Insight Guides Travel Photography

Insight Guides

• Editorial: Insight
• ISBN:
  9781780056289
• Categoría: Personal Development
• Categoría: Travel

To mark the 40th anniversary of Insight Guides, the leading publisher of visual travel guides, we are publishing our very own Insight Guide to Travel Photography. This practical and informative guide will appeal to keen amateurs as well as complete beginners and covers everything from the history of travel photography to digital processing and the sharing and selling of your own images. The guide features expert advice on how to capture stunning photographs whatever the time of day or year, helped by our destination calendar which conveniently highlights when places are at their most photogenic. Illustrated sections explore all aspects of technique from lighting and composition to camera settings, exposure and lenses. 'The Journey' section explores every kind of travel photography, including Setting Out, Landscapes, Elements and Skyscapes, The Built Environment, People, Wildlife, Details and Close-ups, Transport and Active Pursuits. A section offering tips on how to establish a rapport with people and photograph them successfully and respectfully in their environment in order to gain a greater insight into their world is entirely unique to this guide. Authoritative feature essays focus on areas such as 'Capturing the Soul', 'The Family of Man' and 'Flash Photography'. The handy 'At Home' section provides invaluable advice for preparing for your trip, including what to take and planning the journey, local customs, insurance and protecting your camera. There is also plenty of tips for processing, including how to download safely and getting the most from your images. A full and extensive glossary also details technical jargon, for anything you may need to know. This inspirational and practical guide is of a portable size making it a useful on-the-spot handbook, yet comprehensive enough to be a wonderful reference guide at home.

The Camera

From light and composition we move on to the camera and how to get the best out of it. Here are the basics about compacts and DSLRs, settings, exposures and lenses. Plus tips on video performance

Digital, apart from everything else it has done to photography, has complicated hugely the choice of camera – but in the nicest way. From small compacts that will slip into a shirt pocket to high-end SLRs, there is variety to suit most budgets and every need that manufacturers can anticipate, plus a few more features that they hope will become needed.

The ground rules for camera design are open and the nature of digital technology means constant innovation. A year is a generation in the camera world. A large part of the choice of what to buy and what to take when travelling depends on how serious a part of your trip the photography will occupy. But more basic than this is the variety of sensor, of image format, and what still remains the big divide among digital cameras: compact or DSLR.

Digital cameras come in all kinds of sizes and flavours, touting this feature or that, but the two major classes are compacts and DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) cameras. The major difference lies in what the DSLRs have and the others don’t: through-the-lens viewing by means of a prism and a mirror that flips up at the moment of shooting, and interchangeable lenses. Some mirrorless cameras also offer a range of lenses, but by and large, compacts do a simpler job with less fuss and less weight, while DSLRs are the choice of professionals and serious amateurs. This does not mean that DSLR image quality is necessarily better, just that there are more features.

Manufacturers are constantly blurring the lines by launching models designed to “bridge the gap”. The shape of the image (which comes from the shape of the sensor), otherwise known as aspect ratio, tends to divide along the same lines. Most compacts produce images in the proportion 4:3, known as “four-thirds”, while DSLRs tend to follow the old 35mm film standard of 3:2. Creeping up behind is the newer 16:9, which fits HD television, and will probably grow in popularity.

The importance of sensors

Before buying a camera, it is important to know about the variety of sensor. The heart of a digital camera is the product of intense miniaturisation. The front surface is packed with small photosites, one per pixel, which collect photons that are then stored briefly as an electrical charge. The more pixels there are, the higher the resolution of the final image, and so the bigger it can be printed or displayed. For this, sensors and their cameras are rated by megapixels (one million pixels). All digital cameras have sensors that will produce a good-sized print, and will fill a computer or television screen.

To work out how large a digital image you need for a screen or a print, you have to know the resolution, which for a screen is between 72 and 96 pixels per inch, and for most high-quality printing is generally accepted to be 300 pixels per inch.

For instance, a compact camera with a 12-megapixel sensor delivers an image that measures 4000 pixels across by 3000 pixels deep. That will make a good print measuring 13 inches by 10 inches. For a computer display, all you would need to fill, say, a typical 15-inch screen is between 1000 x 600 and 1200 x 800, while even HD television needs just 1920 x 1080. In other words, for almost all needs other than large gallery prints, most camera sensors do the job perfectly well.

An image taken with a Holga recalls the early days of photography.

iStockphoto.com

The photosites on a sensor collect just light, and do not discriminate colour, so to create a colour image, the sensor is faced with a grid-like transparent filter called the Bayer array in a pattern of red, green and blue. One colour covers one pixel, so the colour resolution is lower than the bright-to-dark resolution, and the “colouring” of the final image is estimated in the camera. However, as our eyes don’t require as much detail in colour as they do in brightness, it all works out well.

Calculating colour is just one of the tasks that the camera’s internal processing has to do. The others are converting the electrical charge from the sensor into digital values, and making the image look “right” to the human eye by brightening part of the range. Digital capture is “linear” in that it doesn’t vary from bright to dark, whereas the human eye, and film incidentally, registers more information in the highlights and shadows.

Processing images inside the camera is a complicated business, which is why sensor and processing unit are inseparable. Sensor sizes and performance vary between cameras, and the best are found in high-end DSLRs, which generally have what are called full-frame sensors (meaning the same size as former 35mm film: 24x36mm). Even modest compacts have 10MP, but while squeezing more and more pixels onto a sensor improves the amount of detail that can be captured, it does not help noise, which is why DSLRs that perform well at high ISO sensitivity settings make more careful use of their larger sensors. Larger pixels capture more light and so are less prone to noise. If you are choosing between cameras, make sure that you check megapixels, colour fidelity and noise performance on one of the many comparative websites.

Retro Revival

Perverse though it may seem to many, the super-technology of digital cameras has bred a reaction ­– a new-found love among some photographers for the imperfections and distressed-image qualities that came from cheap, throw-away plastic cameras. Models like the Holga and the Diana make a virtue out of low fidelity, utter simplicity, and the effects of using a cheap plastic lens, which include softness, colour fringing, flare and vignetting (darkening towards the corners). This cult is, of course, a part of the constant search among photographers and the people who use photography for new and different styles of imagery. If you are on the road, one extra advantage of toy cameras, if you like their results, is that they are unlikely to get stolen!

Still with film

Digital may have taken over photography almost completely, but it’s a confident prediction that film will never disappear. Some photographers still prefer film for being less complex and for being more forgiving of harsh lighting and less-than-perfect exposure. Film cameras are much more mechanical than are digital models, which makes them more long-lasting, and there are countless available secondhand. Taking a film camera on your travels can be a less expensive and more robust option, and if you are in remote places without the necessary supply of electricity, a film camera remains useful. But remember that there is no instant review to show you got the exposure and framing right, so accuracy is important. Film cassettes or rolls need care, in particularly keeping them out of heat and bright sunlight and avoiding too many passes through an airport x-ray scanner.

Film has not disappeared altogether

iStockphoto.com

Settings

All cameras offer a choice of settings in order to try and satisfy different tastes and ways of working, and the choice can be daunting. Moreover, manufacturers often cloud the issue by offering proprietary extras with fancy names that in reality are just ways of processing the image that you already captured.

To cut through all of this, just remember that there are three key camera controls – aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity – and then there are the digital settings that affect image appearance and quality. First, let’s look at the three key controls, all of which control the amount of light that goes to make the image, but do other things as well.

Crossing the street in Manhattan

Abe Nowitz/APA

Aperture

The lens aperture is a diaphragm that closes down (called stopping down) to restrict the amount of light from the scene that will strike the sensor and make the image. The aperture is measured in ƒ stops; these are for convenience, so that each stop smaller than the one before lets through half the amount of light.
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