Campground life styles….

During our workshop tours in Europe one thing that frustrated us was the “hotel in, hotel out, hotel in, hotel out” life style.
I have to say, some hotels are great but sometimes you just wonder…..

 

Mostly however it also was the frustrating game of Tetris you have to play everyday with the gear and clothing because let’s be honest, you can’t leave it in the car. And finally the time it all took (not to talk about the costs), most hotels aren’t close to the locations we shoot so we lost a lot of times per day traveling from the hotel to the locations etc. (unless of course you want to pay top prices for hotels).

 

So we came up with the idea to buy a “large enough” RV to cut down not only on travel times but also on costs (although the investment will take some time to earn back of course). We started with an older type to test the waters and believe it or not we were hooked, the freedom and the fact you have everything with you while traveling is just great. Now Annewiek can drive while I retouch and we are not “forced” into eating at restaurants any more, we can just prepare our own (more healthy) food. And as an added bonus we have fast internet and HD satellite on board (hey we need toys).

 

But also in the Netherlands the RV is of tremendous use, think about shooting in a remote location with models (I mean no facilities because the Netherlands actually hardly has remote locations) and having your gear, cool drinks and food and plenty of changing room space with you, the plusses are endless 😀

 

In the mean time we traded the first RV (the tester) for a newer model, a 2004 model Knaus which has all the options we thought we didn’t need but missed a lot during the test period. But what has this to do with photography and the blog you might ask… well actually a lot. Both Annewiek and I love to do travel photography and having the RV opens up so many new doors for us we normally never had, for example… when we travelled by plane and car we only had time to do the tours/workshops and that’s it, we were never able to book a trip to go somewhere we wanted to see, there was always something that needed to be blocked in the agenda and in 90% of the cases that “thing” would of course become reality but in some cases it didn’t meaning I would have a hole in my agenda… try to fill that up in a few days and fitting the hole, that’s very difficult.  Thanks to the RV we can now in an instant turn the key and drive away for any period of time we want, being it 3 days or a week (or more). So we can now also concentrate a bit more on travel and street photography.

 

And this is how this new series has started.
As you know I love the more “story telling” images, the “weird”, the “different” etc.
Well when you stay in campgrounds it can be a pure eldorado of those…. cool characters, amazing RV’s, vehicles and …… well I don’t know how to call them…. let’s go for “At least you’re dry” kind of places. So I thought it might be cool to just shoot some images while staying in these grounds and see where the series lead. The idea is to also incorporate people, portraits, fun stuff, amazing stuff, bad stuff and much more…. let me put it this way… I’m there anyway so let’s entertain myself and you in the process.
I have to be honest that the idea started actually on the way back from Zeeland (the Netherlands) so I was not yet looking for images, still I shot some on the campground that I wanted to share, let’s call it the most simple begin of what hopefully will become an interesting series.