Steve Davey

Steve Davey’s photography has taken him to almost a hundred countries and his work has been published in a variety of books and magazines worldwide. Steve also leads his own travel photo tours to some of the most photogenic parts of the world. Visit www.bettertravelphotography.com, www.stevedavey.com or follow @stevedaveyphoto on Instagram

Travel photography is a unique beast, generally involving shooting a huge number of pictures in a variety of styles. One minute you might be photographing landscapes, then portraits, food or even wildlife. Nothing is standard, which is why it is so satisfying – but it does make the post-trip processing somewhat of a mission. The key is a good workflow, which can make you more efficient, but the real secret is to get as much right in camera as possible. Learn your trade: if every shot is a rescue mission, with blown highlights or shadows and in need of significant cropping, then each image will take far longer to process.

Once you have your base settings save them as a develop preset, which can be applied when images are imported, speeding up subsequent processing. I will often be editing on a laptop abroad: depending on computer speed and camera resolution, this can be somewhat of a languid affair. Build 1:1 previews on import to speed up zooming to 100% to check focus and build Smart Previews, and then tick ‘Use Smart Previews instead of Originals for image editing’ in Preferences> Performance, to significantly speed up processing edits. Exports will still use the original raw file so there will be no loss of quality. I will generally import all images as soon as I get back to my room, and then leave previews building whilst I take a shower and get changed. By the time I am ready for drinks and dinner, my laptop is ready to come with me.

‘GPS-tag all your images, whatever your camera, using a simple GPS logger on your phone to record a continuous track’