Self Indulged Online Travel Magazine
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  • Archives

  • March31st

    Torres del Paine – After The Flames

    Posted in: Travel & Landscapes

    Torresdelpaine sandra herd

    We’ve just returned from 10 days camping in the spectacular Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia and this is one of my favourite captures from the trip…ironically it was taken on the first day. We initially intended to just do the popular ‘W’ trek but somewhere along the line Dave convinced me that we should do the ‘O’. It was certainly a challenge on the ‘O’ circuit lugging our gear around…camera equipment, tent, sleeping bags and food (Dave did most of the lugging – bless him) but we made it around and finally got to the ‘W’ section which was pretty busy in comparison to the deserted back section – I’m not sure if it has occurred to anyone else but the ‘O’ trail combined with the ‘W’ trail produces the ‘OW’ trek…yep, my blisters had blisters and I think Dave could possibly need a knee reconstruction from the downhill pounding. We came away with a stack load of images and a wonderful sense of achievement. 

    We’ve been hanging out at the Erratic Rock for the past few days for a period of recovery, taking our cue from Bonnie & Clyde, the lazy resident cats.

    At this stage I anticipate the next issue of the mag to be out around the 14th of April as we’re going to be offline again for a while when we head over to Argentina for more trekking at El Calafate and then to El Chalten in search of more spectacular granite spires.

    I’ve called this image ‘After the Flames’ in commemoration of the fire that swept through the park in December last year.  For those who have been enquiring, prints will be available for sale when we return to Australia…I intend to put an exhibition together on our return, if you’d like to be on the mailing list then SUBSCRIBE here for free. Also, there have been a number of emails about the one day course…again, when I return to Perth,  I will update the schedules and resume the courses.

  • February29th

    Epic HDR for an EPIC landscape.

    Posted in: Blog update, Travel & Landscapes

    Giants-Causeway-by-Sandra-Herd-

    You can be forgiven for thinking we’d fallen off the face of the planet, it has been a long time between posts. But, as always, we’ve been travelling, shooting and planning the next leg of the trip.  We just recently completed a one week whirlwind tour of Ireland. We caught the ferry with the car (GBP215) from Pembroke to Rosslare on the Emerald Isle then drove via Galway to the wonderfully windswept Achill Island. This was a bit of a pilgrimage for me as my Great Aunts family was from there and she once told me that her father had said that there was only a paper wall separating it from hell! With a description like that we couldn’t resist popping in. In the one day we spent there we endured gale force winds, rain, hail, snow and brilliant sunshine. It really was an experience of four seasons in one day…OK maybe not…the sun wasn’t that hot, summer was definitely missing.  From the wild west coast we headed North East to the highlight of the trip for me, the Giants Causeway. The landscape here is epic and we weren’t disappointed. We were lucky enough to get a break in the grey weather for a spectacular sunset.  As a rule I don’t tend to shoot much HDR but I think, in this instance, the scene warrants the treatment.

    We leave today for South America…a new episode begins.

  • November27th

    One big tick for the bucket list

    Posted in: Travel & Landscapes

    EUROPE-3005-Edit

    We haven’t had much sleep over the past two nights….we’ve been hunting. Chasing the light. And we found it.

    On Friday night we drove for 2 hours out of Tromso chasing a glimmer of the illusive aurora borealis.  We did get a glimmer but only a small one, at midnight we gave up and drove through the sleet and rain for another 2 hours back to Tromso. Last night was wonderfully clear. We drove 20km out of town and were treated to a striking sky show from about 11pm to 1am. Granted, it’s the not the greatest aurora photo of all time but it’s hopefully the first of many while we’re in the arctic circle.  It’s also the shot that means I can put a BIG TICK next to #2 on my bucket list – “See & shoot the aurora borealis”

    Tick!

  • July21st

    Street Treats…

    Posted in: Blog update, Travel & Landscapes

      Beijing_Gifograph_Sandra-Herd

    Street food in Beijing: I first saw this photo effect a while ago and then more recently a series of fashion images by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg that were really inspiring.  I’ve been dying to try the effect in some of my travel images and have been capturing them since I arrived in China…and now I’ve finally had chance to do some processing.  The term coined for these animated photos is the ‘Cinemagraph’ but I’m calling mine ‘Gifographs’ becaause it is, after all, just a humble gif. This was taken on the street outside our hostel in Beijing.  The Happy Dragon is down a side street to the North-East of Tiananmen Square, there’s no outdoor area to sit and the beers were expensive so we sat outside on the street in the warm summer air with another traveller from Canada (Hi, Flora!) and ordered cold beers and meat skewers from the guy in the photo. The beers were cold the food was good and cheap and the whole evening cost 75RMB (about  $10 ) for the 3 of us. Gotta love China!

  • May29th

    And so it begins…

    Posted in: Blog update, Travel & Landscapes

    Dumbling chef_Chengdu_by Sandra Herd

    Here we are finally in China, Chengdu to be precise.  After the last minute rush to pack up the house and pack up our lives we’re finally here in a cosy hostel, drinking beer for 72 cents a bottle and finding our ‘travel feet’ in a slow but steady fashion.  There has certainly been some culture shock…not so much because we’re in China but more because we’re not used to lugging our luggage around.  I’d forgotten what it was like and it came flooding back pretty quickly as we stuffed our bags into the back of the taxi from the airport and spilled out in a dishevelled mess on our midnight arrival at the hostel.

    That was over a week ago and already it feels like we’ve been away for weeks. We’ve been out to Jiuzhaigou (an eight hour bus trip North of Chengdu) and Huanglong and stayed a night in Songpan before coming back here to the hostel where we started from. We’ve taken a bicycle tour through the manic streets of Chengdu and sampled the steamed dumplings  made by the man in the image above.  Our legs hurt, our backs ache and my camera trigger finger is worn out but we are loving every minute of it…and it’s only just begun.

  • April1st

    Glaciers & Growlers

    Posted in: Blog update, Travel & Landscapes

    Glaciers

    Issue 3 of Self Indulged is out now and one of the features is ‘Cruise Ship Diary’ about our cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage. The glaciers are just beautiful…and sooo blue.

    There’s no de-sat on the top shot, that’s just how it looked on the day. Grey skies, grey rocks, blue ice. We flew over Mendenhall Glacier in a chopper which is a great way to get a handle on just how epic this landscape is….you can read more about it in the mag.

    The Inside Passage is just the tip of the Alaskan iceberg….I’d love to get back there with my camera and explore the real Alaska, further up and further in.

  • February1st

    Seaman’s Sanctuary

    Posted in: Travel & Landscapes

    Seamans Hut_Sandra Herd1

    It’s been a while between posts and, even though I haven’t put in an appearance here, I have been busy working on a million projects…honest!

    After spending a fantastic Australia Day aboard the True North I was keen to try out some of the sharpening techniques that Nick Rains discussed and, with all of the storms that are flying around Australia at the moment, I thought this image was fitting. (Pleased with the result on the hi-res file…it’s hard to see the effects with this squished up jpeg!)

    It was taken last year on our hike up Mt Kosciusko, the very top of Australia. There was a storm rolling in, we were kitted out in our warm waterproof jackets and hiking boots and I grabbed this shot on the way up. On the way back down we could barely even see the hut, never mind photograph it so, like many others before us we took refuge inside Seaman’s Hut until the worst of it had passed over.  We sat inside munching beef jerky and yearning for a hot cuppa. There’s a visitors book inside full of messages from other hikers who have made the trek from Charlottes Pass, some caught in snow storms, some spending the night so that they can be at the peak for the first dawn of a new year and some just looking to take a 5 minute break from the 18km round-trip.

    It was built in 1928 as a sanctuary for travellers after Laurie Seaman and Evan Hayes died on the mountain in 1928. They were skiing on the mountain and were caught in a blizzard and probably didn’t stand a chance. The hut was built by Seaman’s family as a shelter to help prevent further deaths on the mountain.  Although we were in no danger that day it was still a very welcome sanctuary for our weary, wet bodies!

  • December2nd

    ISSUE 2…..Out Now!

    Posted in: Articles, Blog update

     Nepal Cover

    POP!! That’s the sound of a champagne cork popping (actually it’s not because it’s 6.30 in the morning) but it will be tonight!

    Since it’s launch on the 1st of September 2010, the first issue has been viewed by over 30,000 readers. That’s not just hits, that’s people physically turning the pages (well virtually turning them…you know what I mean!)

    So I’d just like to say a huge THANKS to everyone who has flipped through and I hope you’ll enjoy this second Issue just as much.  It’s much more ‘interactive’ and the pages contain links which I thought might interest some of you.  There’s also a chance to win a fabbo Kata backpack if you know ‘where Dave is’.

    So grab a cuppa, take a load off and sit in front of the computer for just that little bit longer.

  • October26th

    Tiny Terminal

    Posted in: Tiny Tourist, Travel & Landscapes

    Tiny Central Station_Sandra Herd

    I’m a huge fan of this sort of tiny town perspective – I blame my parents for taking me to all of those model villages when I was a kid growing up in the UK. Sadly, I got excited when I discovered that there was a miniature village ‘Cockington Green’ in Canberra. I love the work of Keith Loutit who combines this look with timelapse to produce some wonderful footage. On the weekend I ‘found’ this image of Grand Central Station which I took while I was in New York a while ago and it was just crying out to be transformed into a ‘Tiny Terminal’.

  • October5th

    Been WANGLED!

    Posted in: Blog update, Travel & Landscapes

    Wangle

    Self Indulged was featured on Wangle today. It’s a great site and really flies the flag for all things West Australian.

    Thanks Wangle!

    Check it out HERE



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