Top 10 Travel Photography Tips

Follow these top 10 tips to improve your travel photography and help you capture memorable photographs to be proud of!

1. Advanced planning

Before you travel, do a little basic research on where you’re going. Tourism websites are good for highlighting the top locations and attractions.

2. Cultural research

Travel photography is often more about people than places. In some cultures, people aren’t happy to have photos taken, so this is another area that’s best researched in advance.

3. Security risk

Many ‘high-security’ landmarks have quite a relaxed attitude to people taking photos with compact cameras, but come down heavily on anyone using a D-SLR. It’s best to ask first.

4. Travel light

When you’re travelling, it’s good to keep the weight and number of accessories down to a minimum. Rather than taking an assortment of lenses, invest in a good super-zoom lens and prime lens.

5. Focus on the unusual

One of the biggest joys of travel photography is finding people and things that are different from back home. Always be on the lookout for the surprising and be ready to react.

6. Follow the sun

Take a brief trip to places you’d like to photograph and bear in mind that the sun moves in an arc from left to right across the sky. You can plan ahead to visit areas that are well lit or in shadow at different times throughout the day.

7. Shoot early and late

The most dramatic lighting is usually seen at the beginning or end of the day, so find out the sunrise and sunset times and, if possible, make the most of fabulous lighting during the ‘golden hour’ before sunset.

8. Architecture

For architectural shots, keep your distance and avoid the distortion of very wide-angle lenses. Don’t shoot upwards, as the perspective will make uprights appear to lean inwards.

9. Off the beaten track

It’s all too easy to end up with a set of images that look like a series of postcards or snapshots. Try getting away from the most common views to capture the real character of a place.

10. Back it up

Take enough memory cards to hold all the shots you take and, if you have a laptop with you for work, backup your images as well as leaving them on the memory cards for safety’s sake.

Travel photography by Ephraim Muller

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2012 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Photography Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.