Blog — Andy Mumford Photography

AZORES PART 1: PICO

This year Teresa and I decided that we'd like to see more of Portugal so instead of booking an exotic trip to someone far away we've gone on short trips to different parts of Portugal, from Porto in the winter to Alentejo in the spring. For the summer we decided to spend 10 days travelling around some of the islands of the Açores, a place neither of us had ever visited and didn't really know much about. The Açores is an archipelago of nine volcanic islands pretty much in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean midway between Europe and the USA.

The first part was planning which islands to visit. São Miguel is the obvious one, but it's also the most touristed and best known. I spent some time researching the islands and it quickly became apparent that Flores, one of the western most islands, was the one I wanted to photograph most, and next to that is the tiny island of Corvo which also looked stunning. I also wanted to photography Pico, Portugal's highest mountain, which can also be viewed from the neighboring islands of Faial and Sao Jorge. Both of these islands looked lovely, but as there are direct flights to Faial from Lisbon it made sense to spend some time there. So our final plan saw us flying to Faial, picking up a rental car and then catching a ferry for the 30 minute trip to Pico.

Azores, Fujifilm, Landscapes, PortugalAndy MumfordOctober 4, 2016pico, azores, AÇORES, Portugal, paisagems, travel, fujifilm, fuji x series Comments

A LIGHTWEIGHT LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY KIT

It’s been a little over a year since I switched to using the Fuji X System and one of the many things I still love is how small and lightweight the system is, and of course a small, light camera and lenses means that other equipment can also become smaller and lighter too.

Like many landscape photographers I’ve gone through my fair share of backpacks since I started, and one of the main criteria has always been that I want the bag to be as small as it can possibly be and still fit my needs. When I’m out on a landscape shoot my kit typically consists of an X-T1, the 10-24mm and 55-200mm lenses, a couple of spare batteries, three filters, a cable release and a tripod. Additionally I’ll have a bottle of water and some kind of outer shell for if the weather changes, along with a head torch, a fruit bar or two and wallet, keys and phone. When I’m travelling I tend to use a Lowepro Photosport 200, which I’ve reviewed on my blog, and while it’s a great bag it’s still larger than I need to carry the dayhike kit I outlined above. So, when I switched to Fuji I started to look for the smallest backpack I could find but pretty much anything smaller than the Photosport doesn’t have hip straps, which for me are vitally important as I like to get the weight off my shoulders as much as possible. Then it occurred to me, if I wanted a small bag where I could carry the weight on my hips, why not just look at waist packs? I’d always ruled them out before as they are not really effective for carrying a full frame dSLR kit, even if it’s only two lenses, but for the Fuji system it’s a different matter altogether, so I started to look at what was available.

Equipment, FujifilmAndy MumfordAugust 5, 2016fuji x series, fujifilm, lowepro, lowepro inverse 100 Comments

CARRASQUEIRA - CAIS PALAFITICO

About ten years ago now, not long after I'd first got seriously interested in photography, I made the hour and a half journey down to the small fishing village of Carrasquiera on the edge of the Sado estuary. I'd seen pictures of the fishermen's piers there, the cais palafita, and wanted to see if I could make a good image there. Piers are the kind of subjects that work really well with long exposures, so I took a thick neutral density filter and my tripod and arrived just before sunset.

That evening I was fortunate enough to get some of the best light and colour I've ever seen and took a couple of images that changed my perspective on photography. In some ways it was the beginning of my photography journey, when I realised how powerful photography could be and how much I enjoyed waiting for the light.

Landscapes, PortugalAndy MumfordJuly 19, 2016cais palafitas, porto da palafita, piers, waterscapes, long exposures, CarrasqueiraComment

EURO 2016 FINAL

When Portugal played France in the Euro 2016 final, win or lose, there was no way we could stay at home when half the city of Lisbon would be out cheering on their team. We walked through some of the main squares and thoroughfares of the city, as well as stopping off at a couple of bars and locals tascas to soak up the atmosphere with the tiny X-T10 and a couple of prime lenses. While the majority of people were congregated infront of the huge screen in Praça do Commercio, we ended up watching the extra time when Portugal scored the winner in a small square with an outdoor kiosk and lots of packed tables. By the end of the evening it was too dark to properly capture the action, and besides, by then I'd got so completely caught up in the game that I kind of forgot about taking any photos.

Fujifilm, Portugal, Street Photography, TravelAndy MumfordJuly 2, 2016campers euro, euro 2016, fujifilm, fuji, fuji x series, lisbon, street shootingComment

FUJI X PASSION

It's almost a year now since I ditched Nikon and started my relationship with Fujifilm and their fantastic X Series cameras. I haven't regretted the switch for a moment and have loved using the cameras since I first got them.

It's also been my most productive year photographically with plenty going on, one of which is hooking up with Hugo and Mauricio at Fuji X Passion magazine. They've invested so much time and energy in their website, as well as producing a couple of magazines; the FXP online magazine and this beautiful portfolio print magazine, which I was honoured to be featured and interviewed in. You can purchase it at their website, which is packed with useful articles and some great interviews.

Fujifilm, EquipmentAndy MumfordJuly 1, 2016fujifilm, fuji x series, fuji fujifilmComment

A FEW DAYS IN ALENTEJO

Alentejo is a large rural area between the industrial heartland of Lisbon and the developed coast of Algarve. We spent five days there over Easter to unwind and spend some time hiking in the countryside.

We spent the first couple of days in a small town near Sao Luis where we did a few hikes. The first was through dunes along the coast near Almograve. While we were walking there the light wasn't really conducive to landscape photography, although I did note a few excellent locations for coastal photography and the dunes that I'd love to return to photograph another day. I did spend some time photographing the flowers and plants that grow in the sand near the sea. I don't have a macro lens, but with some careful composition and a bit of patience I managed to get a few close ups I was happy with.

Fujifilm, Landscapes, PortugalAndy MumfordApril 18, 2016alentejo, portugal, portugal landscapes, beja, fujifilm, fujiComment

CHAMPALIMAUD FOUNDATION FOR THE UNKNOWN & LISBON PORT AUTHORITY

In the last couple of weeks I've been out to Alges, a superb of Lisbon right next to the river that I wouldn't really associate with shooting landscapes, but there are a couple of interesting locations there, the Champalimaud Foundation for the Unknown and the Lisbon Port Authority building, which I was really interested in photographing.

The Champalimaud Foundation, or "Centre for the Unkown" is a beautiful building next to the river on the outskirts of Lisbon. I've passed by it on the train hundreds of times but only recently got around to shooting it. It's a fascinating structure with some interesting architectural aspects and water features.

I always think architectural shots work well with long exposures against and fast moving clouds, and I as we've had a lot of rain recently I liked the idea of being able to include reflections made by the wet stone in the images.

Fujifilm, Landscapes, PortugalAndy MumfordJanuary 24, 2016champalimaud, lisbon, lisbon port authority, alges, rio tejo, fuji, fujifilm, x seriesComment

A FEW DAYS IN PORTO

Despite having lived in Portugal for around 17 years I've spent almost no time in Porto, and as one of my plans for this year is to spend more time shooting different parts of my Portugal Teresa and I decided to spend a few days between Christmas and New Year in the second city.

I wanted to pack as light as possible, and this meant taking a minimal amount of photography kit. Fortunately with the X Series it's really possible to travel light as with my old dSLR system just a camera body and two zooms (a wide angle and telephoto) along with a tripod would already start to take up a lot of space and add a fair bit of weight. I took the X-T1 body instead of the X-T10 because of its weather resistance as I expected rain and also planned to do a sunset on a local beach.

PHOTOGRAPHING LELLO BOOKSTORE IN PORTO

Lello & Irmão bookshop in Porto was voted the third most beautiful bookshop in the world and the beautifully elegant gothic staircase and carved ceilings make it easy to see why. It's also become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Porto, thanks in part to the story that JK Rowling conceived the idea for Harry Potter whilst passing time in the café there. It's a tiny place and is constantly full of people, indeed you actually have to queue to get in, which makes photographing it quite problematic.

TRAVELLING WITH THE FUJI X SERIES TO INDONESIA

I've just returned from 25 days in Indonesia, my first trip with Fuji cameras and my first trip without a large dSLR. We traveled the entire length of Java and Bali overland so it was important to me to have a camera that wouldn't feel heavy and cumbersome to carry around, but also one I could completely rely on to produce excellent image quality.

The experience of traveling with Fuji cameras has been a revelation! Not only in how much lighter, smaller and easier to carry around it all is, but how I've not once missed my old Nikon in terms of image quality or autofocus in any of the many situations I've encountered, from fast moving street scenes to dynamically lit landscapes. They've been brilliant, reliable and a consistent pleasure to use.

LOWEPRO PHOTOSPORT 200 REVIEW

The search for the perfect camera bag is one that lasts many photographers years and can cost a fair amount of money. For a long while I was pretty happy with my Lowopro Primus, which could happily fit my old Nikon D3 along with a wide angle zoom and the 80-400mm.
When I upgraded to a D800 though, I also switched to using a 70-200 f2.8 as my telephoto lens, and all of a sudden my kit wouldn't fit in my bag. It's also a pretty heavy bag so I started looking around for alternatives.

There were quite a few frustrating "this would be perfect if only..." and "this is great, but why didn't they..." moments, but over the last couple of years I've owned a couple of bags that pretty much ticked all the boxes, the F stop Kenti and the Lowepro Photosport 200, and after using both bags extensively on trips I thinks it's time I got around to reviewing them. I've also now switched to the considerably smaller Fuji X system so I'll try and write these reviews from the perceptive of a full frame dSLR system and also a smaller mirrorless system.

Equipment, Travel, Landscapes, FujifilmAndy MumfordNovember 22, 2015lowepro, lower photosport 200, backpacks, fuji, fujifilm, xt1, review, best backpackComment

INDONESIA PART 6: UBUD

Ubud is the cultural capital of Bali, an artist's town set amongst the rice fields and hills of central Bali. It's a place we planned to unwind and catch some culture like Balinese dancing, and although I had a couple of locations researched I wasn't really planning on much photography here.

One of the things that Ubud has is a wide range of incredibly stylish, sophisticated, but affordable accommodation. We'd booked 5 nights in a place called Alam Indah, on the outskirts of Ubud next to the famous monkey forest. It didn't disappoint, the room was beautiful with great views out over the forest and proved to be a fantastic place to relax (and write this blog).

INDONESIA PART 5: MUNDUK

We were sad to leave Pemuteran. It had been a relaxing four days, but it was time to move on to our next location, Munduk, high in the central mountains of Bali. It's a tiny village surrounded by clove and coffee plantations with rice terraces cut into the side of the hills. The journey from Pemuteran took a little less than an hour and a half, and after we left the town of Seririt we seemed to be constantly rising in twisting roads. The landscape is so green and there is so much water. It's incredibly fertile land and so much grows here.

INDONESIA PART 4: PEMUTERAN

The train journey from Probolinggo to Banuwango takes about four and a half hours through verdant green fields of rice, then it's a few hundred meters to the ferry port and about a dollar to make the crossing to Bali.

The island sits there in the blue of the sea with volcanic peaks covered in green vegetation reaching high into the sky. It's a very short crossing, and in no time we were there and being picked up at the exit. It's a short drive to the hotel but we were fascinated by the small villages we past through. Unlike Java, which is mostly Muslim, Bali is predominantly Hindu and right away we could see subtle differences in the architecture. We could feel ourselves starting to unwind and the stress of the busy last 5 days leaving our bodies, which had been the plan when we'd organized this part of the trip months earlier. There was nothing in particular I wanted to photograph in Pemuteran, it was just 4 days in a beautiful place where we could snorkel and recharge our batteries.

INDONESIA PART 3: BROMO

We were up at 4am the next day again, but this time it was to get us to the early train in to Surabaya from Yogyakarta. Where the journey to Borobudur had taken almost 2 hours with the holiday traffic, the journey back to the station only took 45 minutes and we were there in plenty of time to get some breakfast and find our seats.

The journey took 5 hours and despite dozing a little on the train, I saw lots of the countryside through the window. Lush rice fields with people wearing conical hats, it was a typical rural south East Asian scene that made me wish, as ever, that we'd had more time to explore the area. At Surabaya station we met the driver we'd arranged with the Bromo hotel a few weeks previously. After about 2 hours we turned off the main road and started to head up into the mountains, the air got cooler and our ears started to pop.

INDONESIA PART 2: BOROBUDOR

Leaving behind Yogyakarta we headed towards nearby Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument on the world. It's the kind of place like Angkor Wat or Bagan, when you first see photos of it, it seems like it's the set for some movie about a lost world. It's a vast stone mandala-like structure built around the hill in a jungle over a thousand years ago.

By now though it's firmly established on the tourist trail and thousands of Indonesians travel from all over the country to visit it. I wanted to photograph it at sunrise, which I knew would mean a very early morning and difficulties in getting a clean shot as I expected the place to be very busy for first light in the way that Shwedagon Pagoda in Bagan was. Indeed both of these things were firmly on my mind as we arrived at Borobudur as I knew that it marked the beginning of four mornings where we would get up at 4am or earlier in both Borobudur and then Mount Bromo, and that both places would be incredibly busy with tourists making photography with a tripod sometimes a little challenging. When we'd planned the trip I'd tried to ensure that we visited Bromo away from the weekend hoping that would mean slightly smaller crowds, but also because we also wanted our time in Ubud, Bali, to coincide with a full moon festival. However, we hadn't realised that this would mean this part of the trip taking place in a week that began with a bank holiday to celebrate Indonesia's independence. The traffic as we left Yogyakarta to get to the temple was incredible and I started to realize how busy Borobudur was actually going to be.

Fujifilm, Indonesia, TravelAndy MumfordSeptember 16, 2015borobudor, buddhism, temple, java, yogyakarta, sunrise, dawn, mistComment

INDONESIA PART 1: JAKARTA & YOGYAKARTA

Java, Bali, Indonesia, Jakarta are all magical names that conjure images of far away exotic lands to me. After loving our trip to Burma we really wanted to return to Asia and spent a while looking at different possibilities. Indonesia was the place we kept coming back to and about a year ago we decided that that's where we'd go.

Planning the trip proved a nightmare as it's a vast country spread out over thousands of islands with so much to see. At first we had quite an adventurous plan to see about 4 islands, but with this trip we thought it would be nice to have a smaller focus and spend more time in different places. For me, the huge Buddhist temple of Borobudur and the amazing volcano at Bromo, both on Java, were the big draws. For Teresa it was the cultural city of Yogyakarta, also on Java, as well as Bali that she really wanted to see. So after poring through guide books, GoogleEarth and various sites on the web, we decided to focus on Java and Bali and limit the locations we stayed in so weren't constantly on the move.

Indonesia, Fujifilm, TravelAndy MumfordSeptember 7, 2015candi lara, candi sewa, gamelan, indonesia, java, jakarta, yogyakarta, istiqlal, southeast asiaComment

HEADING TO INDONESIA

After months of research and planning, Teresa and I are finally heading off to Indonesia for a around a month on Monday. It's a trip we've wanted to make for a long time and we'll be taking in a really wide range of places and locations, so it should provide lots of opportunities for photography.

We'll fly to Jakarta, before heading by train to Yogyakarta, the cultural centre, for a couple of days. Then we'll spend a couple of days at the huge Buddhist temple of Borobudur, before heading by train again to Surabaya and then on to Mount Bromo, the iconic volcano in the Tengger Semeru National Park. After that we head over to Bali for a few days diving and snorkelling in Permuteran on the north coast, then up to the mountains and rice fields in Munduk, before relaxing at the end of the trip in Ubud.

Indonesia, Fujifilm, TravelAndy MumfordAugust 9, 2015indonesia, bali, java, fuji, travel, south east asiaComment

FIRST LANDSCAPES WITH THE FUJI X SYSTEM

It's been about a month now since I picked up a Fuji X-T10, but due to a combination of being busy preparing for a month in Indonesia next week, and how cloudless and uninteresting the skies are in Portugal right now, I haven't had much chance to go out and shoot landscapes with the camera. It was important to me to try and get the chance though, as I really wanted to be familiar with what the camera can do before I go away.

If you read my last blog you'll know that I'd made my mind up to switch completely over from shooting Nikon to Fuji gear for a whole host of reasons that I wrote about there. Even so, my plan in getting the X-T10 (rather than the X-T1) was for it to replace my backup camera and to shoot with it alongside my Nikon while in Indonesia, before switching completely when I returned.

Equipment, Fujifilm, LandscapesAndy MumfordAugust 7, 2015fuji x series, fujifilm, fuji, xt10, xt1, xf14, waterscapes, starsComment

PHOTOGRAPHING BURMA EBOOK

I'm proud to announce that my book on Photographing Burma is now available for download at the iBooks store. If you’re wondering which temples in Bagan are the best for sunrise and sunset, if you want to know what’s the best way to shoot sunrise and sunset at Golden Rock, or if you just want to be inspired by beautiful images of Burma then you’ll find plenty in this book to help you plan your trip to Burma.

Alongside over 120 images I’ve tried to pass on as much of what I learned while photographing this breathtaking country as possible with advice on photogenic places to visit and tips on some of the practicalities like when the locations are best photographed and how to get there. With every image I’ve provided a description of where and how and, where possible, why the image was taken and what I was hoping to achieve when photographing the scene.
While by no means a definitive guide to every location in Burma, the book nevertheless is a great starting point for any trip to Burma, and with that in mind I hope that both the images and information here will provide inspiration and some solid advice about visiting and photographing this truly wonderful country.

Street Photography, Travel, Burma, BooksAndy MumfordAugust 2, 2015burma, myanmar, travel, street photography, photography guides, bagan, yangon, mandalay, ngapali, inle lakeComment