Ice, marble, salt, stone terraces and pale dunes: Hubert Ngan’s travel photographs move between subjects that feel wonderfully different from one another. The collection is held together by curiosity, rather than by a single type of scenery.
In his February 2015 photo essay, Ngan describes an eight-month journey through 12 countries during the previous year. This is his personal selection from that trip, not a route completed by the Snow Addiction team.
Look for changes in scale
The marble-cave photograph brings you close to a textured surface. The salt-flat scene gives the eye an enormous open field, with a vehicle and people supplying scale. Alternating these kinds of pictures keeps a long travel collection from becoming a sequence of similar panoramas.
Try the same approach when editing your own album: pair a broad view with a detail that reveals what the place felt like at arm’s length.
Let cultural places remain cultural places
Machu Picchu contributes more than a dramatic shape against mountains. It is a historic place whose terraces and buildings invite a different kind of attention from the glacier or dunes. A good travel sequence leaves room for those differences instead of treating every stop as interchangeable scenery.
Build a journey at a realistic pace
The selected places span widely separated parts of Latin America, including Mexico. Their weather, access and visitor arrangements vary. An eight-month photographer’s collection is inspiration for choosing a region, not a short holiday checklist.
To turn the collection into a trip of your own, begin with one contrast you want to experience rather than all seventeen names. The glacier and nearby Patagonian landscapes suggest one regional focus; the Peruvian cultural and mountain settings suggest another. Put your chosen places on a map before allocating days, then check the actual journeys between them. Leave room for an ordinary day in the place you have reached. The photographer had eight months to gather these encounters, and the portfolio's variety is partly a result of that generous timescale.
For a more focused road story, follow Jakub Polomski’s Patagonia journey. For one glacier examined more closely, see his Perito Moreno photographs.
Following the geography behind the seventeen photographs
This journey moves far beyond a single mountain range. Its southern landscapes include Perito Moreno, Torres del Paine, the Marble Caves near Puerto Tranquilo and Bariloche. Farther north, the selection changes character through Salar de Uyuni, the Lares trek, Machu Picchu, Canaima and Mount Roraima. These names turn a beautiful slideshow into a useful starting point for understanding the breadth of the photographer’s eight-month journey.
The later images bring together Iguazu Falls, Lençóis Maranhenses, Huacachina and the tree house at Baños, then two very different religious settings: Las Lajas Sanctuary at Ipiales and the underground Salt Cathedral at Zipaquirá. Cenote Samulá near Valladolid completes the selection, while Easter Island adds a Pacific detour. This is a portfolio drawn from twelve countries and more than ten thousand reported photographs, not a seventeen-stop itinerary that can be followed in the order shown.
Sources, photography and further reading
Original feature and image attributions:
- Bored Panda
- Ushuaia – the World’s Southernmost City Found in Argentina
- 8000km In 30 Days: My Photographic Journey Through Patagonia
- Walking on the Perito Moreno Glacier, Patagonia, Argentina
- Spectacular Granite Spires at Torres del Paine National Park
- El Castillo – the Most Famous Building of the Mayan Era, Mexico
- A Hidden Place That Looks Like Heaven… Where The Ocean Meets The Sky.
- Video Shows How Stunningly Beautiful Machu Picchu is in Beautiful 4K Detail
- The World’s Largest Salt Flat “Salar De Uyuni” in Bolivia
- Mount Roraima - The Edge of the World in South America
- The Wildest Swing in Your Life in Ecuador
- The City of Contrasts - Rio de Janeiro
- Hubert Ngan
- Jakub Polomski’s Patagonia journey
- his Perito Moreno photographs
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