Visual Voyager is primarily focused on showcasing photos of the beautiful natural features, architecture, activities, people, plants and animals in various locations around the world.
The photos are taken using a variety of equipment including cameras and lenses from various manufacturers, but with a special emphasis on rangefinder style manual focus lenses on Panasonic (µ43), Sony (E mount) and Leica (M mount) bodies.
The site also contains reviews of cameras and lenses, events and workshops that you can sign up for, as well as the travel and photography-related articles.
We have a specific approach to photography that we adhere to on this site. This approach is shared by all the content creators on this site and hopefully by members of our community.
We recognise that every photographer is unique, and not all photographers share our approach and philosophy. We do not criticise other approaches, nor do we claim that our approach is superior to others.
The reason we share our philosophy is so that visitors to this site are aware of our values and our tenets, and hopefully agree or at least empathise with them.
We believe a photograph is a self contained story, captured as a moment in time. Although it is possible to manufacture a moment in a studio, or by combining multiple images, we prefer that a photograph represent an actual experience we had, at a specific location at a specific time, in a particular situation.
This means we prefer street and location shoots using available light, representing the actual conditions that evoke the moment we want to preserve.
We generally avoid significant processing that changes the conditions of the photograph, ie. changing night into day, making a location resemble another location, the identity of a person, weather conditions, even the colour of an object.
We believe that unlike other forms of art, we have an innate expectation that a photograph represents a kind of truth, something that actually happened, as opposed to something imagined or created.
We not generate images by combining or reusing images from other photographers, or using generative Artificial Intelligence.
Whilst we may apply some processing to a photograph, including removing or obscuring objects, or perhaps alter the look of an image for artistic reasons, we generally aim to preserve the core integrity of a photograph, so that a person who was there at the time we took a photograph will recognise that we shared an experience with them.
We believe photography represents a deliberate intent from the photographer rather than a random or accidental action. A photograph represents a specific point in time and not another.
The composition of the photograph should also represent and frame an image the photographer envisioned at that moment. A photograph by it’s very nature is dependent not only on the external conditions when it was taken, but also the equipment the photographer had at the time. Specifics like lens focal length, aperture, shutter speed, sensor size and sensitivity can and do affect a photograph, and we expect the photographer to have taken these into account when taking a picture.
We believe the image as captured by the camera should be a reasonable approximation to the final image. We appreciate that often an image can be cropped, or stretched, or aligned post capture, however we do refrain from dramatically altering the composition (ie. significant cropping, alteration of aspect ratios or depth of field) except in special circumstances where the photographer’s intent and objectives have significantly different from what was originally captured by the camera, for artistic reasons.
We believe every photographer sees the world uniquely and differently. We capture with our minds and emotions as well as our eyes. Therefore, we believe every photographer should have their own styles and preferences.
We encourage all photographers to find their own style, and avoid copying or duplicating the styles of other photographers. We definitely do not encourage “copying” other photographs, whether physically or by trying to recreate or re-enact another photograph.