because some pilots end up at the regional carrier during a time of limited hiring by major airlines. After flying for ten or so years at the regional, it becomes a difficult decision to leave the company to fly for less money initially at a major airline. So many of those captains elect to stay put until they retire at the age of 65.

Regional pilots fly close to the FAA maximum allowable 1,000 hours a year.

National and major airline Co-pilots

The usual new-hire at a national or major airline has between 1,500 hours and 10,000 hours, typically. Military pilots generally don’t accrue the large number of hours in a short amount of time like regional pilots, so they tend to have between 1,500 and 3,000 hours when hired. Civilian pilots often have at least 2,500 hours, and more commonly now, 5,000 hours before landing a job at the majors.

The holy grail. Captain!

Captains at the major and national carriers usually have at least two to 15 years with the airline before upgrading. Since we’ve had an unusually stagnant decade of growth among the legacy airlines, many have between fifteen and twenty years with a company before moving to the right seat. In fact, I just had my sixteen-year anniversary and I’m still firmly planted in the right seat with no real outlook for an upgrade anytime soon. I’m sure once the retirements and growth pick up, that will change quickly.

National and Major airline pilots fly between 600 and 1,000 hours per year.

Notice I didn’t separate the wide-body, long-haul pilots from the narrow-body domestic pilots with regard to experience, since there’s relatively little flight time differences. Some pilots prefer the international flying and some would rather fly within the U.S., or their carrier is domestic only, so the flight time is relatively similar between those groups.

In the airline world, flight time is measured from the time the aircraft pushes back to the time it pulls up to the gate at the destination. Military pilots often only log the time flown in the air, without the taxi flight time included, so that can also account for the lower numbers among those pilots.

But flight time really isn’t the only way to get a feel for a pilot’s experience. Airlines look at a pilots currency, or how much they’ve flown in the past year, the amount of flight time they have in a particular type of aircraft and what type of flying they’ve been doing. A domestic pilot will accomplish a lot of takeoff and landings and gain valuable experience quicker than, say, a long-haul 747 pilot flying as one of the three or four pilots on the airplane.

And it’s also important to keep in mind that we’re all human. All pilots have to fight off complacency, as even 500-hour pilots can start to feel they’ve got this flying thing figured out.

The Turkish pilot with 15,000 hours may have been complacent or lacked currency. The facts on that accident are coming out and it’s looking like an automation failure wasn’t picked up by the pilots while on approach resulting in a loss of airspeed. Proof positive that even a 15,000 hour pilot (equivalent to nearly two straight years in the air) can be caught off guard at times.

So flight time isn’t the definitive tool used to judge a pilot’s experience level. It’s just the most often used.

Do you have a question about something related to the pointy end of an airplane? Ask Kent and maybe he’ll use it for next Monda
y’s Plane Answers. Check out his other blog, Cockpit Chronicles and travel along with him at work.

The first 24 hours in Nicaragua

by Brenda Yun on

Just how cold is the water in Nicaragua, I say to myself as I scuttle up to the lapping ocean’s edge.

Mike had told me it was going to be colder than I would normally think.

I dip my toes in, and quickly realize what Mike was talking about. Despite my assumption that everything about Central America is hot, the water is chilly at best – cold to be generous.

“Aw, heck,” I shriek before running full throttle, throwing my borrowed surfboard in front of me, and paddling as quickly as possible to the lineup.

Rob, too, the owner of the Hotel Brio where I am staying for a week, jogs into the water and informs us this is the coldest it’s been in his recollection. He’s been surfing these waters for over five years, so that’s saying something
Dusk is settling in, and the hot Nicaraguan sun is quickly fading, bringing with it forceful offshore winds. It’s feeding time for the frigate birds, who are scouring the sea out on the horizon. It’s just the three of us in the water, a perfect closing to my first full day in this largely misunderstood country.

For those of you who are afraid of traveling to Latin America because you think it’s too dangerous: don’t be. Having been to some of the lesser traveled countries such as Colombia, I too was afraid of hostility and violence. Like Mexico, there are clearly places you should go and places you should avoid.

I’ve now spent just 24 hours in this blessed country, which is in the middle of its dry season. I decided to come here before Nicaragua becomes an expensive travel destination and/or explodes as a surf destination. On the plane ride from Houston to Managua, I happened to sit next to Rob, who invited me to his hotel near the Tola coast in south. After many serendipitous moments like this, I’ve become a firm believer in trusting that things and people happen for a reason.

Therefore, might I suggest that you just buy the ticket you’ve been anxious about purchasing. Just go for it. Beyond that, you might want to book your first night’s stay somewhere, but let the other events just unfold before you naturally. There’s something utterly comforting about being in a third-world country and seeing it develop before your eyes.

Specifically, the people here are awfully helpful. No matter their dire financial or living situations, the locals I’ve met are particularly resilient. The hotel cook Nestor, for instance, taught himself English and taught himself how to cook the most delectable meals this side of Central America. Rob told us that previous guests at the Brio contact him specifically to rave about Nestor’s amazing dishes. Not only this, Nestor is the friendliest Nicaraguan I have yet to meet – and this is not to say that the people are not friendly because they are.

Speaking of Nestor, it’s time for dinner. An enticing plate of garlic red snapper fillet, freshly purchased from a local fisherman, awaits me. The side of mashed potatoes could feed five starving children in the beachside village just down the road. Parrots are chirping goodnight from the trees outside, and the sun is quickly turning midnight blue.

So for now, I will say buenos noches, but tell you I’ve only just begun to explore this small country packed to the brim with vibrancy and culture. You will certainly hear more from me soon, but I implore you to come and see it for yourself.

Cockpit Chronicles: Groundhog day – The St. Thomas turn (with video)

by Kent Wien on

One of the benefits of working as an airline crewmember, whether it be as a pilot or flight attendant, is the chance to get to know a city in a manner that’s second only to living there. But when we’re given the option to fly a month of ‘turns’ – those one day trips with flight times occasionally exceeding eight hours, many of our Boston international pilots forgo the London or Aruba layover for a line with 9 or 10 turns in it.

It’s tough to pass up a schedule that allows you to be home every night and have a good deal of time off as well.

As a result of the popularity of these turns, they’re not always available to choose when you’re as junior on the seniority list as I am. But my seniority must have improved since the beginning of the year, since I’m able fly FO (First Officer, as opposed to FB, the relief pilot) lines to St. Thomas.

Some might consider it torturous to see a glimpse of warm weather during a walkaround inspection lasting less than ten minutes, only to come straight back to the northeast and land while it’s snowing.
But for the entire month of February, I’ve been doing just that – flying trips to and from St. Thomas, and occasionally trading for a different day or different destination, such as San Juan. I’ve kept an eye open for an opportunity to ‘chronicle’ the trip, but the flights have been rather uneventful and amazingly consistent.

So consistent in fact, that I feel like I’m experiencing a pilot’s version of the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day.

Wake up at 5, depart at 9. Answer a Plane Answers question during the 1 hour crew rest break. Fly a visual approach to runway 10 in St. Thomas, park at gate 3.

I’ll debate whether the view is interesting enough to go outside and snap a picture, and then decide I have plenty of St. Thomas ramp pictures already so I check my e-mail on the phone before doing the interior preflight. The FB comes back in from inspecting the outside, followed by the captain with the paperwork he collected from operations in the terminal and we’re again departing to Boston 5 minutes before our scheduled time.

The flight home might include sleeping on my break, and then returning to the cockpit just in time to watch the sun set before getting ready for the visual approach or ILS to runway 27 back in Boston.

Taxiing in, we maneuver around the same outbound US Airways flight, before finally parking at gate B31.

The FB races out of the cockpit like he’s late for a date, which is entirely expected of that position since there’s nothing left for him to do, except maybe to take the trash bag out of the cockpit as he leaves.

But now, after 10 of these trips in a row, I’ve learned to enjoy the repetitiveness of the flying. It’s refreshing to be familiar with each VHF frequency you’ll dial in as the airplane progresses through the various ATC boundaries. I don’t even mind the same turkey wrap or chicken caesar salad meal option we get on each leg.

And while the captain and relief pilot are occasionally different people, airlines insist on standardized callouts and actions, so even that doesn’t offer much variety.

Last night, however, we had a little experience that finally made the trip one that will stick in my memory for a long time. As we were descending to 24,000 feet (flight level 240 in pilot speak) we leveled off just above a cloud layer.

I call this cloud skimming, and anytime we’re above 10,000 feet, I like to pull out my camera to capture the sensation of speed that 300 knots provides when you’re just a few hundred feet above a layer of clouds.

But today, of all days, I chose to leave my new, amazingly wonderful, mind-blowing Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR slash HD video camera at home. I figured I knew everything that would happen today, right down to the approach and gate we’d be using, and since I had taken enough shots of anything even remotely interesting during the previous flights, today seemed like the day to shed the extra three pounds.

Never again! I was forced to pull out my $210 Flip Mino HD video camera, which I love for it’s simplicity and incredible portability, but I know the 5D’s HD mode would have been even more beautiful.

For those learning to fly, a quick note. After you get your private license, you might be thinking about adding an instrument rating to your ticket. You’re probably weighing the costs and benefits of such an investment. Let me tell you that, in addition to improving your flying skills and your options during long cross country flights, you’ll also be able to experience scenes such as the following that just might make all the studying and checkrides worth it.

Cockpit Chronicles takes you along on some of Kent’s trips as an international co-pilot on the Boeing 757 and 767 based in Boston. Have any questions for Kent? Check out Plane Answers.

Through the Gadling Lens: try not to focus

by Karen Walrond on

There can be no doubt that a really lovely, crisp image with a sharp focus can make a shot — and in truth, focus can be one of the easiest technical aspects of a photograph that can be learned and controlled. But just this past week, I was instant-messaging a photographer friend of mine:

Me: Hey, have you ever taken a photograph, and you can’t tell whether the result is really crappy or really cool?

Josh: All the damned time.

Me: I just took one. I can’t tell. There’s no part of this image that is in sharp focus. But I think I like it anyway.

Josh: Meh. Focus is overrated.

I’ve thought about this conversation a lot since then, and I have to say, I agree with him: sometimes, focus is overrated. So this week, I thought I’d share some of the photographs in the Gadling Flickr pool which are great illustrations of how sometimes ignoring focus (or manipulating it, at least) can result in a great shot.

1. Shallow depths of field. One of the most fun ways to play with focus is to manipulate the “depth of field” — the amount of photograph which is actually in focus, as compared to the rest of the photograph. When you look at a photograph with a large depth of field, almost every portion of the photograph will be in focus. Conversely, if you look at a photograph with a shallow or small depth of field, only one portion of the photograph will be in focus, while the rest of it will be in “bokeh,” or fade smoothly out of focus.

Subjects in photographs with very shallow depths of field don’t look like the subject does in real life; however, it does add a lot of interest to the photograph, in that they help direct the viewer to a single point on the image. The easiest way of manipulating the depth of field is to play with a lens’ aperture — the smaller the aperature number, the shallower the depth of field (more on aperture can be found here). Simply set your camera to “aperture priority” (or just put the camera in full-on manual mode, if you wish), and set the aperature to a low number.

Some beautiful examples of shallow depth of field:

This great shot shared by (flicts) in the Gadling Flickr pool is a classic example of shallow depth of field. Notice how just the small barb of the fence is in focus, where the rest of the shot isn’t. You can still tell exactly what the image is — a verdent green field in the country — but the shallow depth of field directs your attention exactly where (flicts) wants it to go, on the tiny detail of the fence. Taking this photograph with a large depth of field would have resulted in a rather ordinary shot; instead, the depth of field makes the shot. Really spectacular.

Flowers are wonderful subjects for playing with depth of field, primarily because they generally have so much detail going on, the number of areas you can choose to have in focus are general endless. In this great shot shared by dog blue in the flickr pool, the very tips of the petals are in focus, while the rest of the flower (and its neighbours) rapidly fall into bokeh. Again, this would’ve been an ordinary shot if there was a large depth of field; but it makes for a great image when the depth of field is restricted. Lovely work.

2. Capture movement through blur. Oftentimes, when taking a photograph of a rapidly moving object — a car driving quickly, perhaps, or a child on a swing, for example — the natural tendency is to move the camera along with the moving object, in order to minimize blur. Instead, consider trying to capture the blur itself — forget about trying to get the moving object in focus, and instead, go with the flow: let the object whiz by, and capture the speed of the object

A few tips as you try to capture blur: consider placing an inanimate object (or an immobile person) in the foreground, and focus on that, instead. The stationery object/person will provide great contrast with the moving object, and give some context and contrast in the image.

Some amazing examples of blurry movement:



This shot of a New York City subway shared by ultraclay! is a classic demonstration of capturing blur by juxtaposing a moving object against an immobile one. In this shot, by focusing on the stationary couple in front, the speed of the passing train is beautifully captured — you can almost imagine standing on the platform with them, with the sudden train rushing by taking your breath away.

Nobody nearby for you to use as your stationary focal point? Look up: in this shot, Cazimiro used the interesting ceiling pattern as his stationary object — by focusing on that, the rushing train in this Washington DC subway is just a beautiful blur of light, and the entire shot is from an interesting perspective, rather than just looking straight on at the train. Outstanding job.


Finally, lest you think the “blur” technique only works for public transportation, check out the amazing shot above by Willy Volk, taken on a Florida beach. In this shot, Willy focused on the stationary sand, and let the ocean do its thing. An awesome shot – it makes you totally imagine the rushing waves over your feet, as your toes sink into the grainy sand. Of course, the warped perspective given by using the fisheye lens helps make this shot, as well.

3. For night shots, purposely make the lights out of focus. Lights at nighttime are magical — and sometimes purposely “unfocusing” the lights can make your images even more magical, as they flare against a darker sky. This technique is particularly effective when shooting holiday lights, strings of street lights, or any multitude of city lights against a darkening sky.

Something to keep in mind — this effect tends to work best at dusk, when you can still make out silhouettes against a dark blue sky, rather than at pitch black-darkness. Also, this can be a lovely effect when taking images in intimate restaurants or bars: place an object with a recognizable silhouette in the foregrounds, with the twinkling lights in the background.

Some really stellar examples of blurry lights:

This shot by ultraclay! is a perfect example of capturing an intimate feel in a bar or restaurant. Shot at a sake bar in New York City, by focusing on the candle in the foreground and keeping the other candles in blur in the back, the result is an image that makes you think of low conversations, the clink of sake glasses, and the occasional outburst of laughter. The photograph doesn’t just record an image, but it captures some of the mood around the image as well.


Additionally, this great shot by StrudelMonkey of holiday lights in Florida captures the magic of the season. The light tree in focus in the foreground provides the perspective and the setting; however, the blurred lights in the background let you know that the light tree isn’t just a one-off — the magic of the season goes on into the scene. Lovely piece of work.

4. Finally, just give up on focus altogether.

I’ve shared this photo with you before, but I can’t help it: I love this shot, mostly because it was a complete and total accident — I squeezed the shutter before the camera had time to find focus anywhere. But still — even without the focus, I’ve never had anyone fail to recognize the image above as one of the Houses of Parliament in London — and in fact, it’s the lack of focus that provides the interest.

The reason the shot above works is because (a) it’s an iconic image — one of an internationally-famous landmark; (b) there’s lots of colour and (c) there’s lots of lights. In other words, there’s more than just the shape of the subject, but light and colour keep the eye’s interest.

What (accidentally) taking this image taught me is that perhaps when taking pictures of iconic subjects — say, like the Statue of Liberty in an upcoming trip to New York, or the Great Wall of China (one of my future photography goals) — perhaps it make sense to grab a few shots with the subject out of focus — instead, let the colours and the contrast and the light of the surrounding area tell the story.

Hopefully all of these examples will inspire you to play with your focus a little bit — because, as my friend Josh says, sometimes focus is overrated. Keep taking your amazing shots, and keep sharing them in the Gadling Flickr pool. And as always, if you have any photography-related questions, don’t hesitate to send them to me at karen.walrondATweblogsincDOTcom – I’m happy to tackle them here on Through the Gadling Lens.

Karen is a writer and photographer in Houston, Texas. You can see more of her work at her site, Chookooloonks.
And for more Through the Gadling Lens, click here.