That one thing, though, that I do
hear is, it'd be great if I was on a
two-year vacation or three year. I've
been traveling now for three years and
I'm not on a three year vacation,
I'm working all the time.
The assumption is, because I have all this
freedom, there are no deadlines.
But there are. There are deadlines.
So, you know, I've
got AdoramaTV episodes that I need to
send regularly. Then I'm writing
articles for my blog and other blogs
and those have to be filed. Then I've
got some sponsors and some people
that I'm working with on the motorcycle side.
So there's always this pressure and
then, the other thing on top of that is,
on a motorcycle you just can't ride
after dark because of cows and
sheep and people and all kinds of things.
But it is really, really,
your chances of
having something really bad happen
after dark go up exponentially.
There are many times where I'll see
something that's really fantastic and I
have a little computer that says, "This is
how long you have until sunset and this is
how long it's going to take you to get
to where you're going," and I realize I
have about 10 minutes out of the whole
day that I can not be moving. I don't
have enough time to take this picture.
Then I have to weigh the price;
if I take this picture and get a
great image, the chance that I'm going to
have an accident later is pretty darn
high. Is it worth it?
Most times it's not.
I was told, by, quite
a funny anecdote by another fellow
long-distance motorcycle driver, his name
is Boorman,
Charley Boorman, that's it.
I did a piece on him a few weeks,
few months ago
for one of newspapers and he
and Ewan McGregor do these trips, great trips
through Africa and South America etc.
He was recently in South
Africa and he was in Kruger National
Park on his bike but he was told by the
rangers he wasn't allowed to ride the
bike in Kruger because the lions look at
his bike and think it's pray and will
attack him for it. Have you ever had that
problem?
Yes, actually. So I didn't go to
Kruger because they don't
allow motorcycles. But I was in Tanzania,
riding, I rode across, I can't remember
the park, and I didn't see anything.
I saw some hippo and so I
went to this park and it was great. Then
I went up the western side of Tanzania,
had to turn around and come back because
the roads were rained out.
So I was coming
back to the same park I'd been through
and the ranger stopped me and he said
"What are you going to do if
a lion comes out?"
I'm like, "I don't know, I'll outrun the lion".
I thought he was giving me a hard
time, because I haven't seen anything.
I didn't think there were lions and he said,
"Don't stop. Don't stop for anything."
So I get into the park and this
pack of eland, which are like deer
with long horns. They're crossing
in front of me, so I have to stop.
They're going, it's about, I don't
know, 15 or 20 of them they zip across
the road and as soon as they're done
I see up the road a lion cross the road.
We're talking 50 yards in front of me.
Lions, they don't go by
themselves, they move in prides.
I have to go that way and I hear the guy
saying, "Don't stop, don't stop."
So now, I'm riding toward where I just saw a
lion and thinking he doesn't want to
eat me, he's after those guys that I just saw, but
maybe he will eat me I don't know.
It was rainy and muddy and really bad so
I couldn't even go fast. It was
terrifying. I never saw the lion again, by
the way. I did have elephant that
would stop in the middle of the road in
Botswana.
I hope you got good pictures.
Well I was using a GoPro
and so unless they're right there.
So you see these elephant and they look tiny but
to me they're huge.
I had something sort of similar, I suppose,
in British Columbia, in Canada a couple of
years ago. I was doing a story about the
coastal grizzly bears and we approach
them with kayaks, single person kayaks,
and I had a monopod mounted in the
middle so I could use a longer lens,
300mm lens. But we were told by the
park rangers that we couldn't get
within 50 meters of the bear.
Well as a
photographer you're taught, when you're
first starting out, that you've got to get
close. Close, close, close, close. That is
the mantra that goes through your head.
So as I'm in this canoe, this little one
person canoe, and I'm slowly paddling,
picking up the swells a little bit,
pushing me a little closer into the
shore. All I in hear in the background
is from the ranger saying, "Doug, get
back! Doug, get back!" and I'm like,
"He doesn't know anything."
That somehow bears can swim?
There's this big female grizzly bear on the edge,
eating some sedge grass with her two
cubs and I'm looking through my 300mm
trying to get a nice, tight headshot. I'm
getting just to that spot where
I'm close enough to get the image.
And what does the bear do?
The bear comes
out into the water after me and I
realize I'm about 15 metres away from
her and I can hear the guy behind me
screaming at me. So I'm trying to put the
camera down, and back paddle as fast as I can
so this bear doesn't catch me.
But I think
it's a problem a lot with
photographers. You get lost
in what you're doing and you don't
listen to anything around you.
Not usually for the better
of yourself.
You can die that way.
So then the gear that you take,
here's mine and here's yours.
There's quite a difference as far as size, weight.
All of my stuff that's
right here, this is everything. That's my
entire camera bag, which is about the
same size as your camera.
Well the Leica stuff is bar none.
The lenses are fantastic. The Leica
stuff, I think, is the best for up
close photojournalism or reportage.
It's just so unobscure
and you can hide behind it. You can
hide it really easily.
So much easier to
approach somebody with this.
Yeah, definitely.
Now, the reason why I've still
got, I do have a couple of Leicas, by the
way, but I still prefer the DSLRs.
The main reason for me is the autofocus.
I'm getting older and my eyes aren't so
great anymore so I tend to rely a little
more on the autofocus, unless I'm
shooting landscapes and through live-view.
I like the versatility, the longer lenses
because I do often switch to the
70-200mm and 300mm lenses.
I do like that about the DSLRs
and I still will use two
cameras at once often times. So I'll
usually mount a 50mm and maybe a 24mm on
here if I'm in markets and such.
I think it's just a
matter of what you get used to.
The cost, of course, are definitely something
you have to think about. I personally
still like DSLRs. I know it's a lot of
weight to carry and I do have a bad
shoulder because of it but I think I'm
going to stick with the DSLRs for a
while yet.
I mean, this has its advantages.
Really it's the size of the
camera that did it for me. It's
not that much lighter when you pick up a
Leica, they're not so light.
But the size,
the unobtrusiveness and the
sharpness, the clarity, the contrast of
the lens is unmatched by any
manufacturer. Which you can't see in
videos, can't see it online. You can't see
that until you have a print then you can
see it. So a lot of comparisons that I've
seen on YouTube, everything has
been basically downgraded. So you
can't really see it until you see it and
it's like, "Oh my gosh."
Yeah there's just a clarity about Leica
that you don't really get unless you
go up to a medium format or bigger.
So when people found
out about how much this was, I got tons
of emails about the cost. But I've had
Lumias, Hasselblads, a Nikon D4, 1DX,
never have I heard any comment
about the price and those are as much as
this. But this red dot, for some
reason, to some people just says it's too
much money to be worth it. But for me it
is worth it because of the lenses and the
system and all of that kind of stuff.
Wow, it's a lot to think about.
I think we're going to sign off here,
I'm Doug McKinlay with Mark Wallace
for AdoramaTV.
All you travellers out there,
I hope you got some
good food for thought and
keep traveling.