CHOOSE CAMERA SETTINGS AND SKILLS
Learn when to adopt different technical approaches
If you want to take your travel photography to a more professional level, there are both creative choices and tried-and-tested techniques that you can employ.
One approach is to do with aspect ratios, namely switching from the familiar landscape or portrait orientation and shooting a panorama of a scene. This letterbox format can be used to capture a larger vista – wide plains, mountain ranges and sprawling cityscapes – and can help you to incorporate a more immersive perspective. For a stitched panoramic shot, use a standard prime lens such as a 35mm or 50mm lens, shoot around five to six overlapping images, and then stitch them together using Photoshop. This always has more impact than shooting a scene with a wide-angle lens and simply cropping the image into a pano format after.
Regarding camera settings, don’t just stick with semi-auto modes, but switch your camera dial into full Manual and experiment. Taking control of the exposure gives you a greater say over the look of your images in different situations. For example, when dealing with tricky lighting situations such as shooting in snow, in automatic mode the snow will appear too dark, as the white mass will mislead your meter into underexposing. Shooting travel photos in Manual mode means you can manually adjust the aperture and shutter speed to give you an exposure compensation of +1-2 stops for a more accurate exposure. If the lighting doesn’t change while you’re shooting, Manual mode can even be quicker than auto, as the settings won’t need changing.
Experiment with the aperture, using shallow depth of field to hone in on the most engaging parts of the scene, or for portraits. In terms of shutter speed, capture fast exposures of action scenes such as a parade or a performer, and slow shutter speeds down to add movement and dynamism when shooting waterfalls or subjects in motion, for example.
Focus depends on the type of image you want to achieve – whether you want all of your photos to be in focus or part in focus dictates how the viewer sees your image. Creating a single, strong focus point can lead to a more dynamic image that focuses attention on a particular area, while extending this into the foreground and background can spread the focus across the entire frame.