19 Tips for Better Travel Photos
(part 2)
When
taking a photo of a person, emphasize the person.
When taking photos of traveling companions, it is easy to prop them up in front of something interesting and then take the picture. If you go to some effort to get the attraction behind them, but cut off the top of someone's head, or include a sloppy untucked shirt, or cut the photo off at someone's socks, you have a good photo of the sight and a terrible photo of your friends. In this case, frame them first and then worry about the background.
Move.
I find that very often a decent photo could have been a great photo if I had just moved a little bit, whether to reframe the photo slightly, or to put something interesting into the background. This can involve moving a few steps forward or back, shifting to one side or the other, or crouching down. As a photographer, you have much more control over what you are doing and where you are standing than you do over the subject matter; if you just stand lead-footed in one spot, your photos will reflect this.
Zoom
in and out until you like what you see.
If your camera has a zoom feature, and most do these days, you can help
yourself to "move" by zooming in and out on your subject. I find that
when you do this, at the point the scene becomes most interesting, your eye
will notice it -- that is, you'll just like it more intuitively. That's when
you take the shot.
Pay the most attention to the edges
and corners.
A great photo is as often defined by what is left in as by what is left out. You have considerable control here, and while it is normal human behavior to look directly and in a concentrated way at the things that interest us most, the camera behaves otherwise.
Very often you can take a photo that seems like it might turn out extremely well, but when you see the print of a photo, your friend is a speck in the middle of a nondescript background. Take all that stuff out, and you have a great photo.
In the same way, if you zoom in very closely on someone's face, and cut out the monkey standing on her head, you missed the shot.
When zooming in and out, or moving around while looking through the viewfinder or at the screen to frame your photo, the first thing to scan is the sides and corners of the visible area. Is there anything of interest there? If not, consider moving again, changing the zoom, or tilting the camera up, down or to one side. When everything seems to fall into place, fire away.
At familiar sites, emphasize something other than the subject.
Pay the most attention to the edges and corners.
A great photo is as often defined by what is left in as by what is left out. You have considerable control here, and while it is normal human behavior to look directly and in a concentrated way at the things that interest us most, the camera behaves otherwise.
Very often you can take a photo that seems like it might turn out extremely well, but when you see the print of a photo, your friend is a speck in the middle of a nondescript background. Take all that stuff out, and you have a great photo.
In the same way, if you zoom in very closely on someone's face, and cut out the monkey standing on her head, you missed the shot.
When zooming in and out, or moving around while looking through the viewfinder or at the screen to frame your photo, the first thing to scan is the sides and corners of the visible area. Is there anything of interest there? If not, consider moving again, changing the zoom, or tilting the camera up, down or to one side. When everything seems to fall into place, fire away.
At familiar sites, emphasize something other than the subject.
If you are photographing the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of London, Mount Rushmore or any other frequently photographed site, you would often do better to buy a nice calendar than take yet another point-and-shoot photo that will just take up space on your hard drive until it crashes.
But if you make it a photo about something else -- your companion's goofy hat with the Eiffel Tower in the background, or a bobby in front of the Tower of London, or a motorcycle gang parked in front of Mount Rushmore -- then you have a great photo.
Take control.
When I take photos of people, almost invariably they try to set up the photo themselves, arranging themselves and companions in a way that they think might make a good photo. And as often as not, they arrange themselves such that I would be shooting straight into the sun, or with half of the group in shadows, or with one person almost completely obscured by another person. None of these will make for good photos. You're the one with the camera -- you set up the shot.
Look, then think, before you shoot.
Before taking a photo, if you just take a quick look at your surroundings, and
give yourself a second to think about anything interesting that might be
happening, you will get a much higher percentage of interesting photos than if
you simply pull your camera to your eye and snap without planning what you want
to capture.Try to take photos where you didn't
"have to be there."
If you want to take a great photo and not merely a snapshot of your traveling companions in a certain location, think about how a complete stranger would react to seeing your picture. Photos that are thereby intrinsically interesting will enhance and retain their interest to you as well.
Use your sense of humor.
Do not underestimate the value of capturing or expressing a little humor when taking travel photos. Travel is usually as much about how we felt and thought while traveling, not just where we went, and photos that capture some humor often bring back the strongest memories and sensations as time goes by.
Use a good printing company (or printer if you print your own).
Ansel Adams compared photography to a piece of music, stating that "The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance." Clearly most folks no longer deal with film negatives, but if we let the digital file replace the negative, Adams's truism still stands up. If you take a great photo but the print is washed out, grainy or otherwise sub-par, it doesn't matter if the composition is great -- the performance was not.
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