This may be strange to hear from a travel photographer, but I can make a case that location isn’t everything—light is. And I’d build my argument on the fact that the right light brings out the best in any location.
Somewhere along the line in a pro photographer’s career, or amid an enthusiast’s pursuit of picture making, you achieve a balance between geared up and weighed down when it comes to lens choices. You want versatility, but you also want to be mobile, even comfortable.
The September 25, 2016, issue of The New York Times Magazine was titled "The Voyages" Issue, and it featured an impressive collection of images. In the introduction to the issue, the writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus talks about the idea of the image as document or experience: this is what a place looks like as opposed to this is what it feels like to be there. He notes the cliché of “the traveler so busy with documentation that he misses out on some phantom called the ‘experience itself.’”
Earlier this year I co-led a photo tour in the Palouse region of Washington state. I’d never been there before, but reputation alone indicated an awesome photographic destination offering vistas of rolling hills and farmland, plus all the textures, colors, and plays of light and shadow you could wish for.