Charles Harris Rwanda

In the course of interviewing more than two dozen professional travel photographers, we picked up some advice. Here are their best hints for the journey— and photos—of a lifetime.

Doing Your Research

— Learn as much as possible. Start with the tourism website of the destination that you will visit.

— Read the Lonely Planet guide for your destination, then try to avoid the must-see places it recommends. They will be swimming with tourists.

— Search Flickr.com to see what other photographers are shooting at your destination.

— Despite the previous three tips, your best research will happen when you hit the ground at your destination. Whatever you learn prior to traveling will be secondary to the sources you will find there.

Going and Staying There

— Visit at the right time, and find out—by speaking with locals—what “the right time” is.

— Couchsurfing.org and SERVAS International (joomla.servas.org) are home-stay and hospitality exchange services that can help you find free lodging all over the world.

— When booking rooms in dicey locations, ask if the hotel offers a safe place for storing gear.

— Search for hotels that are centrally located, near potential subjects, offer a view from your room, and have a roof deck. If you’re staying for several days, try switching rooms—even hotels—nightly for better views.

— To avoid forgetting battery chargers or laptop cables, set them next to your car keys, wallet, or purse — never on the floor.

What Gear To Pack

— Most of the photographers we interviewed travel with surprisingly similar kits: a fullframe DSLR, f/2.8 ultrawide zoom lens, image-stabilized 70–200mm f/2.8 zoom, 2X teleconverter, lightweight carbon-fiber tripod, electronic cable release, and portable storage device for backing up image files.

— Try to bring a backup camera body, preferably one that’s identical to your primary body. Working with different button configurations is confusing and inefficient at best, and disastrous at worst. In many foreign countries, cameras are significantly more expensive and often outdated compared to what you get in the U.S. Having a camera body overnighted to you can incur hundreds of dollars in local customs tariffs.

— A camera poncho like the Aqua Tech SS-Sport Rain Cover will keep you shooting in wet weather.

— Bring lenses that suit your subjects. If you’re visiting mainly cities, wide-angles will be more useful than telephotos.

— Collapsible reflectors are better than flash units. They don’t depend on batteries, they fold up flat, and they produce a softer, more flattering light. They also show their effects in real-time and can be slowly adjusted for nuanced changes of direction and intensity. Of course, you’ll generally need to have someone else hold the reflector, but enlisting the aid of a nearby local often can pay off in unexpected ways.

— Use many smaller memory cards (2GB) instead of a few large cards. That way, if you lose one or it becomes corrupt, you haven’t lost too many images.

— Bring a digital compact for when a larger camera isn’t practical. A Canon PowerShot G11 or Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH1, for instance, can be invaluable for situations in which the noise of the shutter is inappropriate. Waterproof compacts such as the Pentax Optio WS80 are perfect when the weather isn’t.

— A small digital voice recorder such as the Olympus WS-400S can help capture ambient sounds, interviews, and notes or reminders to yourself.

— For remote destinations where your subjects may never have seen a photo of themselves, a pocket-sized, battery-powered printer like the Polaroid PoGo can build trust, gain cooperation, and open doors.

— Energy bars and bottled water will let you keep shooting through the lunch hour. Why waste time eating?

****Gallery: The Best Places To Photograph Around The World****

Shooting Strategies

— Don’t stop shooting just because it’s wet outside. The time right before and after rain can produce amazing light and more saturated color.

— Try to plan your day and shooting schedule based on your subjects’ positions relative to the arc of the sun.

— Get up early to be photographing as the sun is rising. Use midday for napping or location scouting. Start shooting again in the mid- to late afternoon.

— Return multiple times to the best locations to capture them in different light and weather.

— Don’t hurry. It’s better to capture a few places well than many places superficially.

— Stay patient and focused. Travel can be distracting and overwhelming. Creating a “mood board” can keep you on track: Cut and paste some inspiring photographs or pictures of artwork onto a piece of paper. Keep it folded in your pocket or bag. If you find yourself lost or drifting, pull it out to help regain focus and a sense of mission.

Relating To Subjects

— Learn a bit of the language spoken in the places you visit. The more obscure the language, the more you’ll be rewarded for any efforts you make to commit words and phrases to memory.

— An effective and affordable way to learn a language is through an exchange (www.mylanguageexchange.com): You teach people your mother tongue while they teach you theirs.

— The single most important trick for getting better photos is connecting with people at your destination and using them as resources. If you have no human contact there, you may get a great landscape or architectural photo, but you will rarely feel that you’ve captured the soul of a place.

— Politeness and good manners will get you better people pictures than the highest-tech cameras and lenses.

Travel Safety

— Get a web-based (not serverbased) e-mail account. Attach scans of all your important documents (passport, credit cards, driver’s license, hotel and airline reservation numbers, etc.) to an e-mail and send it to yourself.

— Before traveling internationally, visit the U.S. State Department’s website and check the Traveler Alerts.

— Women, in particular, should consider carrying their gear in a large, leather hobo-style bag rather than a conventional camera bag. It may attract fewer thieves.

— Purchase travel insurance such as Global Rescue.

****Gallery: The Best Places To Photograph Around The World****

The post Tips For Better Travel Photography appeared first on Popular Photography.

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The usual approach to photographing fall foliage involves gaudy color and lots of it: yellows, reds, and oranges against saturated blue skies. But Erik Lundh, 54, of Tigard, OR, has a different strategy.

Rather than capturing broad expanses of brightly hued trees, Lundh exploits—and enhances—details, shapes, and contrasts for their visual power. “I do look for color, but also for separation in individual leaves,” he says.

The shapes that a wind-tossed leaf takes on, as well as the patterns that small groups of leaves form can pack a punch. “What attracted me to this scene,” says Lundh, “were the sporadic leaves on an otherwise bare maple.” Not your normal fall foliage shot, right?

The moral? Don’t passively fill your frame with colorful clichés. Use this striking time of year to explore new and expressive photo techniques, the below steps can help:

Step 1: Scout for great locations. Websites like the Foliage Network (www.foliagenetwork.com) tell you where the best locations are and when.

Step 2: Wait for the right moment. For a shot like Erik Lundh’s, hold off until the peak of the season has passed, when many trees are ornamented with only a handful of leaves. If sharpness and clarity are important to you, shoot on a day when little or no wind is predicted.

**Step 3: **Gather your gear. For Lundh, two musts are a polarizing filter and tripod. The polarizer will help you squeeze every bit of color from a scene, and the tripod comes in handy when exposing.

Step 4: Dial in the right camera settings. Conventional wisdom dictates high shutter speeds (1/250 sec or higher) to freeze moving leaves, and a small aperture for maximum depth of field when shooting a tree from below. Lundh, however, dialed in a mid-range aperture, because it’s his lens’ sharpest, and because he wanted a lower ISO to suppress noise. A tripod helped him avoid blur introduced by camera movement.

**Final Step: **Postprocessing. Tweak color, contrast, and sharpness in an image editor. Using Adobe Photoshop 7, Lundh selected the leaves, then inverted the selection and desaturated the background so his subject’s color didn’t have to compete with a richly saturated blue background.

The post You Can Do It: Leaf Show appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Have your lighting skills progressed so that now a single on-camera flash feels more limiting than liberating? You’ve got an inexpensive option: a second flash. Adding another light can open up creative floodgates, giving you professional effects at little cost. (The $136 flash, stand, and adapter rig described in the September 2006 Lighting column would be perfect.) Just choose — and use — your flash carefully.

THREE LOOKS: A second flash behind the subject outlined (rim-lit) her head and shoulders (left); placed a halo behind her head (center); and produced a softer hair light when bounced off the ceiling (right).

WHICH FLASH?

In terms of exposure, almost any hot-shoe flash will work as a second light. You’re probably shooting digital and can check exposure on your camera’s LCD, so you don’t really need TTL exposure control. If the second, non-TTL flash is too bright, manually dial down its power or add some distance between it and your subject.

The problem is actually triggering the second flash. Many SLRs and DSLRs use a preflash to determine exposure, which can cause a conventional opticaltriggering device (often called a “peanut slave”) to fire the off-camera flash prematurely. The solution? A new-generation, digital-savvy, optical slave that recognizes (and ignores) preflashes. One popular unit: the Wein PN Digital Peanut Slave ($35, street). It works with any accessory flash that has a PC-cord connection.

Putting It To Use

You’ll find uses for your second flash at events and in product photos, but most of all in portraiture.

MAIN LIGHT: With your new off-camera flash as your main light, use your oncamera flash as fill by dialing down flash exposure compensation. Correctly positioned, the second flash creates shadows below the cheekbones, nose, and chin to shape your subject’s face, something an on-camera flash alone rarely can do.

BACKGROUND LIGHT: Move the second flash behind your subject to separate the subject and background (see photos). Aim it at your subject’s back, for example, to create a white highlight (rim light) around the hair and torso; this works best against a dark background. Or aim it at the ceiling to create a hair light. You could also turn it around to illuminate the background: Against a plain, dark wall, position it to create a small circle of light behind the head (a “halo”), or use it on the background to capture the environment.

EVENTS: At, say, an indoor wedding reception or cocktail party, place your second (or third) light discretely in a corner, aimed at the ceiling. It can open up backgrounds, fill any shadows cast by your main, on-camera light, and/or overpower or dilute ambient light of a contaminating color temperature (usually fluorescents, which produce green casts). Be careful: Aiming your camera directly at perimeter lights can introduce flare.

PRODUCTS: Shooting small items? Aim your second light at the ceiling at high power. In a small, white-walled space, this turns the entire room into a light tent. Dial down the power on your on-camera flash, and use it to fill in any shadows.

BACKUP: You’re shooting your sister’s wedding, and it’s going great…until midway through the “I do’s,” your on-camera flash says, “I won’t.” It pops and sizzles, and the tube turns a scary brown. Good thing you’ve got that second flash!

The post How To Use A Second Flash appeared first on Popular Photography.

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In the summer of 2009, Orlando-based pro Gage Young was photographing rising singer/songwriter Dave Melillo against a receding allée of trees along a length of sidewalk in Celebration, FL. While graphically interesting, these trees broke up the sunlight into dappled hot spots and shadows, creating too-bright blotches on Melillo’s forehead and sections of his shirt while rendering most of his figure a featureless black. Young’s solution:

Evenly light the subject.
He did this by throwing the musician completely into shade, which eliminated the contrasty pools of light. A 36×42-inch panel of black foamcore board clamped to a lightstand next to Melillo did the trick. Standing in the shadow of this board, Melillo lost the blotches. The strategy introduced a new problem, though: Now in shade, the musician was several stops darker than most of the background. Adding exposure to brighten him would have rendered most of the scene an unacceptable blown-out white.

Balance subject and background.
To bring the exposure on his subject up to the brightness of the background, Young lit him with a 320-Ws strobe. Its output, diffused through a 24×36-inch softbox, produced a bright, natural, and flatteringly soft illumination.

With the strobe’s intensity perfectly matching background light levels, however, Young’s subject blended in too much with that background. The fix? The photographer incrementally bumped up strobe output until the resulting exposure dimmed down the background slightly and Melillo became the picture’s unchallenged subject.

Defocus the background.
Next, Young used another technique to pop his subject: He tried to defocus the background by shooting with a large aperture. Setting his Canon 50mm f/1.4 to f/1.6, though, grossly overexposed the background, even at ISO 160. The solution was stacked neutral-density filters, which cut down the light hitting his sensor by 4 stops, letting him shoot at f/1.6 with perfect exposure and an attractively defocused background.

Gage Young’s portraits of musicians have appeared in Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, and other music industry publications

The post How To: Make an Image in Spotty Lighting appeared first on Popular Photography.

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