Travel Photography

Grand Canyon

Wow. This is BIG. As big as everyone says it is. To be totally honest, I’m not easily impressed, especially beyond words, I love the natural world and thoroughly enjoy seeing as much as I can, but for me to be ‘in awe of something’ is not an easy achievement. 1-0 to the Grand Canyon. What a truly incredible place!

My first look at the Grand Canyon was from the air, as myself and a few fellow photographers and friends took a helicopter over the West Rim of the Grand Canyon with time to fly into and land within the Canyon itself – its vastness started to set in. Yet it wasn’t until a few days later when myself a few different friends rented a car and went to the South Rim Village area of the Grand Canyon that I was truly in awe of its shear size, depth and endlessness. What a sight -100% recommended!

These pictures, nor-any, will do any justice to the time you can spend simply looking in amazement – if you haven’t been, it’s not possible to understand – just go!

Top tip: When we went to the South Rim Village, we managed to get ourselves up very early and drive from a nearby motel we stayed at about 10 miles away the night before. This meant we arrived at the Rim about 6:30am just after sunrise, almost entirely deserted! Perfect.

Visiting the Grand Canyon was part of a much longer trip exploring the West Coast of the USA. However, I thought that the Grand Canyon deserved a separate blog post. This is why…

Barney Walters

USA Road Trip – West Coast

Exploring the west coast of the USA in March of 2016 for the first time was such an amazing highlight of travel and exploring in life thus far, I’m not sure I will be able to top this one for a while. Whilst the trip itself was breathtaking for the places we visited and explored, what made this trip even more phenomenal was spending 3 weeks exploring alongside some of my oldest and dearest friends. The friends I used to see daily back when I was kid and then as time has passed seen less and less of. In fact, until about 2 years ago we still used to meet almost monthly and we do all genuinely try.

However time passes and life gets busy, we are all doing our own thing and pursuing our own goals, yet we have always stuck together and it was incredible that we were all able to find a couple weeks in our diaries to live this adventure together.

Some of the highlights of this 3,000-mile road trip were simply sat by the side of an empty road in the empty Utah Dessert or joking about some crappy motel in Nevada that we decided would be a good idea to stay in, I mean who doesn’t love a £8 nights sleep – bargain! (with breakfast). Yet we also managed to squeeze in a lot of little stops along the way and some of them you may have heard of…

Yosemite National Park, Zion National Park, San Fransisco, Las Vegas, LA, Lake Tahoe, The Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam were all incredible places to visit, if only for an hour or two in some cases and others for several nights.

When can I go back? :)

– by Barney Walters

Thailand & Myanmar 2015

What can I add about Thailand that I haven’t said in the last 2 or 3 years, its somewhere that draws me in every time I’m heading to Asia and somewhere I think I have had enough of, but then another few weeks never seems enough. Poppy is especially captivated, and as the first place I took her outside of Europe, she is always twisting my arm to stay just another few days. This year we spent nearly 3 weeks in Thailand, mostly in Bangkok (I was shooting a wedding in Bangkok) and whilst we took a couple days out to visit Myanmar and I would love to go back to explore the North, this time we soon found ourselves back in Bangkok.

Also for the second year running we went on a 3 day livabaord to the North Similan & Surin Islands which we thoroughly enjoyed – I love spending time on the calm ocean waters and also beneath in a 30 degree bath tub. ;) Its somewhere that you can truly switch off and relax and the scenery of the islands and the vast blue ocean provide an awesome time for reflection.

See you again soon Thailand, no doubt.

by Barney Walters

Abu Dhabi

This was my first time to Abu Dhabi, me and poppy visited on the end of nearly 5 weeks away from the UK, most of which we spent in Asia. We coincided this as a stop-off on the way home from a wedding I was photographing in Thailand and watching the final Grand Prix of the year in Abu Dhabi. As an F1 fan it was cool to be able to explore so much of the circuit and Yas Island itself, we actually spent very little time in Abu Dhabi itself but rather most of the 5 days on Yas Island.

I’ll be back to explore more one day soon… :) I’ll probably need to stop in Doha soon too.

by Barney Walters

Red Sea, Egypt

Me and poppy spent a week on the Red Sea with some fellow divers led by Cornish Diving School and the team at Red Sea Adventurer.

We had a fantastic time with most of the dive sites being near empty and had some wonderful experiences both diving some large wrecks and one very memorable dive with a school of dolphins! :)

I was trying to put the camera away underwater and just have some great dives and enjoy everything with my own eyes, thus most of the images here are of a few of the sites above water level.

Can’t wait to go again…

by Barney Walters