Focus on Travel Photography

Focus on the Fundamentals (Focus On Series)

Haje Jan Kamps

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780240823911
• eBook ISBN: 9781136108778
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Digital Media

Author Haje Jan Kamps knows that you are travelling for two good reasons: to experience great things, and to get great photos of your travels. He also understands very well how people's eyes tend to glaze over when phrases like "Circles of Confusion" or the "Inverse Square Law" are brandished about, and focuses instead on great photographs, and how to take them. A realistic and easy-to-follow approach to travel photography puts the fun back into photography, and by following a series of simple exercises, you'll learn much more about photography than you would have thought possible!

Focus on Travel Photography covers the basics of photography in brief before throwing itself into the real essence of travel photography: landscapes, people, and capturing the spirit of your destination. Finally, the author explores how you can download, edit, and distribute your photos while you're on the move-all without being over-burdened with equipment.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Travel Photography

Travelling through Arizona more than a decade ago really opened my eyes to travel photography. Taken at 1/125 sec, f/8.0, and ISO 100 with a 28 mm lens.

There's an old truism that goes as follows: “On their deathbeds, no one ever states they wish they had spent more time at the office.” No one ever asks the logical follow-up question: What do you wish you had been doing instead? For many of us, the answer is not hard to come up with: Travelling the world.

There are many ways to travel. Do me a favor, and imagine the following two scenarios: Imagine you are travelling in all-out luxury, flying only first class, with a footman to help you carry your dozen suitcases; staying in the swankiest hotels conceived by man. Now, imagine the other extreme, a reality where you travel on foot, rickety buses, and downright dangerous trains, from youth hostel to youth hostel, carrying nothing but a notepad with your travel musings and two sets of clothes.

Do you have those two scenarios clear in your mind? Good. If you're anything like me, both alternatives have an almost magical draw to them, and in envisioning the lifestyles of journeying into the unknown, I can feel myself becoming thirsty with wanderlust. In reality, I will never be able to afford to travel in the former scenario, and I'm not brave enough to implement the latter. The point is this: No matter how you travel, irrespective of where you go, you'll run into situations, see things, and make experiences that you couldn't have gotten in any other way.

As a photographer, this is a golden opportunity. The excitement of bringing home photographic trophies you can show to your friends and family is a particularly intense flavor of magic.

It doesn't matter if you're a seasoned photographer or a complete newbie—travel photography is great fun, and gives a huge amount of creative freedom and inspiration.

To me, travel photography is a fantastic opportunity to keep memories of my travels alive – and an excuse to spend some quality time with my camera, of course. Taken at 1/800 sec, f/2.8, and ISO 100 with a 17–35 mm lens zoomed to 17 mm.

Two ways of travelling

Travel photography offers a lot of latitude for adding your own personality and your experiences to your photography. I love food, so I invariably come home with a lot of food-related photographs. Taken at 1/30 sec, f/2.8, and ISO 400 with a 50 mm lens.

When we are talking about travel photography, it's worth making a distinction between the types of photographers we are talking about, because there is a fundamental difference between them: One group consists of photographers who travel, and the other group is travelers who take photographs. The approach to travelling and photography will be quite different to each group.

This book is for both types of photographers, but some of the key advice will be different for each type.

The traveler who takes photos

Simple snapshots – such as this image taken in Thailand with a simple Canon compact camera – can be a lot more rewarding when they are taken half-way around the world. Taken at 1/1000 sec, f/4.0, and ISO 80 with a Canon S95 compact camera.

The difference is mostly a philosophical one: A traveler who takes photos will be focused primarily on travelling, experiencing the world around them, interacting with the new environments, and exploring the world. Photography—whether done for commercial purposes, to keep the people back at home up to date, or simply as a means to preserve memories from your travels—will be a secondary concern. Photography is, in a way, an overcomeable obstacle in the pursuit of travel.

If you fall into this category, you can afford to make a lot of photographic compromises to ensure that the pursuit of photography doesn't hugely inconvenience your travelling. By carefully selecting lightweight photography equipment that still delivers high quality results, and by utilizing techniques to make the most of a weight-limited photography bag, you can travel the world without having to check an additional bulletproof flight-case for your photography equipment.

The photographer who travels

My 100 mm f/2.8 macro lens is hardly the most convenient lens for travelling; but as long as it keeps getting me lovely photos, I can't bear leaving it at home when I head out into the world. Taken at 1/640 sec, f/6.3, and ISO 400 with a 100 mm lens.

A photographer who travels will have quite a different take on the same situations. If this is you, you will probably be travelling with a lot more photographic equipment. The goal of the trip will be to collect as many high-quality photographs as possible. For the travelling photographer, the travelling itself is the thing that is an overcomeable obstacle in the pursuit of travel.

As a travelling photographer, you'll find that you have different demands than a photographing traveler. It is true that travelling with additional luggage for photography can be expensive, but if you are aiming to make money on your photography, there's no space for compromising on quality. With your needs in mind, we'll be talking about ways of travelling with a significant amount of photography equipment that is less heavy, less financially risky, and as comfortable as possible.

How to become a luckier photographer

A lucky capture of a spectator in a crowd, or a result of careful observation and preparation? A bit of both, perhaps. Taken at 1/400 sec, f/2.8, and ISO 400 with a 100 mm lens.

We will be covering a lot of things in this book, but I wanted to kick off this first chapter with a brief discussion about the concept of “luck” in photography. You'll often hear one photographer comment on another's work by saying “Wow, that is an incredibly lucky shot” or “Wow, I wish I was lucky enough to come away with a shot like that.”

I appreciate the sentiments in both sentences, and there can be no denying that all photography will have an element of luck in it. That is doubly true in travel photography; you're likely to be shooting at locations you aren't used to, possibly with less-than-ideal equipment given the circumstances, and you might be miles away from the nearest photo store if something does go wrong with your equipment.

However, I believe that a lot of so-called luck, instead, comes down to preparation. Every photograph might very well prove to be a throw of the dice, but as photographers, there's a lot you can do to load the dice in your favor.

Planning ahead

A careful look at the day's program and doing my research meant that I knew I had better bring a polarizer filter with me for this particular day of shooting. Needless to say, it paid off. Taken at 1/320 sec, f/7.1, and ISO 100 with a 28–84 mm lens at 28 mm.

One tried-and-tested way to ensure your luck is simply to plan ahead. If you know you are going to travel in an area where you will be far away from the nearest photo store, for example, you might decide to ensure that you have backups for every piece of equipment. At the very least, this means bringing an extra set of batteries and memory cards, but you might also decide to bring extra equipment with you to work as a backup if your camera body fails or your lens goes crashing to the ground, or if you are a victim of a thief as you're travelling to the location of your shoot.

We'll talk about a redundant approach to photography equipment in more detail in the equipment chapter, but for now, I'd like for you to start thinking in “what-if” terms. It's no good to bring 24 different lenses with you if a failure of the imaging chip on your camera body leaves all your equipment useless, for example.

Let's take a closer look at “luck”

Planning ahead goes far beyond equipment. It also means that you always have your camera on standby. If you're on a bus travelling from one place to another, and you spot a beautiful scene out of the window, it's no use if your camera is in the luggage compartment of the bus. A “lucky” photographer would be sitting with his camera in a bag between his legs, or even around his neck. He'd be able to produce a camera, turn it on, point it in the right direction, and fire off a couple of shots, before an “unlucky” photographer could start complaining about his camera being in the luggage hold.

On this visit to a safari park, I assumed correctly that I wouldn't be able to get too close to the animals. As such, bringing my 70–200 mm lens proved invaluable. Taken at 1/2000 sec, f/2.8, and ISO 100 with a 70–200 mm lens zoomed to 200 mm.

Another example could be if you're taking photos of an event at an air-show. The “unlucky” photographer might be shooting with a telephoto lens, and get a series of glorious up-close photos of the planes in flight. However, one of the parts of the air-show is the spectacular look of a Harrier Jump Jet landing very close to the audience. One “lucky” photographer would have a compact camera with a wide-angle lens on the ready. Another “lucky” photographer might have read the program in advance, and was aware of this part of the event, and would have switched to a wide-angle lens before it happened. A third “lucky” photographer could have chosen to use an ultra-zoom lens for this event; the trade-off of slightly lower quality telefocus images is that she could quickly zoom all the way out and capture the action up-close.

A third example might be a safari. At sunset, out of nowhere, an enormous, single male elephant shows up. It is moving at great speed through a small pass, and there's very little time to capture it. The “unlucky” photographer grabs his camera and starts shooting, only to realize later that his camera was still on a very low ISO from shooting in the bright sunshine earlier in the day, and all the photos come out blurry. The “lucky” photographer will have created a habit of always adjusting the ISO for t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• The Focus On Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Travel Photography
• Chapter 2: Equipment for the Road
• Chapter 3: Basics of Travel Photography
• Chapter 4: Landscapes and Vistas
• Chapter 5: Photographing People on the Move
• Chapter 6: Capturing the Spirit of Your Destination
• Chapter 7: Wildlife Photography
• Chapter 8: The Mobile Digital Darkroom
• Chapter 9: Sharing and Showing Off Your Travel Photos
• Index