Doing a phototour

Is it worth doing a phototour?

Yes.

In a world of clickbait headlines that make you wade through a whole lot of ads before providing an answer, rest assured I’m not going to put you through that. I did my first ever photo tour last year, and I’m just going to explain why I would recommend doing one…and gratuitously show some photos I took. So if you’re interested, please read on…and if you’re not interested, you should read on anyway, because ‘you won’t believe what happens next as bully gets taught a lesson/person shows true meaning of kindness/politician gets owned/Aardvark does the most adorable thing!’

So what is a photo tour?

There are probably as many answers to this as there are combinations of photographers and photo tour leaders. You can have group tours, or individual tours. You can have the tour leader take you through how to use your camera or you can just have a tour leader who takes you to a location and leaves you to it. It can be half an hour in the laneways of a city, or three weeks in the desert of Morocco. 

Our family was on a holiday to the south island of New Zealand, and so I was looking for a photo tour where someone could take me to a few great locations and let me take some photos. Ultimately I was looking to pay someone to get me to the right spot at the right time to take some photos. 

I think that about 90% of any great photos is just being there to take the photo, the last 10% comes down to composition, creativity and experience…but that last 10% doesn’t mean much if you’re still in bed at your hotel, or in the wrong spot for a sunset, or trying to explain to an angry someone in a foreign country exactly why you thought it was OK to take a photo of them. So I was very keen to find someone with local experience in the Wanaka area that could give me the best chance of making the most of my ‘last 10%’.

I ultimately narrowed it down to three companies who were offering similar packages, emailed them, and then went with the highly scientific approach of choosing the first company who got back to me…this turned out to be Ridgeline NZ.

How much did it cost?

The tour I did cost $1,200. Did this feel like a lot of money to pay someone to wake me up early on holiday and drive me somewhere? Yes. So it’s probably worth also explaining that this was also a 50th birthday present to myself. This made me feel marginally less guilty about spending this much money, and besides, this idea had originally started as a 7 day trip through Morocco. So really…you should be looking at all the money I’d saved!

But in short, this got me a half day photo-tour, I could invite someone along at no extra cost, Ridgeline would pick us up and drop us back to our accommodation…and they would throw in hot coffee and fruit cake. One of the other photo tour companies I was looking offered a full day option at a similar price…but I preferred the idea of having some time to work on the photos in Lightroom on the same day as shooting them…and I also felt that taking landscape photos in the middle of the day would probably not yield the best results.

So while it was a lot of money, having done it, I would definitely do it again.

I need something to help me get to sleep, please take me through a detailed account of the day.

Harsh…but fair. I won’t take you through a blow by blow account, but we did have a brutal 5am start to catch the sunrise, and a drive to the location on a piece of land only accessible to Ridgeline that really made me appreciate having a local behind the wheel…and that wheel being attached to 4 other wheels on a Landcruiser. It’s always amazing driving through the dark on overgrown tracks, and then suddenly emerge onto a sweeping vista.

The sunrise we had woken up at 5am to see…decided to hide behind clouds, which was a bit of a bummer. But while it meant we missed the sunrise, it also meant that we had an hour or two of constantly changing light, which was actually a lot more fun to take photos of. Not to mention mountains in the background, a lake in the mid-ground and all manner of things to use as foreground…the pictures pretty much took themselves.

The Kea

After about an hour of tramping across the countryside Josh heard a birdcall and asked our guide (Mark) if it was a Kea. Mark listened for a bit and then said ‘It is!’ and so we set off to see if we could find it. Kea’s are an endangered parrot that are as renowned for their shock of orange feathers hidden under a demure green, as for stealing things from people’s campsites and balconies. 

As we rounded the hill, sure enough, there was a Kea happily sitting on a rock preening itself.

I’m not a wildlife photographer, so I don’t have any 200mm-300mm lenses that would allow me to get a great shot from a distance, so we had to take a few photos from a safe distance…and then skulk forward hoping not to spook the bird and take some more shots. Then repeat until the Kea flies away.

At one point it did fly away, and I thought ‘Ah well, I got a few good shots’…but then it promptly landed back down on a rock even closer to me than it had been before. In the end, I think the bird knew it could get away from us if it wanted to, and was potentially plotting to steal some of my camera gear, so we were able to get remarkably close before it did eventually fly off into the mountainous postcard of a background.

It was a pretty awesome experience, and judging by the expression on our Guide’s face…a pretty rare opportunity.

The Post-Kea era

We drove and walked to a few other locations, and as with almost anywhere in NZ, the views were amazing. There was very welcome coffee and fruit cake…and less welcome wet feet from trekking through long wet grass.

By 9am we were heading back down the mountain, and by 10am we were back home, ready to load in *checks notes* 350 photos!

Do I recommend doing a phototour?

Absolutely. There is no way I would have taken these photos any other way. I wouldn’t have got up early enough and I sure as hell wouldn’t have been in these locations. If you’re in Wanaka I cannot recommend Ridgeline NZ enough

My tips

Having someone else on the trip with you is great, even if it’s just so you can have someone in the photo. I noticed that a few of the tours charged the same for two people as they did for one or a little bit more (I’m assuming because they already have the car and guide booked, and an additional person isn’t going to change any of this), and so if you have another budding photographer in your family or group, it’s worth bringing them along.

Don’t be a dick. It can be really easy to slip into ‘I’m spending a lot of money, so there’s no need to be nice!’ mode…but you’re in a car/van with the tour guide for at least a few hours, so just make the most of your time together, don’t make life difficult. It’s a lot more fun when you all feel like you’re on an adventure together…plus they’re the only one who knows the way home.

Your guide will almost certainly be a great photographer…so get them to take some photos of you!

Don’t be afraid to ask if you can borrow gear. I didn’t pack a tripod as I knew I would need it for the rest of our trip. But I was worried I’d miss out on some great shots without one, so I asked if I could borrow one for the tour and it was no problem. Did I use it? No…but it was nice to have it available.

Get as much local knowledge from your guide as possible. We got some great recommendations on other places to go for photos, the best times to do some local attractions, and most importantly a GREAT recommendation for a place to go for a meal. So make the most of your time with someone who really knows the local area.

Phones are pretty good these days. Now clearly the most important part of being a photographer is having a camera that clearly shows the world that you are a photographer…but I took quite a few photos on my new iPhone, and it was painfully hard to tell the difference between them and the photos off my Fuji.

You don’t need a full day. If your social battery is going to be as depleted as your camera batteries after 4 hours, then just do a half-day. I’m convinced I got as many great photos in a half-day as I would have got in a full day, plus I got all of my photos loaded into Lightroom by lunchtime…and I got to spend that lunchtime with my family at a place that our guide recommended that turned out to be amazing. So it was a win all round!

Overall, I got an incredible experience, I met a great person in our guide Mark, I got some photos I’m really happy with, and I learnt a lot. So I will definitely be doing another photo tour, and if you have a recommendation of one to do, I’d love to hear it.