Most of my travel photography – whether for an assignment or personal pleasure – reflects a simple fact: I’m strictly an urban animal. Unlike my good friend Barbara Hayton, a gifted nature/wildlife photographer (www.barbarahaytonphotography.com), I don’t have the inclination or patience to hike hours into the Wyoming backcountry to capture spectacular landscapes much less "hunt" for prancing elk, foraging wolves and, of course, the Bad News Bears. I leave nature to the pros.

Instead, I prowl back alleys. Or something like that.

Yet I do often find myself waiting patiently for my own kind of wildlife to show up -- the human variety, which can turn even otherwise solidly rendered images into something far better: a story. I learned this early on mostly by accident when I would snap photos of a building, cityscape or architectural vignette only to discover later that when someone inadvertently got into frame it occasionally made the photograph more, well, interesting. At least to me.

This is just one guy’s unschooled philosophy, but urban landscapes by necessity seem to need human presence as proof that architectural design at its best imbues man-made spaces with both meaning and purpose.

Case in point: Not long ago I was sitting in the Swiss Air VIP lounge at JFK waiting for my connecting flight to Zurich when I became smitten by the articulation of leaning windows, window panes and columns, as well as the flood of almost heavenly light that poured into the space. Not a great shot but certainly not the worst photo I have ever snapped after a couple of martinis.

When a gentleman in a suit showed up, I congratulated myself on getting my shot ahead of time. It wasn’t until he sat down and opened a newspaper that I saw the room in a whole new light (no pun intended). I grabbed my camera and took the shot again – from the exact position and angle and with the identical camera settings. When I looked at the image on my viewfinder, I thought, “Holy crap – that’s the shot!”

Another time an unexpected passerby walked into frame during a late-night fashion shoot I was doing in New Orleans’ Warehouse District with a mannequin for a major retail client. Because I was using a long exposure to better capture the available ambient light, the fellow was sufficiently blurred so as to add what I thought was a nice artsy touch. I showed both images to the client – with and without the guy walking by – and the client wisely opted for the "with" photograph. Go figure.

Once while prowling the backstreets of Merida, Mexico, I stumbled upon a large, curving metal artwork in the middle of an alleyway that led to nowhere in particular. Perplexed as much by the location of this objet d’art as its mere existence in this largely impoverished Yucatan Peninsula city, I began taking photos but stopped when I spied the slightly hunched over elderly woman making her way up the street. Best I could calculate, if I positioned myself slightly left of center of the metal sculpture, I might be able to nail a shot of the reflection of the woman as she walked past. And so I did.

There isn’t a travel photographer drawing breath who wouldn’t be fascinated by Lyon’s legendary underground tunnels, built in the 4^th century and known as traboules, originally used by silk merchants to transport their products in secret. But it was the entryways far more than the tunnels that fascinated me most, especially when I waited patiently for just the right pedestrian to descend the stairwell.

Sometimes you wait only a few minutes. Other times it takes much longer for the right kind of “accidental walk-on” to complete the image in ways you never imagined. Such was the case during a visit to postcard-pretty Lucerne, Switzerland, when I set up my tripod at midnight to shoot the River Reuss and, in the distance, the pedestrian-only, 14^th-century Kapellbrücke Bridge. Despite the splendid architecture and nighttime vibe there was something missing – something to stamp this historic and well-touristed destination as the urban oasis as it has often been described. I waited more than an hour before a quartet of late-night pubcrawlers appeared and (as a bonus) a cyclist making his way across my horizontal plane.

Even a run-of-the-mill Caribbean beach shot can – if time permits – be elevated to the status of something bordering on the absurd when the photographer is patient enough to wait for a lone duck, spied 30 yards camera-left, to amble directly in front of his lens. Hey, turns out this city slicker might have a little nature photography game in him after all. Yeah ... when ducks fly.