If you are the one who loves to travel and want to capture all the memories in your camera. Then, here are 10 travel photography tips for travel enthusiasts
Travel light
Travel photography by its very nature is inspirational and exciting – but it’s easy to get carried away when you prepare what to take with you. Whilst it would be fantastic to take all of your kit abroad practicalities such as baggage allowance and insurance costs could mean you are better of hiring equipment on arrival or opting for lesser items.
Choose the right lenses
Travel opens up a wide scope of genres for the avid photographer to explore, but picking which lenses to take will ultimately help or hinder you in the field. If you only have the room or budget to select one glass, opt for a fast zoom such as an 18-200mm or 28-300m etc. Sometimes you’ll find the focal point far off in the distance, but other times it could be right under your nose, as such a variable focal length lens that starts with a healthy wide angle and follows through to telephoto is ideal.
Shoot in the right mode
Shooting in RAW and JPEG Fine will offer you greater flexibility on your return, but this will mean you’ll need to travel with a several high capacity memory cards.
Get in to the habit of downloading your images to a laptop or photo storage device every night so you can free up your memory cards for the next day. When you go off shooting, take twice the amount of cards/capacity with you than you would expect to need.
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Take notes
Each night, after a hard day’s slog with your camera, take the time to jot down a few notes in a journal about the day’s events. This will help when you come to add keywords and descriptions of the places, people and activities featured in your photos. Alternatively some cameras allow for small sound bites to be attributed to each image which is another way to reference your pics.
Scout locations
If you find gaining inspiration of what to shoot difficult, start by taking a walk to the local tourist information Centre and ask the staff their where they recommend you visit.
Explain what style of photography you enjoy and ask whether there are any local guides or fellow photographers in the area who would be willing to show you some of the sights away from the tourist track.
Ask for portraits
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for any travel photographer is confidence. We’d all love to grab those beautiful environmental portraits – expressing the subject’s culture and character but many of us choose to fire of a telephoto shot from meters away for fear of rejection. But what’s the worst that could happen? They could say “No”. That’s no big deal! The chances are they will smile and nod their head in agreement and you are good to go. Take a deep breath, walk right up to the subject and ask if you can take their photo. Be polite.
Be safe
Most places in the world are relatively safe and the people friendly, but there are a few pockets of the globe where this may not be the case, so always take care to be conscious of your safety and take some sensible precautionary steps to reap better confidence in unfamiliar surroundings.
The first thing you should do after booking your trip is to take out adequate travel insurance for you and your gear and check the policy carefully to see what is covered – some adrenaline-orientated activities such as white water rafting or bungee jumping may be excluded for example.
Invest in solid luggage locks and anti-theft bags are great for travelling photographers.
Think outside the box
In choice tourist destinations it can be tricky ‘thinking outside of the box’ when there are so many cliché or timeless views of recognizable landmarks and sight-seeing subjects.
Shoot from the floor with a wide angle or fish eye lens, climb a tower and shoot from above, wait for dawn/dusk – mount your camera on a tripod and slow the shutter speed to capture the landmark in beautiful light whilst incorporate the ghostly movement of tourists strolling by.
Research your location
If you haven’t yet booked your travel arrangements, investigate the place a little further to find out when the country/city/town celebrates spiritual or religious events, traditions, national holidays and carnival style celebrations. Visiting during these times can offer a great magnitude of photographic opportunity, especially for portraiture and documentary style shots.
Use your shots well after your trip
When your holiday has been and gone, consider what next to do with your images. If you’ve bagged some wonderful frames you could enter a choice selection in to a travel photography competition. Alternatively you could upload the files to an image stock site and harvest an extra revenue stream.
Source: digital-photography-school.
