One of the most beautiful monuments in the wor ld and one of the most thoroughly photographed sites

, the Taj Mahal in India is a challenge for the photographer to come up with something different. I was par t of a National Geographic Expedition, the Taj being one of the stops. Pre-dawn, I gathered a group of the photographically-driven Expedition member s and headed out to photograph the building. I’d been there before, and I knew there is a classic vantage point just across the Yamuna River. We arrived ear ly, photographer s spreading out to capture dawn from different angles. Shor tly after the sun rose, this camel driver appeared, taking his camel to drink for the Yamuna. The scene was illuminated by the heavily-diffused sunlight (pollution is good for something—adding so much par ticulate matter to the air, acting as a giant “lightbank,” softening and warming the har sh light), but I still had to use a Singh Ray Galen Rowell Graduated Neutral Density filter to allow the exposure on the foreground to balance out the brighter exposure value of the sky. 12–60mm lens at 12mm, 1/500 second at f6.3, 100 ISO, Singh Ray Galen Rowell 2-stop, hard step Graduated Neutral Density filter