Weather and the wet season.

This is NOT what the editors are after for the publications I'm working on, unless they want to use it for 'when not to visit'!

I’m currently in the Northern Territory, Australia, taking photographs for some new books and several magazine features. While that might sound great (and in many ways it’s brilliant), this is the wrong time of year to be here to give the clients what they want. The wet season is upon us and it is serious business as several inches of rain can fall in a couple of hours causing flash flooding, making any off-road excursions dangerous. The wet also signals the end of the tourist season and we were on the last tours of the season and the last guests at several resorts before they shut for the wet. Even when the sun is out now it’s a very hard light, not really conducive to producing the kinds of photos that will entice people to visit. The humidity and heat here has the tour guides wondering whether their guests will keel over while bushwalking to look at Aboriginal art and losing a client to dehydration or a heart attack is only marginally less embarrassing than losing them to a saltwater crocodile. So why schedule a shoot for this time of year? Glad you asked.

Editors rarely take this kind of thing into account — the weather and tourist seasons are generally oblivious to editors when scheduling dozens of titles. In fact, one book I was meant to be doing the photography for had to be postponed until next year as many of the places that were to be included are now shut until next May. To put it in context, that’s like sending someone to the Swiss Alps in August for some great off-piste skiing shots and it wasn’t until we explained it to them in explicit terms such as, ‘THAT CAMPING GROUND AND WATERFALL WILL BE INACCESSIBLE UNTIL MAY’ that they postponed the book.

But there are less serious, but still ‘what were they thinking?’ assignments such as a few months ago in Venice, Italy. Now Venice is generally gold to a photographer (avoiding the clichés is the challenge), but August in Venice is to be avoided at all costs. I’d like to say you couldn’t pay me to be in Venice in August, but someone did. And I went. To add insult to injury, the main postcard vistas had key sights covered in scaffolding. But that’s a story for another post…