It’s often tempting to think of what life would be like if you just packed up all your things and flew away. Hit the road, ride off into the sunset, throw caution to the wind and disappear. In a slightly less dramatic fashion and with far more planning and Excel-spreadsheet’ing, that’s pretty much what Liv and I did last year. Neither of us had ever been to Europe before, so we picked a bunch of countries that we could vaguely draw a line between without too much backtracking and went for it.
We crammed roughly 28 cities across 12 countries into 11 weeks, and being planned around a southern-hemispherian wedding photographer’s schedule, that meant they were the 11 hottest weeks of the European year. It was incredible to visit so many places and cultures completely different to ours, although it seemed that basically everyone (except Spaniards) spoke incredible English. Our AirBNB hosts would apologise for their language barrier before perfectly guiding us through an entire city, while we were still trying to remember yes / no / please / thankyou.
Camera-wise, I picked up a new system just for this trip – didn’t want to be weighed down with a DSLR. Everything below is shot on the Fuji X-T1 – a killer travel camera. I started out with the 10-24, the 23/1.4 and 56/1.2. On the train to Amsterdam, one of our bags was stolen and I just had the X-T1/23mm from there on out. Thankfully the paranoia of shooting weddings paid off in this instance – an external HDD with all my photos was in the stolen bag, but I had an identical backup in separate luggage.
Looking back, there’s a strong correlation between my favourite spots and the places I took the most photos. Paris, Venice, Prague & Croatia…all absolutely amazing. We visited Berlin as well, but you wouldn’t know from this post – I didn’t take a single shot in the 3 days we had there. I’m really stoked to be sharing a bunch of my favourites here – there are a few more on my Tumblr as well. For us, this was a trip of a lifetime. Enjoy 🙂
2 Comments