"Let's Pretend..."
You might say he learned to be a travel photographer by pretending to be one. Of course, in the beginning he didn't want to be a photographer at all. "I wanted to be an actor," Bob Krist says, "and I only bought a camera when I got a job with a theatre company touring Europe. But that's how I fell in love with traveling and with photographing my travels." A few years kicking around the acting world brought the realization that photography might be a better way to make a living.
A friend who was a reporter at a small newspaper in New Jersey got Bob an interview at the paper, and despite a lack of news photography experience, he landed the job. "They took a chance on me, and I really learned the craft of photojournalism on the job."
After a few years he switched to corporate photography. "But I still had that travel bug from when I toured Europe, and all the time I'm thinking what I really want to do is travel." That's where "let's pretend" comes in: "When my wife and I went on vacations, I'd make believe I was on assignment for National Geographic. We went to Haiti, Portugal, lots of other places, and I would just shoot and shoot-I worked harder on my vacations than I did on my job."
Basically he taught himself to shoot travel. "I'd look at pictures in travel magazines and use my actor's training to reason them out. An actor is trained to look at a character's motivations and what previous action could have led him to the current action. So I figured, well, to get this photo, this photographer had to get up at dawn and hike up to the top of the mountain and be there before the sun rises. I reasoned backwards: what did the photographer have to do to get to that point in time to shoot that picture? It's a bizarre mix of two fields, but it helped."
It also helped that Bob was a voracious student. "I read every how-to book and article I could. If there was an interview with Jay Maisel in Popular Photography, I read it three or four times, pulling out nuggets of wisdom. I'd go to seminars given by people whose work I admired."
Thus armed, he started hitting the travel magazines, showing his growing portfolio of vacation "assignments," and after nine portfolio showings over the course of three years he got an assignment from Travel & Leisure. "Then I pitched a story on my home state, New Jersey, the least exotic place I could imagine, to National Geographic, and I got the assignment."
The transformation was complete: from newspaper photojournalist to travel photographer in eight years.
He's still a student, still a reader. And he always does his homework: "Research increases my chances of getting good pictures," Bob says. "Before I arrive I make sure I know the significant sites, the top five historical places; the more you know before you go, the better off you are. And no matter how much you know, once you get there you're still going to be a little lost.
"But," he says, "what's more scary to a veteran than being dropped into a brand new place is going back to a location you've photographed several times.
It's really hard if you've poured your heart and soul into a place and then have to go back and find new angles. In my career I've been sent to the Caribbean a lot. I've been to every island two or three times, and when a magazine sends me down to a small island where there's not too much going on to begin with and I've already done it two or three times, I really have to work hard to find some way to put a fresh view on it. Sometimes it's a matter of getting there during a special festival."
His favorite place to photograph? "My favorite place is the next place. That's the only real answer a person with wanderlust can give you."
"The more you know before you go, the better off you are."
Out of the Box
Think of your own town as an exotic place you've been assigned to photograph.
In the Bag
These days you're likely to find Bob Krist carrying two F100 bodies; a 17-35mm f/2.8D AF-S Zoom-Nikkor, 28-70mm f/3.5-4.5D AF Zoom Nikkor, 80-200mm f/2.8D AF Zoom-Nikkor and a 50mm f/1.4D AF Nikkor; an SB-28 Speedlight, SD-8A battery pack and SC-17 remote cord; an assortment of filters and a table-top tripod. For night work, he packs a hands-free flashlight-"it's like a miner's light on an elastic band," Bob says. "I got it from a camping supply store. It runs off runs off two double AAs, and it's great when I need to check settings and change film. You look strange in it, but, hey, it works." He also carries a Leatherman all-in-one tool, a compass-"when I scout locations, I like to know where the sun's going to rise and set"-and a spirit level that slips into the hot shoe of the camera-"I have a little problem with perception of the horizon, and I need to make sure it's level."
