Five Ways to take Better Travel Photos

Five ways to take better travel photos


Most travellers fancy themselves as photographers. It doesn't matter if you carry around a simple point-and-shoot, or stuff your daypack with wide-angle lenses the size of bazookas, pretty much all travellers like to take the odd snap to show off to their friends back home.
Trouble is, most of them aren't much good (the pics that is, not your friends). Like anything, taking great photos requires some serious expertise, and, while I've basically made a career of feigning knowledge of things I have no idea about, I decided I couldn't fake this one. Instead, I've enlisted the help of Richard I'Anson, professional photographer and author of Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Photography.

Here are his five ways to take better photos.

1. Get the right gear for your needs
"If you know what you want to do with the pictures when you get home, it helps you decide what kind of camera you need to take," Richard says. "And also think about where you're going, and your particular interest. For example, if someone has an interest in wildlife, and they're going to include an African safari on their trip, then without doubt they need a digital SLR, and at least a zoom lens that goes to 300mm. If you just went to Africa with a compact camera you'd be really disappointed. But if your trip was just based around normal stuff, seeing the sights and buildings, and you didn't have ambitions to put pictures on the wall, then a compact camera would probably do you."

2. Fill the frame
"The most common mistake people make is they don't get close enough to the subject. What you're aiming for is a strong point of interest. Why are you taking the picture in the first place? What's it of? And if that's not obvious, the picture usually fails. And one of the main reasons it's not obvious is because people don't fill the frame with the subject. Whatever the subject is, my aim would be to fill the frame with it."

3. Take care with light
"The other really, really big one is making sure the subject is nicely lit. So for example, faces might be half in the shade and half in the sun - just avoid that. Like if someone's wearing a hat. Or a building, at a certain time of day will be well lit, and at another time of day the beautiful facade will be in shade. So observe that and photograph things when they're in the best light. Dawn and dusk are generally the best times to shoot because of the colour of the light. But again, with a building or a landscape, one of those times will be better than the other. There is always a best time of day to photograph anything - the trick is to find that time."

4. Use the rule of thirds
"Essentially what you do is divide the scene, as you're looking through your viewfinder, into nine rectangles. Two vertical lines, and two horizontal lines. A bit like a noughts and crosses scenario. The idea is that you place the point of interest, the subject matter, on one of the points where the lines intersect. What that does is it gets the point of interest away from the middle of the frame. A lot of amateur photographers do that, and the reason they do it is because most cameras come with a little focusing spot in the middle of the frame. So they end up with the main subject in the middle of all of their pictures. Images like that are generally less dynamic. So the way around this is with the focus lock. You can press the shutter halfway, which locks the focus in, but then you reframe, move the camera. So if you're photographing an individual person, focus on their eyes, because that's the most important thing, but then recompose, so that the eye isn't in the middle of the frame. I would take very few pictures without using that technique."

5. Be careful shooting at night
"For buildings lit up at night, you need a tripod, or some form of support. And you should be taking the picture between 10 and 20 minutes after sunset. Not at night, when the sky's black. There's only a small window for pictures of buildings that are really beautiful, and it's when the artificial lights take effect, but there's still light and colour in the sky.

For shooting people in bars and restaurants, one of the best things to use is the setting on most compact cameras called "night mode". What that does is leave the shutter open for a longer period of time to gather the ambient light, while firing the flash. It's definitely worth knowing that that feature exists on your camera."

Do you fancy yourself as a travel photographer? What's your secret to good shots?

To learn more about photography, you can  buy Richard I'Anson's book, Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Photography.