Top Five Tips for Travel Photography

As you can see from some of our other blog posts, we’re keen travellers. After working hard all year, we love to head off to a new place, looking for some adventure and a new experience in our lives.

We love our lives at home and have worked hard to make it so, but there’s just something about travelling to a new place and seeing the different culture around the world first hand.

It feels as though we’re just getting started and the one thing we wanted to take from our travels was to put our photography skills to good use. That way, we could hopefully capture some essence of the places we visit, both for memories for ourselves but also to share our adventures with others.

As you can imagine, after spending time away photographing the different people and their culture, we’ve found several things key to our success in capturing those memories.

We’ve broken them down into our top five tips…

 

Top Five Tips

 

  1. Travel Light – When we shoot weddings we typically use a lot of equipment not ideal for traveling with.  For this trip we used a Fuji XPro2 with two lenses, the Fuji 56 1.2 and the 23 1.4.  This mirrorless rangefinder camera is ideal for traveling light and small and robust enough pop into a backpack.
  2. Shoot from the hip – This means not lifting the camera to your eye, something made easier now with live viewfinders. If you do that people see you’re taking a photograph. You need to learn to be sneaky. Shooting from the hip means you’ll go unnoticed and be able to capture scenes more naturally and authentically.
  3. Don’t be afraid to ask people for portraits – Most of the time people are happy to oblige, if not, then smile and move on!
  4. Wander off the beaten path – Try to get away from tourist areas, find where the locals go and get a different perspective.  If you do go to tourist areas, try looking at the attractions from a different perspective, when we visit these places we often fond ourselves looking at the people rather than the attraction.
  5. Put the camera down! – This might seem like an odd tip but bear with us!  You can’t see everything that is going on around you through the limited viewfinder of a camera.  By shooting every little thing you see through the viewfinder you can miss a lot of what is going on around you.  People watch for a while and soak in the atmosphere before you pick up the camera.

 

Also, wherever you go, make sure you do take some time to take everything in without a camera at all.  Too many people these days live their trips through their cameras, we become preoccupied with capturing the memory, we can forget what the whole point of travel is, discovery and experience in the authentic moment.

 

Take a look

We’ve added a few images below from our recent trip around Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. If you like what you see, you can checkout the whole trip by clicking here

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