Steven Barber - Photography
ADVENTURELAND
Dispatches from the Road
Night of the Mantas
You're floating, face down, hands tightly gripping the pad on the boom. Lights from the boat illuminate the sea floor some thirty feet down, and you've got other snorkelers to each side of you. Well below you swims a professional diver/videographer recording the scene.
When you see him shift, pointing his camera and lights to the side, a thrill runs through you unlike any I've experienced before. Something mixing a respectful awe with a sense of fear as to what is just outside your view...
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Joshua Tree, very pretty
The desert affords a true getaway, a true escape from the workaday world. If your cellphone doesn't work, you have to just sit back and accept it. Railing against the lack of dial tone does little more than echo off the granite walls, or dissipate amongst the desert sage.
There is a quiet serenity there. A lack of sound, even wind through the brush at times. How often are we in a wide open area with virtual silence as a companion. Not often, and not often enough.
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London Calling
London is a city of timeless classics with a thoroughly modern stripe -- more than stripe, make that "heart". In this gallery I have selected and edited pictures to ideally recapture the London of not too long ago, an era of chic, hipness, vibrance and excitement. London of the 1960s, of the Beatles, of Piccadilly, of the Avengers, of Bond...James Bond..., of Twiggy and Fleet Street. These are reasonably current shots, but I've edited them to echo, just a bit, those halcyon years.
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Getting Through
Saint Maarten
A number of years ago -- before stricter laws were put in place -- it used to be possible for an American to travel around the Caribbean using only a photo drivers license as identification. In those friendlier and less paranoid times, before the TSA turned every American airport security checkpoint into a regional Customs facility, getting from point A to point B between islands and the mainland U.S. was a relatively simple affair. Show up with your ticket, luggage and an ID card of some kind and you were whisked through to your flight in an efficient and relaxing way.
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Malibu at Sunset
Malibu, an almost legendary town up the coast from the LA metro area, is a nice place to visit, but unless you live there it's not really a destination in and of itself -- though the beaches on the west side of Point Dume are truly spectacular. (Point Dume is the large peninsula silhouetted in some of the below pictures.)
Malibu is commonly viewed and marketed as a Hollywood colony, with a lot of film and television stars.producers.directors, etc, making their home along this quite beautiful stretch of the coastline.
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The Road to Hana
Have you ever just followed a road because it was there, laid out before you, begging to be explored? The lure of asphalt as it disappears around a bend, or into the distance?
No expectations, no knowledge of where you might end up. Just trusting in the fact that someone went through the trouble of building it, so there must be something at the other end.
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Under the Tuscan Sun
“Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.”
― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun
We all tend to travel with preconceived notions of what a particular destination might look, smell and be like.
Usually we're wrong.
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