Photography Expeditions in May

Ubud puts three of Bali's most photogenic subjects within 45 minutes of each other: the UNESCO-listed Tegallalang rice terraces, the volcanic crater of Mount Batur (best at pre-dawn), and the water purification temple of Tirta Empul. Several operators run dedicated photography workshops, from smartphone walks through the rice paddies to DSLR dawn expeditions to Batur's crater rim. The variety of subjects within a small radius is what makes Ubud exceptional for photography, landscape, culture, architecture, and portraiture all within a morning.

The Avenue of the Baobabs is Madagascar's most photographed landscape, a short stretch of dirt road outside Morondava lined with towering Grandidier's baobabs, the largest of the island's endemic species, some of them around eight hundred years old and thirty meters tall. Photographers come for the light: the smooth gray trunks and tiny crowns turn amber and then deep red as the sun drops, ox-carts and villagers pass along the track in silhouette, and after dark the Milky Way arcs over the crowns for astrophotography. Dawn is quieter and cooler, with mist sometimes pooling between the trees, while the nearby Baobabs Amoureux, two trunks twisted together, make a second classic frame. It is a compact, high-yield location where a single evening can fill a portfolio, and the surrounding Menabe region adds baobab-studded plains and the Kirindy forest, with its fossa and nocturnal lemurs, for wildlife between shoots.

Huangshan is the mountain that taught Chinese landscape painting how to see. Its granite peaks, wind-bent pines and the famous sea of clouds have been the subject for over a thousand years, and photographers climb it for the same reasons the painters did. You stay on the mountain to shoot the two ends of the day: sunrise from Bright Summit or Lion Peak when cloud fills the valleys and the peaks float above it, and sunset over the West Sea Valley. The clouds are the prize and the gamble, most likely in the cold months and right after rain or snow, when a sudden clearing can turn the whole sea red and gold. At the foot of the range the UNESCO-listed Hui villages of Hongcun and Xidi add whitewashed walls and reflecting ponds to the itinerary.

Kalandula is Angola's great natural set piece and one of the biggest waterfalls on the continent, a curtain of the Lucala River roughly a hundred meters high and several hundred wide, thundering into a gorge wrapped in green. It is far less known and far less visited than Victoria Falls, which is exactly the point: you can photograph a giant African waterfall in near solitude, from the cliff-edge viewpoints, from the mist at the base, and in the golden light of early morning and late afternoon when rainbows form in the spray. An hour or so away stand the Pedras Negras de Pungo Andongo, the Black Rocks, a cluster of huge dark monoliths rising out of flat grassland that are a photographer's dream at sunrise and sunset and carry deep significance in Angolan history as a stronghold of Queen Nzinga. Together they make Malanje province a two-day landscape-photography circuit, reached on the good tarred road east from Luanda, through farmland and past roadside markets that add their own frames.

The Tandayapa Valley holds the record of 43 hummingbird species photographed in a single year, and the infrastructure matches the birds: multi-flash rigs, fruit-feeder blinds, and lek hides for the Andean cock-of-the-rock, all inside the UNESCO-listed Choco Andino biosphere. Refugio Paz de las Aves pioneered antpitta feeding here, putting one of the world's most skulking bird families in front of a lens, and the elevation ladder from 1,200 to 3,500 meters swaps out the entire species list within an hour's drive. The clincher is access: dawn in a world-class cloud forest, 90 minutes from Quito's international airport.

The Salar has two completely different world-class shots and you must choose your season. January through March, a few centimeters of rainwater turn 10,000 square kilometers into the largest mirror on earth, erasing the horizon; May through October the water is gone and the surface locks into interlocking salt hexagons that lead the eye to infinity. Add zero light pollution at 3,656 meters, and the wet-season doubled sky of stars above and below, and one landscape carries three portfolios. Extensions south stack the flamingo lagoons, the Siloli desert, and the Sol de Manana geysers into the same trip.

The Atacama is the driest non-polar desert on earth and sits at the edge of one of the world's most important astronomy zones. The combination produces extraordinary conditions for astrophotography: no light pollution for hundreds of kilometers, negligible atmospheric humidity, altitude between 2,400m and 4,500m, and 300+ clear nights per year. The Milky Way core is visible overhead for much of the year. Beyond night photography, the daytime subjects are equally distinctive: the Valle de la Luna salt formations, the red and white salt flat of Salar de Atacama, the Tatio geysers at dawn, and the flamingo colonies of the high-altitude lagoons. The landscape looks like no other place on the planet.

Zhangjiajie is a forest of stone. In the Wulingyuan area of Hunan, more than three thousand quartzite sandstone pillars rise straight out of the subtropical forest, and when the mist pours through them the effect is the one James Cameron borrowed for Avatar's Hallelujah Mountains. For a photographer the challenge is light and cloud: the pillars read as flat gray in harsh sun and come alive at dawn and after rain, when cloud threads between the spires. Local photo guides who work the park hundreds of days a year know which viewpoint at Yuanjiajie, Tianzi Mountain or the West Sea will break clear first, and when to be at Tianmen Mountain for its cliffside road and glass walkway. Time it around a passing front and you get the shot everyone comes for.

The hundred-balloon sunrise over the fairy chimneys is arguably the most iconic landscape-photography dawn on earth, and shooting it from the ridges is a different discipline from riding in the basket: world-name workshop leaders run dedicated Cappadocia departures, Vieri Bottazzini at three participants maximum, multi-day programs timing ridge positions to the mass ascension, while local photo-tour operators supply the daily logistics. The subject depth outlasts the balloons: rock-hewn Byzantine churches, the underground cities, Zelve's abandoned valleys, potter portraits in Avanos, and the winter variant, snow on the chimneys under the balloon fleet, that January photographers fly in for specifically.

The Chobe River is one of Africa's great photographic set-pieces, and it is best shot from the water. Low, stable boats bring the camera to the eye level of elephant herds crossing the channels, buffalo drinking at the bank, and hippo and crocodile in the shallows, with the light coming off the water and no vehicle dust. Bird photography is exceptional too, from African skimmers cutting the surface at dusk to carmine bee-eaters, fish eagles and kingfishers. Purpose-built photographic boats carry gimbal-mounted camera rigs and a small number of guests, so the vessel can be turned to the sun and held steady on a subject, which is what separates a Chobe photo safari from a general river cruise.

The Danube Delta is Europe's greatest wetland, a UNESCO biosphere holding over three hundred bird species including the continent's key Dalmatian pelican strongholds, and its photography infrastructure has matured into the real thing: the Periprava reserve alone runs twenty-plus purpose-built hides, floating, tower, buried, and drinking-pool, and the area rates as Europe's best site for photographing golden jackals. Access is boat-only, the lodges are remote, and the operators are photo-first by design rather than birding tours with cameras tolerated. Spring delivers the breeding colonies in full color; autumn funnels the migration through the reeds.

Mashatu, in Botswana's south-eastern Tuli Block, is built for photographers. The private reserve sits where the Limpopo and Shashe rivers meet, holds the largest elephant herds on private land in Southern Africa, and has some of the region's most reliable leopard sightings, but its real signature is a set of underground photographic hides. Sunk at a waterhole so the lens sits at ground level, the hides deliver a worm's-eye view of elephant, lion, leopard and eland coming to drink, and of the smaller stuff, sandgrouse, doves and jackals, at eye height. The Matebole hide that opened in 2012 was the first of its kind in Southern Africa. Custom photographic vehicles and a dedicated night hide extend the shooting around the clock.

Sossusvlei is a landscape built for a camera and cruel to the unprepared. The draw is Deadvlei, a white clay pan where camelthorn trees that died around 900 years ago still stand black against apricot dunes and a hard blue sky, the whole scene lit for about twenty minutes at dawn before the contrast blows out. Getting the shot means being at the gate before sunrise and knowing exactly where to stand, which is what a photo-led operator buys you. Akari Photo Tours runs small groups with pre-dawn park access, and Focused Escapes builds full Namibia photography itineraries around the dunes, Deadvlei and the Skeleton Coast.

When the world pictures Tuscany it is picturing the Val d'Orcia, a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape whose icons, the Cappella di Vitaleta, Podere Belvedere, the San Quirico cypress groves, the Pienza ridgelines, sit within thirty-minute drives of each other, a compact circuit purpose-built for a photography week. The conditions are the craft: spring and autumn dawns layer valley fog beneath the hills, May adds poppies to green wheat, October adds harvest gold, and the workshop economy around it is led by local professionals running small-group sunrise-to-sunset programs with lodging included. Few landscapes anywhere convert effort into portfolio this efficiently.

Yangykala is the most photogenic landscape in Turkmenistan and one of the least visited, a canyon system in the far west whose name means fiery fortress. Its cliffs and flat-topped mesas are banded in white, pink and deep rust red, the exposed floor of the ancient Tethys sea lifted and cut into ridges that run for tens of kilometers. The color shifts through the day and catches fire at sunrise and sunset, which is when photographers position on the rim, and the scale is hard to convey until you stand at the edge of a drop with nothing built in any direction. There is no town, no fence and no signage, so trips come out with a 4x4 and camp on the plateau. The nearby Gozly Ata shrine and the Caspian coast are often folded into the same route across the Balkan desert.