Useful Tips to Take a Better Travel Photography

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Are you the one who thinks travel photography is as important as the travelling itself? Some people love to collect moments and sceneries, and travelling is a must-to-be-captured journey for them.

Everyone wants to have good travel photography, to simply reminiscence their journey or share it on social media. But taking a good photograph is not as easy as it seems. Although a high-end and expensive camera is a good tool for taking images, you must learn and practice to have stand-out travel photography that inspires people to embark on a new adventure. It's all a matter of skills, after all.

So, on this occasion, we will introduce you to 10 useful tips for beginners to improve your travel photography.

Let’s start!

Pre-trip Exploratory

By doing pre-trip exploration you'll be prepared with a lot of useful information. This knowledge will guide you to your best shot. That's because in pre-trip exploration you have to answer these questions:

• How is the weather?

• When does the attraction open?

• At what time the tourist traffic is low?

• Which time will serve the best view?

• Where is the photo location's best spot?

• Is it hard to get to that area?

For more information you can also read articles on the internet, ask for recommendations from your friends who have been there, and browse for photography references on Instagram, google image, or Pinterest.

Ask Permission from Locals

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A great photograph is not always about the scenery. The culture, people, history, and stories can also create a good shot. In that case, you can ask permission from locals to take pictures of them. Sometimes they will refuse, ask for money, and other times they just happily pose for you. We don’t know how they will respond, but asking for permission is a worthy effort to do, it indicates politeness and respectfulness.

You have to familiarise yourself with this action and learn the key because taking a photograph of local people can be challenging, you might get uncomfortable, nervous, and afraid of rejection. Therefore, the first thing to do is to say hello, have a little chit-chat to make both of you comfortable, and finally ask their permission to take some pictures of them. Moreover, the local people will appreciate you more if you could talk in their language. So, spend your time learning about their language.

Camera

Let’s be honest that a camera– the main equipment of travel photography holds great importance. Currently, cameras come in a variety of shapes and specifications. Action cameras, DSLRs, compact digital cameras, mirrorless, and so on are among the camera kinds available. A good camera can help you to take good photos easily, but with some skills, a much simpler camera can form a better photo.

The tip is to always bring your camera wherever you travel because you don't know what you might see along the way, you can accidentally meet a beautiful animal, find interesting activities that locals do, and many more.

Last but not least, understand your camera, explore its function from a to z, try the modes it has so you can be familiar and have a fast decision which mode to use on a specific condition.

Utilise the rule of thirds

The rule of thirds is a fundamental photography guideline that will help you in creating balanced compositions in your photographs. It employs mathematical calculations in photo design to represent what human eyes normally find pleasing.

Since it’s a basic guideline, every camera have it on its LCD screen. You can easily activate it by turning the “grid” feature on. It will split the image into 9 areas which look like this

Photo by Johann Siemens on Unsplash

The rule is to place your photograph's main object on the frame's right-third or left-third point, to create a nice composition. Every point of intersection is a prospective object area; you can align the main subject together with other elements to capture balanced and aesthetically appealing photos.

Use the appropriate settings and shooting modes

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Familiarise yourself with ISO, aperture, and shutter speed for a better photoshoot. Since a camera collects light, those three parts of the exposure triangle will define the amount of light for your photos. In this section we will give you a brief overview of each function:

ISO

Basically, ISO is a camera feature that allows you to darken or brighten a photo. A low ISO number will give you a dark result while a bigger ISO number will brighten your photo. But please note that a big ISO number can cause noise or grain on the photo, making your photo be unusable.

Aperture

Aperture refers to how wide or narrow your lens is opened, where it will affect the amount of lights entering your camera. Once you adjust your aperture, the lens will shirnk following your settings.

What is more, by altering depth of focus, aperture may give dimension to your images. Aperture provides you a blurred backdrop with a stunning shallow focus look at one side.

Shutter speed

The shutter speed of a camera is the amount of time where the shutter is opened, at this time lights will be exposed to the camera sensor.

Shutter speed determines how much time is needed for the camera to take a single capture. A long or slow shutter speed will make your photo have more lights in but each move in the frame will get blurry, moreover, a long shutter speed requires a stable camera position where a tripod will hold its important role here. While a quick shutter speed will make your photo has less light but every move in the frame will be captured sharply, you can use a quick shutter speed to capture active animal activity, a sport, etc.

Combining these three appropriately can help you in taking better photos.

Explore for the best angle

Don’t stand on the same spot and be happy with your captures. Step aside, and explore for the best angle. Or you can simply take multiple shots on various spots. Fill up your memory cards so you have plenty of selections once you return home.

Bring tripod

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After the camera, a tripod is the essential equipment you should have if you plan to take a breath taking travel photography. How not so? Tripod will help you to set your camera at a certain spot, and take photos from there without the fear of shaking the camera. Furthermore, you may compose a photo with low shutter speeds and low ISO without fear of blurry photos because a tripod offers the comfortability of taking a stable shot.

For travelling purposes, you can get yourself a lightweight tripod. This equipment will be very useful for self portraits, low-light photography, silky smooth waterfall shots, and many more.

Bring Extra Batteries

What can be more frustrating than being run out of battery in the middle of beautiful scenery. As we know that unwanted things might happen, and bringing extra batteries is an act of prevention we should do.

So, before you go travelling, make sure you have fully charged all your camera’s batteries and bring extra batteries in your bag. Plus, be aware of warm weather because it's your batteries' worst enemies since it consumes energy so much faster than cold weather.

Consider the Post Processing

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Let’s agree that photo post-processing is not a cheat. Everybody does that, including the professionals. Because sometimes, a raw photo from the camera couldn’t represent scenery pretty well so it’s okay to retouch the photo with post-processing.

This workflow involves contrast improvement, adjusting colour tones, highlights, exposure, and many more. Including some manipulation to the picture for some enhancements.

It can be said that any trip photographer's workflow would be incomplete without post-processing and learning photo post-processing is as important as the camera and shooting skill itself. If you’re a beginner and want to do post-processing you can try a free photo editing software like GIMP, and once you step on the professional ground we would recommend you to purchase adobe photoshop and adobe lightroom.

Final words

And those are all the 10 useful tips for taking a better travel photograph. Please note that the camera’s eye is different from human’s, what looks plain in our eyes can be pleasant if we capture them with good skill and proper composition, the same as what looks pleasant in the eyes sometimes can not be captured as good in the camera.

In the end, photographs are part of art. You need to learn, practice, and explore for more to create the best photography. So, keep going, readers!