Eurasia Mega Trip 2026 - Day Nineteen - Alanya Photo Workshop

It is getting harder and harder for Wife and I to arrange photography workshops when we travel. The rise in the Instagram driven world of personal travel has caused those doing photography to morph. There is little money to be made in teaching photography. There is tons of money to be made bringing people around to 'Instagramable' photo locations or even taking pictures for the clients so they can post them. I was able to work through our Airbnb host and find a professional photographer, Vadim, who was willing to work with us to create an actual working/teaching session. 

We found out he's actually never done this. Yes, he's done the Instagram driven type of touring, but not real teaching. But he was definitely enthusiastic about it, looking at what Wife and I had put on our blogs, getting information from me, organizing a program, and even sending us some homework ahead of time.  

We started our day at 8:15am and finished getting back at 3:15pm. In between, there was tons of driving around the center of Alanya, and climbing the prominent hill that has the cities most notable landmark, its castle. We spent many hours walking in pretty hot weather but working on our photography. 

Note: There is a ton of stuff related to our day and to the fascinating history of Alanya and its 'castle'. We took a lot of 'non-photo workshop' pictures too. However, both Wife and I feel the posts would be to busy and jumbled up trying to combine the two subjects. So we're both going to segregate the photography component and then do a separate post on Alanya and the castle. 

There were a few significant lessons (or maybe I should say teaching points) that the session focused on. 

1. The first had to do with my actual handling of the camera. He is the first person who showed me the physical way I was working with the camera was causing instability which led to lack of clarity in the individual shots.
2. He had me focusing intensely on making sure that I had my base horizontal line truly flat and not crooked. While we were shooting, I didn't quite get it, but when I looked at the pictures afterwards, I could really see the difference. 
3. Lastly, Vadim's composition esthetic focuses on having a strong central point of focus (he would repeat 'Centrum' over and over.

He took the whole shoot seriously and was constantly watching what we were doing and making corrections. He also wanted me to be taking many shots of the same thing...like 6 to 12...so I ended up with 421 pictures! More than I have ever taken in my life. Of course, because there were so many duplicates, most were simply trashed. Here are the final ones I kept. Tomorrow, we'll go into the fascinating place that is Alanya.