The Olympus Visionary photographers are a well-traveled group. Between them, they’ve covered most of the globe, shooting for places as diverse as the United Nations, National Geographic, the Day in the Life book series, and international travel, fashion and advertising campaigns.

Recently, we caught up with five Visionaries to discuss how to get the best possible images in exotic locales. Each photographer zeroed in on a favorite place on earth to shoot—a tough call for a group that, between them, has visited over 200 countries.

JAY DICKMAN
As a photographer for National Geographic, Jay Dickman has traveled to places as diverse as El Salvador, Antarctica, and Easter Island. His pick for a favorite place to shoot? Iceland, where he went several years ago to work on a book project for National Geographic. “I fell in love with this country after just a short time,” he says. “The diversity of the terrain, the quality of the light and the openness of the landscape were all contributing factors.”

While there, Dickman shot a series of graphically simple, yet stunning, images of nature. There are fluffy clouds sitting like frosting on the top of a red-tinged mountain, a pair of geese canoodling on an isolated lake—and, in one long exposure, a vehicle’s red tail lights trailing mysteriously over dark, rocky ground.



“It’s good to minimize the amount of equipment you take with you,” says Dickman, whose preferred lenses include the Zuiko 12-60mm and the "really versatile" Zuiko 50-200mm lens. “If you have two cameras, you can carry a wide zoom lens on one and a short telephoto on the other, and that may be all you need.” Honing down the gear is helpful, he says, because, “if you’re not constantly bending down to change lenses, you can focus on the photography aspect of your journey and empower the picture-taking process.”


ANNE DAY
In recent years, Anne Day has been shooting American life as it plays out around her in the small Connecticut town she calls home. But she often thinks back to the 1980s, when she worked as a photojournalist based in Johanneburg, South Africa, and also to the time she spent shooting on the continent for the 2002 volume A Day in the Life of Africa.

Of all the African countries she visited, Day picks Namibia as her favorite place to photograph, and one she’d revisit in a heartbeat. “The country is spectacularly beautiful, and the climate is wonderful: it’s warm, dry and soft, and just very comfortable to be in,” she says.

When photographing Namibian Independence celebrations in 1990, Day took time out to visit Etosha National Park, home to over 500 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. She particularly enjoyed photographing the park’s giraffes, which made good subjects, she says, because “they didn't seem to be particularly skittish, and they’re so elegant.” Her head-on image of a parent and child giraffe standing side by side, as if posing for a family portrait (above), beautifully proves her point, as does this image of two giraffes silhouetted against the sunset.



“If you want to photograph wildlife in Etosha, or anywhere in Africa, I’d choose the time of year carefully, because there are more animals at certain times,” advises Day. She likes the fact that her Olympus cameras have a unique dust reduction system, making it possible to shoot in dusty places without cleaning the camera constantly. Whether photographing your local Little League team or a herd of zebras, this makes for a more relaxed shoot, Day says. “I don’t have to worry about my camera, and that means I can focus more on getting that great shot.”


MAKI KAWAKITA
A true global citizen, Maki Kawakita can often be found shooting pop stars in Tokyo, advertising campaigns in Paris, or supermodels in New York. Recently, though, a personal project took her to the island of Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia, where she instantly fell in love with the landscape.

Formally trained as a Japanese dance performer, Kawakita had been looking for a place where the landscape matched the color-drenched drama of traditional Kabuki backdrops. Tasmania, she says, “looked exactly like that to me. There were dramatic mountains, a rainforest, wonderful beaches. I thought I could create all the emotions I wanted to create with these as my background.”



Drawing on the folk tale of Oshichi, a woman driven mad by love, Kawakita photographed herself, in full Kabuki costume and make-up, in a variety of different locations. Since a lot of her images were self-portraits, she appreciated the Live View swivel screen on her Olympus E-3, which allowed her to preview a shot without breaking her pose. She also enjoyed using Olympus portable FL-50R flash units, which work remotely with the E-3 and allow you to control the strength of the flash in-camera. “Working with these small, portable strobes allowed me to trek into the rainforest and get dramatic shots there, without dragging a huge amount of equipment with me,” she says. “This was really a wonderful thing to be able to do.”


JOHN ISAAC
As a photographer for the United Nations, John Isaac visited over 100 countries, photographing everything from the effects of genocide in Rwanda to Audrey Hepburn’s missions for UNICEF. Since retiring from the U.N. in 1998, though, Isaac has focused on a different subject: wildlife. He’s shot dancing cranes in New Mexico, zebras in Kenya and grizzly bears in Alaska. Currently, he’s working on a book project about tigers in India.



Isaac says his favorite place tends to be wherever he’s shooting, but he singles out a few key spots for capturing wildlife, including Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya and Katmai National Park in Alaska. In both places, Isaac says, he camped in the parks to be closer to nature and the animals. “If you’re prepared to camp, you can go to these places very cheaply,” he says. “You can really do it on a shoestring budget.”

From Alaska to Kenya, his Olympus cameras have never let him down. “The E-3 housing is incredibly solid, waterproof and rugged,” he says. “In Alaska, I never once had the camera freeze on me, and in India, I’ve photographed tigers for 7 years without once getting a dust blotch in my sensor. How remarkable is that?”


GARY CRALLÉ
As a travel photographer, Gary Crallé is used to jetting in and out of places, quickly assessing how to get the best shots. But his favorite place is one he’s returned to again and again over a period of forty years—England, where he first studied film in the swinging Sixties.

“I’ve always thought of England as a place with all kinds of mysteries,” Crallé says. “It’s like a house with lots of nooks and crannies—if you look carefully, you can discover something wonderful in every corner.”



On a trip to England last summer, Crallé traveled to historic places including the old city of Bath and the cottage of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway. But the highlight of his trip was a visit to Lacock Abbey, where William Henry Fox Talbot made the first-ever photographic negative. Positioning himself in front of the window where Fox Talbot took his iconic first image, Crallé photographed the same scene—then, in homage to photography’s inventor, made it into a color negative image. “Being in that sacred spot, and documenting it with the very latest digital SLR camera, was thrilling,” he says.

Like Dickman, Crallé travels with two main camera bodies–in his case, the Olympus E-3 and E-30. His main lenses are the Zuiko 12-60mm and 50-200mm, which he finds covers most of his bases. Ultimately, though, he says, the key ingredient in every shot is passion. “It’s important that people ask themselves what interests them and what they want to show about a subject,” he says. “Once you’ve figured that out, then I’d say, just go for it. Shoot, shoot, shoot."