The low down
THE LOW DOWN PHOTOGRAPHY WITH PETER GUTTMAN This ongoing section for readers will be providing top travel tips for low season travel, gathered from experts around the world. Photographs have become a core part of how we experience, share, and remember our travels. To give you some of the best low down on getting high results in the sometimes challenging conditions of low season travel, our Editor-at-Large asked a renowned, award-winning photographer to share some of his tales and tips. Peter Guttman has travelled in over 240 countries in all kinds of weather.
The visual high of low season travel Seasons often fuel the driving engine for travel. In order to survey earth’s amazing diversity and fragile beauty, I’ll often seek out travel’s low season to visit many of our globe’s remote and magical corners. With a tireless passion for exploration, I dedicated much of my life to travel photography and toward discovering the wonders of our planet, which I’ve tried to capture visually within the eight hardcover books I’ve written. In doing so, it became apparent that sojourning during less busy times can provide a soul-soothing, almost spiritual sense of wonder and discovery. Very fortunately for me, the rhythmic flow of mother nature’s elemental forces doesn’t always coincide with the desire for comfort and climate-controlled imperatives sought by mass tourism’s pleasure-seeking hordes. As such, I often deliberately schedule my travels in direct contradiction to the usual patterns of vacationing tourists. This has enabled me to take valuable advantage of pristine landscapes and intimate wildlife encounters, while spending quality time with local culture, providing a deeper dive toward understanding and investigating remote societies.
Low Season Traveller
Privileged access created by low season travel has, for me, served as a backstage pass to our global theatre, and in turn has greatly enhanced the photography for my iPad travel app, Beautiful Planet HD. The images in that collection depict our astonishing planetary diversity by featuring lightly-populated scenes of pre-digital cultures and landscapes.
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For example, when investigating Fez, Morocco, the world’s largest non-motorised city, I journeyed there in the very early spring. This enabled me to sidestep a relentless crush of foreign visitors mobbing the labyrinthine lanes of the medina. Its narrow walls now echoed hauntingly with clip-clopping donkey carts, while strolling djellaba-clad falconers and water vendors served as vivid avatars of the mysterious atmosphere pervading this medieval quarter. I made my way down to Venezuela, not during the mostly preferred dry season, but rather deep within its July rainy season to paddle through tropical jungle by dugout canoe
A sauna building in Lapland in the glow of the Northern Lights, Ahvenjärvi in Finland
