“One of the reasons I like my new lady friend is her good taste. She thinks I am handsome and is not shy about sharing her opinion with others. At 74 years old, I naturally felt flattered. But my ego trip ended when I drove her to the registry to renew her driver’s licence. She didn’t get it. She failed the eye test.”

-              William Wolf

 

Minding his own business on the Bridge of Thoughts, Myungsoo is suddenly the most popular traveller in Venice.

“Excuse me, would you mind ….?” Says two Japanese girls, giggling and blushing, communicate their request with gestures.

An Italian man pulls his sweetheart over. “We are just married. Can you ….?”

Certainly, Myungsoo take the proffered cameras and go to work. He positioned his camera and composes a shot that has water and gondolas in the background. The memories of Venice Myungsoo imagine they’ll want to hold in their hands 20 years down the road.

Click! Click! Smiles all around. The role of good travel photographer is not something Myungsoo thought he’d ever play.

Myungsoo usually travel alone, look pretty approachable and carry a retro-looking black 35mm camera with a couple of lenses and a tripod.

For about the first ten years of Myungsoo’s travels, he refused to carry any camera on his trips at all.

Myungsoo thought photography was a travellers’ trap, a technology that got in the way of real experience, creating a barrier between him and the local people he yearned to get to know.

In just a few years, Myungsoo went from anti-camera snob to equipment geek, prowling camera shops in search of specialty tinted lens filters and joining Internet news groups populated with like-minded fanatics.

No Japanese dinner or Chinese banquet would be complete without a round of giddy picture-taking, followed by the pleasure.

 

 

 

In Myungsoo’s first flush of enthusiasm for capturing images, he went overboard and almost became his worst nightmare.

You’ve seen the person in the khaki multi-pocket jacket, huffing and puffing under the strain of heavy shoulders bags?

He is the traveller who wakes at five a.m. to catch the ‘good light’ of early morning.

It’s hard to beat the thrill of sharing your pictures, instantly, with the people you photograph on the road.

In fact, there’s only one better thrill Myungsoo can think of ; the feeling he get when he hand the camera back to the couple on the bridge in Venice.

Myungsoo cross his fingers that their picture comes out well.

That someday they will turn the page of an album and find themselves back in Venice, remembering the afternoon they handed their camera to a stranger and smiled.

Some of Myungsoo’s favourite travel photographs are the ones he will never see.

 

 

 

 

‘After a minor accident, my mother accompanied me to the emergency room. Now, I’m 160cm tall and pleasantly plump. But when the nurse asked for my height and weight, I blurted out, “One hundred and seventy two and 56 kilos.” As the nurse pause to check her eyesight, Mum leaned over me. “Sweetheart,” she gently chided, “This isn’t the Internet.”

- Bob Meyerson