From The Sunday Times Travel Magazine

I jumped straight in at the deep end when I decided to become a travel photographer. At the age of 33 I quit my job in advertising, bought a digital camera and a backpack, and set off around the world. I travelled light, carrying the smallest camera I could get away with that would still take pictures good enough to publish – a Canon 20D, 8.2 megapixels.

It’s not too bulky – the same couldn’t be said for my clothes, though. I had to pack lots of warm layers for my trip, which included a visit to the Everest base camp. Most people get there from Nepal, but I wanted to see it from the Tibetan side. I took a horse and cart from Rongbuk Monastery, high in the Himalayas. We walked but you have to take transport with you in case altitude sickness strikes. I was fine until we reached base camp, at 5,020m, but then I got a crushing headache which meant I couldn’t eat or sleep, and the tents were freezing at night. It was worth it for the shot with the snowy peak of Everest on the horizon (picture 1 in the slideshow). I like the way the cart frames the picture. Composition is so important – I always look for angles that show the subject in a different way.

It was pretty chilly (though not quite as cold as Tibet) when I took the shot on the Interislander ferry (picture 2), which crosses the Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands. I’m not a natural early riser, but the quality of light is so good at that hour that the promise of a great photo makes it worth getting up at dawn. I caught the 5.45am ferry – this girl was on the top deck, wrapped in a blanket like she’d just got out of bed.

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• Picture gallery: Emma Wood

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I had to crawl around in mud and horse dung to get the horses picture (picture 3). It was taken at the Helensville Rodeo in New Zealand. I had to crouch under a fence to snap this cowboy framed by a horse’s legs. The compere found my antics very amusing.

My camera needed a good clean afterwards to get rid of all the dust. You need to take care of your kit – take it in for a service after every trip, because even though you may be able to remove the superficial grime, dirt may get into the sensor. You’ll need a technician to clean it – they can reach the bits you can’t – who will take a test image, then clean the mirror box area, the underside of the focus screen and the sensor itself.

Sometimes getting a good picture is all about luck, though. I was in Nepal, hiking to the Annapurna base camp, when I captured the sun peeking out from behind the sacred peak of Machapuchare (picture 4). The effect lasted only seconds. You have to be primed for moments like this – I take my camera everywhere.

The man in the bubblegum-pink turban was another of those spur-of-the-moment shots (picture 5). He was leaning out of a bus window in Jaipur – the ‘pink city’– in Rajasthan. I was on the lookout for all things pink, so he fitted the bill perfectly, and was more than happy to pose. Children are always happy to be photographed, too. The kids peeping through the window (picture 6) I snapped in a tiny village near Lanzhou in China. I showed them their picture afterwards (a word of warning – put on your lens cap first or it’ll get covered in fingerprints) and one girl asked if I could send it to her. She wrote down her address in Chinese characters. When I returned to the UK, I photocopied the scrap of paper and stuck it on an envelope with the picture inside. I hope it found its way to her eventually.

www.emmawoodphotos.com

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