What do you see when you travel?

Word of advice to photographers, do not travel with nonphotographers, you should especially avoid group travel. Well, it works both ways, depending on whom the advice is given to. For the non-photographers reading this, if you see your travelling companion carrying a heavy looking tripod, and the camera bag
is bigger than the luggage, watch out!

Just to name a few unique travelling habits of a serious photographer that will irritate the typical traveller:-

1) Start early. To catch a sunrise shot, one has to rise very much earlier then the sun to be at the correct place at the correct time.
2) Loitering at one location. The serious photographer will never hit the place, take a few shots and leave. He will walk all around, look at all the angles, and quite often visit the place repeatedly at different time of the day.
3) Waiting. The serious photographer spends a great deal of time waiting. Waiting for the clouds to pass, waiting for the sun to hit just the right spot, waiting for the desired pedestrian to enter the frame, waiting for the undesired pedestrian to exit the frame, and the list goes on.

While travelling with a photographer is trying, seeing the resultingimages from a photographer's trip can hardly be described as a chore. Usually it is not so much that the images are unique, but that the photographer managed to capture ordinary things uniquely and beautifully.

Perhaps one of the most valuable assets a photographer could have is keen observation, the ability to see details beneath the familiar, to see beauty in the mundane.

However, one does not have to travel to see different things, all we have to do is to see things differently. Case in point, have you hosted a foreign friend, only to have him or her point out things that we never notice before, things that we have taken for granted because we were numbed by it through everyday occurrences.

Photographing landmarks is usually a very important event during travelling. It is the “evidence” that we have visited some foreign land.

But a majority of travel photographs focuses on culture, people, and the similarities and differences of our daily lives. These allow the photographers to experience the culture, speak to the people, and achieve a greater understanding of the places we travelled to than is possible when travelling in a tour group.

Here are some parting tips on getting started with travel photography:-

1) Know your equipment well;
2) Attend a travel photography course or workshop;
3) Practice locally, try to see familiar places with a fresh eyes;
4) When travelling, seek out back roads as well as well-known places;

This article was contributed by hangdog, a veteran of the Photographic Club. Do you have a passion for photography? If you are so in2 photography that you pride yourself on having a 8megapixel handphone camera, then you probably are. Check us out here or chat with us on the forum!

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