Ned's Top 25 Tips for Travel Photographers

Great travel photography requires much the same of photographers as any photographic genre; advanced planning, preparation, a willingness to adjust when at the site of the shooting session and both technical and artistic photographic knowledge.

I've got twenty-five great tips to help you bring home quality travel images.

Advanced Planning:

Locate specific locations and events at your destination:
Once you decide on your destination(s), it's import to plan and prioritize your visit to include the specific locations and events you want to see and photograph, to ensure you'll have time enough for the ones considered essential. While planning, look for unique sites, people, landscapes, etc. to photograph.

Create shot lists:
For each destination location you plan to visit, create a list of photographs you want to make. Plan as many shots in advance as possible, both specific and general. Look for positions which may or may not be normally visited by people traveling to a particular site, to utilize for photographs.

Tips for urban photography (Part 2)

In Part 1, I listed my first 9 of 19 tips to meet the challenges of taking photographs in urban areas. Here are the last 10 tips to consider when taking photos in cities:

• Context — This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about context in this Blog. It’s really a reoccurring concept which is very important to learn. When I take pictures in a city, my goal for the shot is to convey a sense of place and show the local atmosphere and way of life. It’s not easy to do this, but if you can, it can lead to an outstanding photograph.
• Most every landmark offers a myriad of potential views and unusual angles to capture its image, which allow you to express different aspects and qualities of an already well-known monument. When you arrive at a landmark, don’t just start snapping photos, don’t just stand in front and “call it a day.” Walk around and see if there are alternate views which are better at showing off the landmark.
• Sometimes the beauty, design and mystery of outstanding architecture is best achieved  by taking close-ups of the buildings. Consider a Gothic cathedral like Notre Dame in Paris. The details of the great cathedral really display the greatness of it. What better way to show off the details such as its incredible Gargoyles than via close-ups. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take the wide-angle shot showing the entire church. I’m suggesting don’t stop with the wide shot found in any travel guide. Take additional photographs so you can really see a building's architectural details and sculptures.
• Look for bold vivid colors as you walk the streets of urban areas. They can make the basis of some wonderful photographs, really showing off the city. Don’t just look for colorful art either. Look for brightly colored walls, doors, shops, textiles on display, foods at an outdoor market, floral decoration of buildings and more. At the “golden hours” these colors are often markedly enhanced.
• An interesting way to photograph a city’s over-shot landmarks is to use marginal weather; a dark cloudy sky, rain, snow, ice, etc. Weather can give a completely different look to landmarks, buildings and cities.
• I like to take night shots of cities. At night, cities under urban lights have a completely different feel and mood. Think about how Las Vegas looks during the day, versus with all those neon lights in the evening. When taking night shots, don’t overlook capturing the moon in the sky too. It can make for incredibly interesting photographs.
• Day or night, don’t hesitate to capture movement in your urban photographs. Among classic photographs are night photos of high speed highways which show the taillights of motor vehicles as red blur lines showing where the vehicles have been driven. While taking photographs in Paris, I took some of the Metro. Some of the photographs were taken of the subway pulling out of the station. The motion shown greatly enhanced the photos.
• One of the major challenges of city photography is not taking pictures of famous landmarks and sites, but portraying the local atmosphere to create a sense of place. Cities consist of much more than beautiful and/or historic buildings, cathedrals, castles, and modern buildings; skyscrapers and low risers. They include urban congestion, traffic jams, crowded sidewalks and squares, stores, sidewalk cafés, art, fountains, parks and so much more. Not just that, amid all the hustle and bustle of the city are many intimate subjects to photograph which reveal a city’s mood, style, and life. Take photographs of children at play, animals, and pictures of the local population engaged in their daily activities; shopping, drinking coffee and eating a bagel and schmeer at Starbucks or sidewalk cafés. The diversity of life in cities should result in unlimited photographic opportunities, as long as you’re willing to seek them out, and keep your eyes open to the myriad of possibilities cities hold.
• Often the best travel city photographs are not of the landmarks we see in travel brochures and web sites, but photos taken off the beaten path showing a particular facet of the city’s life. Don’t be afraid to explore the outlying neighborhoods of cities, instead of just staying in their central core and historic areas. Think about photographing markets, fairs, cafés, and overlooked public art.
• The weather and lighting conditions will have an impact on your photography. Shadows from nearby buildings can ruin a shot, and aiming the camera in the direction of the sun can cause your subject to be a dark silhouette with no detail. If you spend several days in a city, consider revisiting areas at different times of the day which might open up tremendous photographic opportunities you might have otherwise missed.

Traveler's "must" photos - Shooting Landmarks

Landmarks like Philadelphia's Independence Hall, New York's Statue of Liberty, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, The Great Wall of China and Paris' Eiffel Tower are all subjects emblematic of their locations. They are geographic icons which you must capture with your camera, if only to say, "I was there!"

The problem with so many landmark photographs is that often when travelers return home, they find their photos of some of the most incredible and famous world sights boring, flat or humdrum. Why is that?

I think it's because their photos look the same as every one else's.

It's not easy to create a unique photograph of a landmark. After all, with millions of photos already taken of them, is there an unusual or distinctive shot left? The answer is yes. Here are 8 tips for making your landmark photographs special.

1. Change your perspective or angle on the subject. Take a picture from a different side. Tilt your camera. Perhaps get low to the ground and shoot upward.

   Don't just take the common "full-on" shots with people waving and smiling in front of the landmark looking toward your camera.

   Scout around for a new vantage point. Rather than just photograph the Panthéon like any ordinary building, I went inside to catch the detail of its magnificent dome.

2. Take a photo with the landmark in the background. Landmarks are special, often embodying the spirit and history of the area in which they're located. By placing a landmark in its surroundings you add interest and context to your photograph.

3. Use local inhabitants in your photograph to add human context and eliminate the sterility found in so many landmark photos. Not only does creatively adding people into pictures tell stories, it provides a realistic sense of the scale of the monument in contrast to the size of the people in your photograph.

   A bicycler riding past it, can add context, scale, visual interest, and the human element to the Betsy Ross House, to what would otherwise be an ordinary photo of a brick building with a flag.

4. If you're using a DSLR, try a special lens, such as a fish-eye. With it, you can gather the surrounding area around the landmark with the unusual perspective it can lend to your photo.
5. Shoot in low light, or near dusk or dawn for their golden tones, or even in the evening. Shooting in natural low light can add a special ambiance to your landmark shots, and by shooting your photos during "off-hours," the crowds of tourists are normally diminished, so you can get less busy shots.

   Cities have both night and day personalities. Some cities start to come alive at dusk, then seem to burst open after dark. Shooting in Las Vegas' and capturing Paris Las Vegas' Eiffel Tower at night is a more interesting photo than if taken during the day.

6. Add visual context to your photo. We see zillions of photographs of the Statue of Liberty taken from the shores of New York Harbor, standing alone in the Harbor as a sentinel. We don't see many photos of the Lady with a ship passing by, which would give the photograph context and echo the history of many immigrants' first sight of their new country.
7. Try processing some of your photos in "black & white" instead of color. It's rare today to see travel photographs in "black & white," but their monochromatic tones can add substantial drama and emotion to a photograph. Consider "film noir" movies and the way their cinematography enhances the drama, feel and tone of the movies.
8. From the above suggestions you can see that the rules of landmark photography (there aren't any) don't require you to take only full shots of the landmark. Often isolated portions of it, or close-ups of a small part of the landmark can be more interesting than the whole.

   In this photograph taken at the Hearst Castle, note that several of the hints discussed above were used. The photograph concentrates on the main entrance of the primary building in the Hearst Castle complex; Casa Grande.

   The photo was taken from an elevation well below the entrance, and framed by some of the lush vegetation of the Castle complex. The tendency of the lens to add limited "barrel distortion" to the photo was used to advantage to further frame the Castle entrance.