People, still to this day, use both Digital and Film Cameras, and use all formats for travel photography (Large format, Medium format, 35mm). Digital cameras have certainly made taking travel photographs alot more easier and accessible, and much more readily stored and used. Compact Digital cameras have allowed tourists and photographers alike to capture quick snap shots of foreign cities, countrysides, buildings, landscapes etc. Also these cameras are easily stored and able to be carried around in pockets, bags etc.
Film still has its place, even with the large influx of the digital market, Professional and amatuer users alike still use medium and large format cameras to capture their relevant subject matter, as film is still readily made and produced for these format of cameras.
35mm and compact make the ease of travelling with cameras easier, as large and medium format can be quite bulky to carry around.

1900's photos - Paris, New York, Texas.

Albert Kahn

source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rdiC45HeD0

My perspective

In a nutshell, I feel that travel is not a discrete event but a continuous process and hence to successfully capture it is a tedious process. It requires not only the skills of a photographer but also that of a keen observer and a person with an angle towards life.

Over the centuries travel photography is no longer limited to only a bunch of handpicked photographers chosen by the likes of Albert Kahn among others. And this has been possible especially due to the digitization of the camera. Thus having said that, I am personally on the side of those in the favour of digital cameras in the debate about the loss of the art of photography by the photography purists.

In travel it is essential to capture the essence of the place and the culture of the subject involved and thus unlike in a pre setup photo session you do not have many chances to capture the shot. Thus in the case of film cameras until one reaches the process of development you do not have much idea about the quality and accuracy of the shots taken. Also digital cameras are a blessing as they reduced the need for the photographers to travel with highly fragile and reactive film developing chemicals and equipments and the same financial investment can now be put into acquiring better lenses.

The pleasure of capturing your own experience and bringing it out for the rest of the world to view and appreciate without having to actually visit those places is what makes it all worth it.

photo from Jonathan Mohabuth

Ken Duncan Lad

As you may or may not be aware, Ken Duncan is a very famous landscape photographer.
He is well known as the pioneer of Limited Edition Photographic Art in Australia. After a visit to New York in the early 1980's, Ken returned home with a dream to have photography widely accepted as an art form in this country. The increasing number of Australian photographers now emulating his panoramic style and finding a market for their work is testimony to Ken's success. He is a modern example of a well established travel photographer, as he has travelled all over the world to capture specific moments of history and significant places and people. below is his site, and showcases spectacular images of places all over the world.

http://www.kenduncan.com/index.php/gallery/overseas

Learning more about the world through photography

Here are some interesting links :


Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/

Trekearth   
http://www.trekearth.com/

Travelphotographer.net
http://www.travelphotographers.net/

National Geographic
http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/

What is travel photography ?

It is a type of photography involving the documentation of an area's landscape, people, cultures, customs and history. The pictures express a feeling of time and place, its people or culture in its natural state and as no geographical limitation.
Travel photography can either be created by professionals or amateurs. Examples of professional travel photography can be found in the National Geographic magazine. Amateur travel photography is often shared online through photo sharing websites like flickr, TrekEarth etc.
source

In the 19th century, enterprising European photographers travelled to distant places such as Egypt, India, China, the American West, and the Pacific. Through the photographs they brought back, for the first time, people who had not travelled could see what the world looked like.

Later in the century, tourism as we know it today emerged, and local photographers in these countries supplied a demand for souvenir images to take home. Faraway Places shows an intriguing selection of both these types of photographs.

http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/WhatsOn/exhibitions/Pages/FarawayPlaces.aspx

National Geographic.

A quite common and well known source of travel images is the magazine, "National Geographic". This magazine provides images taken all over the world, and allows viewers to experience another culture, country, race or place without actually being presently there. Their aim is to push people to see the beauty and essence of life, be it human or animals, and aim to preserve these precious life forms.

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/?source=NavPhoHome

here is an example of modern day travel photography

http://www.tpoty.com/winners/2010

this video is a modern day example of how photographers go about taking travel photography, what gear they use, certain tips etc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z28VvAQWjEg

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid development and increasing recognition of the art of photography, along with a growing fascination with other countries and cultures, marked the beginning of the formation of a "global visual culture.” In the decades following the invention of photography in 1839, professional photographic firms appeared in the major cities of Western Europe, as well as in more remote travel destinations such as Greece, Egypt, India, Asia, and the Middle East. The earliest travel photographers produced images primarily for publications which functioned as surrogates for travel, spurring curiosity and inspiring Grand Tour travelers who, by the 1870s and ’80s, were flocking to exotic sites to visit the monuments of the ancient and medieval past.

Catering to this influx of European and American tourists, a growing number of travel photographers documented historical monuments and archeological sites, as well as scenes of daily life. Technological developments enabled these photographers to produce relatively large numbers of images that were chiefly intended to satisfy the burgeoning tourism trade and the thirst for images of the Orient, the term traditionally used in the nineteenth century to refer to the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. As the techniques of photography became less cumbersome, transporting equipment became more practical. Photographers began to sell their pictures on-site to tourists who collected them as souvenirs during their travels.

These unique photographs have artifactual value for the history of photography, as well as documentary value for the study of the architectural and social history of the regions in which they were produced. Since the nineteenth century, many of the monuments recorded in these images have been altered through architectural restoration, damaged, or, in some cases, completely destroyed. Images on glass plates and paper are often the only surviving records of these monuments and of certain aspects of nineteenth-century daily life in both urban and rural areas. The nineteenth-century travel photograph also provides a singular historical record, documenting cultures and landscapes that have been radically altered by development and modernization.

Here are some early examples of travel photography.

http://web.princeton.edu/sites/Archaeology/rp/globalviews/gv1.html

Man tending to his sheeps.

Cotton Bales In India and dat.

History of Travel Photography

Joseph Niepce

The oldest image produced by a camera was taken in 1825 by Joseph Niepce who captured a street scene in the East of France (Saint Loup de la Varennes).

 taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Image source

This picture is the oldest surviving travel photo captured with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of 

20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. As a result of the 8-hour exposure, sunlight illuminates the buildings on both sides.


· 1839 in Paris, Louis Jacques Daguerre introduced a photographic process called the “Daguerrotype”. It is a complicated process that required a lot of equipments and chemicals (amalgam or alloy, of mercury and silver), but however was still accepted quickly. 

Image source

Each Daguerrotype are unique and record scenes with very good detail. It allowed people to travel with camera.

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taken by Louis Daguerre

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The first owners photographed their local area like Notre Dame Cathedral, the river Seine and le Pont Neuf.


The appeal of photography was obvious to travellers in the 19th as it is today.


Daguerre suggested himself that his camera could be taken on a trip.
But that wasn't that simple!


The travelling photographer had to carry with him a portable darkroom including enough chemical to have a mini laboratory.

                                           image source

A portable darkroom in 19th century Ireland

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process which became a standard photographic process until 1880.


Here is a video explaining about the collodion process : 

This new process reduced the exposure time to only 2 second , compared to the daguerrotype and colotype.
(Calotype  is an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide)




However this did not help many travel photographers in their task.
In the 1850s the standard photographer outfit was the large sized camera, tripod, glass plates, plate holders, a tent like portable darkroom,chemicals, tanks, water containers ...
Photographers carted their equipment around the world.


19 century pictures:

Collodion print from a negative taken by Francis Frith. The Great Wall of China 1860

Grand Canyon, America

Benasares India

In the mid 1800s, pictures taken for scientific purposes were of great interest to people in general and with the help of the collodion process reproduction of photographs became convenient.

With the invention of the printing press, photography became commercialized as the demand due to tourism increased. However, this new era of photography was not accepted well by the purists who debated that commercialization had spoiled the craft. 

According to sources, the first postcard was introduced by the Austrian postal service in 1869.

The world first postcard

source

 In 1910, France printed 123 million postcards and the world's mail systems processed around 7 billion in the same year.

By the end of the 19th century tourists could take their own pictures. In 1888, George Eastman, the founder of Kodak invented a camera using a roll of film.

 He launched the first point in shoot with the now famous slogan.. "You press the button, we do the rest". The camera came loaded with a 100 exposure film and a memorandum book that had to be filled in to keep count of the photos. When the film was finished the camera was posted back to the factory. The camera was written with the films and loaded with a fresh film. In the first year Eastman sold 13000 cameras.

Further refinements saw the introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera in 1900, which made the photography process accessible to millions of people around the world.

source

 Photography had become a mass medium and tourists were traveling with small and easy to use camera. According to some, by the start of the 20th century the world has been photographed to death.

Reference : Lonely planet, travel photography, 3rd edition, august 2009

Louis Arthur Ducos du Hauron,(8 December 1837–31 August 1920),was the French pionner of color photography,he developed a process for color photography on the three-color principle.

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source

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Arthur_Ducos_du_Hauron

19th Century Travel - Airplanes

With the implementation and introduction of commerical use airplanes, citizens, at a very costly price, were able to travel to certain parts of the world, to experience a diverse collection of cultures, monuments, religions and race of people. these people at first, travelled for business reasons or the idea of arriving at a destination faster. Gradually people began to travel for leisure and to experience foreign places previosuly unreachable by airplane, and reached at a much faster rate. Typical photos included that of countrysides, buildings, rituals, and of people that the certain country contained. These photos were either in black or white or sepia tone, as obviously the digital era of photography had not quite begun yet.