Some Shots from My Trip
I put together a iPhoto book of some of my favorite shots from my trip, and I’ve included some of the pages from the photo book below (click on them for a larger version). I went in a bit of a different direction with photos I shot on this trip than I did on my trip to Italy this past summer. These images have more of a focus on texture, color, and mood than my Italy images (I just wanted to try shooting in less of a commercial style than I usually do).
Besides this photo book, I did take loads of regular vacation photos (with us posed in front of pyramids, the Sphinx, etc.), and those are going into a separate photo book that’s more for us to look at to remember the trip, the places we ate, photos of our tour guides, hotels, and regular stuff like that (more like the photo from Tuesday’s post).
The images below were mostly taken with my Nikon D300, and my 18-200mm f/3.5 – 5.6 VR lens (my standard vacation shooting set-up) at ISO 200, 400 and occasionally 800. I took my D3 along as a second body, but wound up using it on just two occasions. The photos are pretty much “as is” out of the camera, but I did apply the “Camera Landscape Beta 1″ profile in Lightroom’s Calibration panel, and I added some Clarity to any photos with texture (Clarity loves texture—or vice versa). Anyway, here are the images as I laid them out in two-page spreads for the photo book.
Nice shots! Thanks Scott for sharing!
Nice shots! Thank you Scott for sharing!
Have a nice day,
Markus
Lookin’ good, some great ideas & angles for all of use to use when we go on vacation. Looks like that place just has non-stop photo opportunities. Thanks Scott!
great shots! thanks for sharing!
I think this word gets used too often but it deserves being used here -awesome!! Really beautiful pictures Scott.
James
Freiburg, Germany
Nice! If the 18-200 is good enough for Mr Kelby, it´s certainly good enough for me. It will be my next lens.
Tommy, Sweden
These photos are very cool!
I see you have a nice trip
Some nice shots you got
It you wan’t to share these shots online you might put set them up in Indesign and export them as a swf file. Then you have a online book with a nice pageturn effect and all. Easy and nice
One word: amazing.
Three words: Awesome, Inspiring, Creative
Great shots Scott – love the sunset ones. They really capture the feel of the part of the world you were in.
Kevin
They are indeed great shots Scott, well done!
Great production Scott. Beside your talent, I admire your ability to get your shots out of the computer and into either print or book form quickly. That’s my downfall. If I remember correctly you transfer book-bound projects to Aperture and publish via the Apple route correct? Also, since your vacation was a gift I imagine you left the tripod in the case and took these photos hand held while wandering about with your wife? Would also be interested to hear your thoughts on the Indesign comment above. Great stuff. Thanks.
Why did you stop using Lightbox to display pictures on your website?
Impressive “vacation” shots, with out a doubt…
I’d like to ask how you created the actual book pages, it gives me some ideas.
Excellent photos Scott. I’m so Jealous. My girlfriend and I had a 19 day trip planned for Oct to be in Greece, Turkey and all over Egypt until the tour guide started getting a little shakey with our money. HAHA. Maybe we’ll make it next year. What cruise line did you go on?
Hi Gang:
The layouts above are actually from Apple’s free iPhoto application, which comes preinstalled on every Mac. What you’re seeing is one of their built-in templates, and once you put things in the order you want them (you can choose background color, and layout for each page), then you hit upload and it uploads the book for printing. You get it it back in just a few days. I prefer the 8-1/2″ x 11″ softcover design myself. For the blog, I just made screen captures of my final pages (as seen above) and posted those, but later today I’m going to look at the InDesign idea and see how that works (thanks for the tip!).
Also, nearly all the shots were handheld, but the sunset shots were taken using my Gitzo Traveler tripod.
Scott, certainly not the ordinary vacation photos some people take. Inspiring. Just ordered a D90 and the 18-200 lens for taking photos of set-ups in manufacturing, (now that my real job has put me back into quality). Using your photos as an example, think I made the right choice of equipment. Especially loved the colors. God bless…….-ejf
Scott,
Excellent shots! I love the Hallway shot with the warm sun illuminating it. (third up from the bottom, right side)
Thanks for sharing.
Frank
Beautiful work! Thanks for the inspiration
Very nice pictures Scott!
I have done about the same tour you did…but from Cyprus to Cairo.
Nice area…but Egypt is little scary…we went with police escort from Alexandria to Cairo. The police was heavily armed with machine-guns.
Nice shots for sure. I just came back over a month ago now. Took more of a backpacking low budget tour of the country – trains, camels, donkeys, sailing on the Nile etc. I have some great shots and memories of the place too even though I ended up sick for the 2nd half of the journey.
Love these shots. Did you manage to use your tripod for all of these photos?
Great Scott!! Fabulous fotos!! Superb color! Well done!
-Bob
(Beantown)
Scott, great shots! Love the use colors and angles here. Looks like you had a great vacation!
Thanks, also, to the poster who suggested the InDesign thing. I run an online music magazine and have been looking to find a way to make it more interesting with page turn effects, but the PDFs we’ve been making of the issues just haven’t cut it. I’ll have to look into that.
Also, thanks again Scott, for bringing the BlackRapid straps to our attention. I just got mine in last night before I was heading out to shoot the Jagermeister Music Tour in NYC, and that strap saved my neck! My chiropractor will miss the money, but my neck thanks you a million-fold!
Nice pics. You sure have set the bar high for everyone taking vacation shots, showing you can still take great photos while enjoying the moment with your wife. Thanks for sharing.
Ron
Your photos, your blogs and your books are such an inspiration!! Makes me want to grab my camera and run out the door every morning I get on this website, but alas, I must head to work instead. Living for the weekends tho! And so hoping that the 18-200mm Canon lens I put on my Christmas list arrives in my stocking!
Amazing pictures, having the ability to see the light and compose with it at all levels make those pictures reflect the beauty of your imagination. Excelsior!!!!
Cracking set of images Scott – a real ’story’ of your trip.
Do you use a tripod on your travels?
David
Lets hope that Lightroom will add a simliar feature that the free iPhoto software has. It’s to bad you have to process your images (even if just marginally) in Lightroom which then need to be exported as jpegs and then brought into iPhoto where you can design your book. Maybe someone like Blurb can create a Lightroom plug-in which will work with their service. I don’t know of any if they are available.
Great collection of images!
Beautiful photos! My husband and I were on a very similar cruise for our honeymoon in September and it’s great to see the amazing way you shot some of the same sights we also saw and photographed. I especially love your shot of the Parthenon.
I have a question though about shooting people in public because I got yelled at a few years ago to pay a man in the main square in Marrakech after trying to photograph people in a crowd. My husband now discourages me from photographing people in public even though I would love to capture them on film. Is there anything special that you do or avoid when photographing people in public?
Killer photos Scott! thanks for sharing. sounds like you guys had a blast! Can’t wait for Photoshop World in Boston this spring.
Beautiful shots. I like the idea of going non-commercial and intentionally focusing on texture, color, etc. Must be the influence of that Maisel guy. The Mac is amazing.
I recently used Aperture to create a book as a birthday gift.
The book arrived yesterday and I was blown away by the quality.
The iphoto book and the Aperture book are very similar, but it is easier to tweak the layout in Aperture and it is easier to do any adjustments directly to the image without having to go to Lightroom or Photoshop and back.
I have created a few calenders over the years using iPhoto and they have always been great. The book and calender services available in iPhoto will be heavily used this year for Xmas gift.
Dang! You can sell this as another Scott Kelby book!!! Awesome photos!
Gosh, Scott, these are your best ever. They are so redolent of the colours of Egypt and the calm of the dimly lit buildings brings home the timelessness that is uniquely Egyptian.
Do you have any suggestions for PC users seeking to create a similar book – other than investing in a Mac? I liked the suggestion of having a plugin directly from Lightroom. As you said when you gave your Lightoom wish list, it is frustrating that we have this killer application and then have to leave it when we want to create something as basic as a book.
Incredible as usual. Nice use of angles, and take as a whole a distinct impression of something wonderful around every corner (which undoubtedly there was!)
And the layout is superb.
Scott: did you convert the color profile of the photos to sRGB before you put them into iPhoto and into your book? I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether or not that is necessary in order to get the color and exposure of the photos to print the same way they appear on screen.
I’m impressed with what you got out of that lens. I owned one briefly a couple of years ago and didn’t like it. Also impressed by your exposures out–of-the-camera with little post processing. Indeed the 18-200 seems a good choice for a travel lens if you’re willing to sacrifice shallow DOF afforded by f2.8 lenses. Did you bring a wide zoom with you as well?
hi Scott,
Did you by any chance go to Kusadasi Turkey? The photo of the blue shutters on the yellow wall is eerily similar to a picture I had taken in a very very run down and sketchy part of Kusadasi.
Cheers,
Jason
Wow, Scott, do you ever know how to put together a photo book! That’s amazing! Beautiful images.
Outstanding!
The photography is wonderful, as usual, and the book came out very nice. I suppose it’s not PC to mention Aperture on a mostly Adobe themed blog, but the book module in Aperture is WAY more flexible than the book module in iPhoto. You have complete control over layout, text, fonts, bleed, and you can even edit photos on the pages. You can even create odd sized book layouts and save them as a PDF for upload to higher end book printers such as Asukabook. Worth looking into. Also, I have found that if you want to just lay out a single page, for instance for a poster or flyer, if you create a 1 page “book”, it is a great page layout program!
Hey Scott,
Excellent images. Very inspiring.
Thanks,
Mike
You make me feel like such a slug. Here you are back just a few days and you put together a beautiful book with some text and great images.
Beautiful images well juxtaposed, Scott!
Balliolman
Great collection of photos there Scott and presented beautifully. I like the different direction and the variations of the images, from the grand colours of some to the minimalism of others.
Excellent collection.
Looks good!
Hey, is there a PC based solution that mirrors the iPhoto construction, upload and production? Maybe a PC based iPhoto?
Thanks all.
-cb
Very cool indeed. Love the photobook layout. Cheers, -M