Japan photo tour in autumn foliage season

Planet

We only run a small number of photography tours each year and we have a maximum group size of 10, thus keeping the environmental impact of international flights to a minimum. We don’t include flights in our package to allow participants all over the world to make the best and most cost and environmentally effective travel arrangements for themselves (e.g. combining with other trips planned in the same area). We also plan all travel on the ground in a way that is the most environment-friendly such as for example avoiding internal flights and focusing on energy-efficient public transportation such as trains / subway vs cars.

As photographers of many genres including nature, landscape and wildlife photography, we only work with what’s presented to us and we highly discourage any intrusive interaction with animals to provoke a reaction, which we consider an unethical and unfair practice. We guide our students to adopt the same policy.

All our in-country travel is over land, therefore reducing carbon emissions generated by flights, and we make use of local resources such as guides, translators etc. As our entire experience is based in as much as possible on staying, eating and shopping local, we stay close to the source of food as most of this will be locally grown and produced. Inside the locations we are visiting, most of the travel is very environmentally friendly such as trains, walking, electric buses, boats etc. We encourage our participants to carry a recyclable water bottle and make use of the bottle refill facilities available in hotels and along the way, thus contributing as much as we can to addressing the single plastic use issue which is a well-known problem in Asia.

People

Being photographers we are very mindful of staying respectful and non-intrusive especially when it comes to photographic genres such as street photography or portraiture. While encouraging our customers to be creative and always seek new points of view and ways of creating images, we actively discourage practicing photography that is too intrusive to either people, nature or wildlife, or which depicts social situations in a way that is derogative, insensitive or offensive.

For every tour we run we employ local drivers, guides and translators as necessary, to assist with any language, social and cultural information, as well as offer first-hand local knowledge and thus raising awareness of culture and customs. We actively encourage staying, eating and shopping local in as much as possible, and we arrange all accommodation, travel and meals accordingly and directly at source if we can, to maximise value for both our customers and local providers.

Wherever possible we purchase our gifts and souvenirs from family businesses, local markets as well as organised local charities promoting welfare of local residents and we never haggle! While doing so, we are very mindful not to inadvertently encourage child labour, as we believe all children should be in schools, not selling on the streets, as hard as the realities on the ground may be. We encourage our photography tour participants to adopt the same practices. This is embedded in our tour structure where we aim to stay and eat local, visit local markets or stay in family-run accommodation.