Travel Photography Advice

In this beginner’s guide to smartphone travel photography, we give you tips and tricks to take fabulous Instagram photos of your trip on your mobile device.

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Calculated Traveller has been a participant in quite a few winter activities in Ontario as of late. You can check the articles here This brought to mind a couple of situations that make photography a bit more challenging – snow and sand scenes. To understand these similar situations we need to first consider what the camera sees. In both cases, if it’s a bright sunny day the camera sees a considerable amount of light due to the reflection from the sand, water, and bright sky, or the snow (and potentially bright sky). This light is not necessarily hitting your subject, and it’s not necessarily real either. To the Slopes We Go! Tips When Photographing Snow In the case of the snow, the white surface gives the impression of light, but that light isn’t really there, so you need to take control of the camera and tell it to shoot brighter than it thinks. You can do this by using Exposure Compensation, or your camera may have a Snow setting that will handle it for you. Generally, exposure compensation of between 1 and 1 1/2 stops should be enough to reduce the grey in your snow shots so that the correct exposure is achieved, giving you nice white snow. To the Beach! Tips When Photographing Sand The situation is similar with the beach scene. Light reflecting off of the bright sand and water trick the camera into thinking there is more light than there actually is, as you can see in the shot below. It may be necessary to change your position to reduce the amount of light shining directly into the camera. Also, if your camera has a Beach setting try that, or adjust your exposure compensation until you get the shot you want. Digital photography makes it possible to take the shot, review the results, adjust, and take another one until you get the shot you want. It’s digital after all. For more information about scene modes check out my article Your Camera Wants to Know More.   Have a tip for getting better photos of sun and sand on your travels? Share it in the comments below.

You’ve planned a great trip with the family. You have some great photos of the daytime scenery and everyone enjoying themselves at the beach or exploring the surroundings. At night though, you seem to slip into another world. A world where everyone is a cardboard cutout against a dark nondescript background. You wish you could get a shot of the restaurant or the street scene with everyone in it, but time and time again you get nothing but brightly lit faces floating in dark space. Should you buy a new camera because it obviously can’t take pictures in low light situations? Well, before you run out and make the investment there are some things you can try. Firstly, read this article “Your Camera Wants to Know More” about your camera, and how to get more out of it. Next, take a look at the scene modes available on your camera. If you see an icon that looks like a person with a star over their head it means your camera has a Night Portrait mode.     Night Portrait mode is a setting that allows the camera to use a slower shutter speed when taking the photo. This results in more ambient light being allow into the camera, which is what provides the detail of the surroundings.     Look at these 2 shots:     You can see that the second shot on the right provides a more balanced exposure that gives a better idea of the surroundings. The contrast between the subject and the background is also more balanced. One consideration when using Night Portrait mode is that the shutter speed might be quite slow depending on the level of ambient light in the room/area. If necessary use a tripod or lean against a wall, doorway, or lamp-post. If your camera doesn’t have Night Portrait mode look for a flash setting called Slow Sync. This mode slows down the shutter speed the same way Night Portrait does. They are, for all intents, the same thing.   One last thing to remember about Night Portrait Mode This technique is to be used with a subject in the foreground that you want/need to use the flash to light up. If you are taking a shot without a main subject in the foreground you can use Landscape or Night Snapshot mode (mountains with a star in the corner icon). These modes actually disable the flash, since you don’t need it for lighting up a landscape.   Have a tip that helps you get the best from your vacation or travel photos? Share it below in the comments section.   Looking for more Travel Photography Tips? Check out: How to minimize the loss of your pictures during vacation Snow and Sand Opposites Except when it comes to photography

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An adjustable wrench? That’s not what I wanted. If you were to send someone to the store to buy something for you, not tell them how much to spend or what to get, what do you think they would bring you? Auto on your camera is a bit like that.   Cameras have become much more advanced over the last few years, with face detection and Smart or Intelligent Auto systems that can evaluate the basics of the scene and make adjustments accordingly. These systems have come a long way to improving the results that we get when we need a simple point and shoot option for our picture-taking. The challenge that cameras face, even when using these advanced systems, is that they still don’t really know what YOU want. So, imagine telling that person on the errand to the store that you want a litre carton of 1% milk, and you give them a $5 bill to pay for it. How successful do you think they’ll be this time? Can you hide my little wrinkles? Now, if you look at your camera you aren’t likely to find an icon on the dial that looks like a carton of milk, but you will probably find a silhouette of a person, a mountain scene, a runner, and a flower. These are called Scene Presets, and they tell the camera to restrict itself to a certain type of photo situation. Portrait mode (the silhouette icon), for example, will tell the camera to soften the picture slightly (to hide wrinkles), adjust the saturation to create a pleasing skin tone, and adjust the depth of field (what is sharp or blurred in the picture, specifically the subject versus the background) to help make the subject more of the focus of the shot, and may enable the flash with Red Eye Reduction turned on. Compare this setting to Landscape mode, which will adjust the picture to be sharper to help bring out the details in tree branches and blades of grass, bring up the saturation of blues for the sky and water and green for trees and grass, as well as disable the flash and allow for a slower shutter speed and increased depth of field so that more is in focus. Think fast! Moving on to some very helpful settings for more extreme situations, we have Sports mode (the runner), and Night Portrait (a person, with a star behind them), and Night Snapshot or Night Scenery (mountain with a star over it). Sports mode is the setting that is used for moving subjects. It doesn’t have to be sports, so don’t worry if you are using it to take photos of someone running to catch a double-decker bus in London, or to freeze the action at a busy intersection in New York. One of the key features of Sports mode is continuous shooting as long as you keep your finger on the shutter button. This means that you will have a few shots to choose from so that you get the best shot of the action. One key thing to note is that the flash will be disabled. The reason for this is that the flash takes time to recharge after each shot, and that slows the camera down, which is the opposite of what Sports mode is designed to do. Night Portrait mode is great for those shots in the restaurant or on the boulevard, where you want a shot of your travelling companions or the Busker at the corner in Times Square. Unlike regular Portrait mode, this setting is designed to provide a slower shutter speed that will allow more available or ambient light to be part of the picture. Ambient light is the light from everything the flash does not reach, and it helps balance the scene (reduces the chance of a dark background with no detail, and a brightly lit subject that looks like a cardboard cutout of a person). Try this setting the next time you have a sunset behind your friend – the results can be awesome. Night Scenery mode is like Night Portrait, but without the flash. If you are taking a scenery picture at night, or late in the evening/early in the morning without the aid of the sun then try this setting. It will disable the flash (you don’t want a dark photo with a brightly lit newspaper box in the foreground, do you?) and use a slower shutter speed to allow that all important ambient light in. Note: if there isn’t a Night Scenery or Night Snapshot mode you can use the Landscape mode for night shots without a person or close subject (if you did want the newspaper box to be the main subject, for example, then see Night Portrait mode above). Variety is the spice of life. Some cameras have an even broader list of modes to use. These can include Kids & Pets, Beach, Snow, Fireworks, Sunset, Sunrise, Food, etc. Each specific mode will set the camera up differently, helping to ensure that you get as close to the picture that you want as possible. All modes can be used creatively to achieve wild and wonderful pictures that you never thought of. So take the opportunity to explore your camera and try something new. You never what you’ll get when you say, “surprise me”. Most of all, have fun and take lots of pictures. Have a question about camera settings? Join the discussion…

No one wants to hear the words: “Honey, I can’t find the camera!” Yet every day, throughout the world, people leave their camera, with those perfect pictures, in hotels, on buses, at the pool. They get stolen in crowds and from restaurant tables and beach chairs. They get dropped overboard, or bounce out an open car window. They get lost forever. Despite these risks, there are some simple things that you can do to decrease the potential for loss of your prized memories. The camera doesn’t matter. The bottom line is—even the most expensive camera money can buy is nothing compared to the loss of the pictures on the memory card. You at the Louvre. Your kids playing on the waterside over-looking a sunset on the Atlantic Ocean. A herd of elephants on the plains in Africa. Once those are gone you better be either a great artist or very good at describing things. But even with the greatest of skills nothing can replace the shot that you toiled over so that you could share the moment with family and friends. It’s like the one that got away on a fishing trip. Nobody likes the story of the one that got away. Two is always better than one. If you’re like most people you probably have one large memory card for your camera that will allow you plenty of room to take both photos and video. The simplest thing to do to minimize the potential loss of your memories is to have multiple memory cards. This way, your loss is reduced to those shots taken on one card. You may not want to have a card for every day of the trip, so you may want to just alternate between a card for everyday activities and one for those special excursions or moments. Keep the cards in a safe place in a pocket. You may even want to take them out of the camera between locations if you are particularly cautious. Mark the cards with numbers or letters or some identifier so that you know which is which. You can also buy a memory card case to keep them in so that they don’t get mixed up with your pesos, pence, or paise. Wait a second. Back up. Still, there is the potential to lose both the camera, and potentially the cards, if Murphy’s Law is to be believed. So, how can you prevent the best laid plans from coming undone? Do what you do at home (you do back-up your data at home, right?). With the use of a simple card reader and a USB memory stick, you can have a back-up of your picture files safely stored in your room safe, or in your pocket in very little time. Get a memory stick that is 2 or 3 times the size of your cards so that you will have plenty of room for pictures. Most hotels have some form of computer available to guests so that they can check email, etc. You can use the computer to transfer your photos from your memory cards to your USB back-up. Even if they don’t offer computers to guests they usually have one for office use. You can be very charming, can’t you? If you don’t have computer access at the hotel you may be able to find a local retailer who will allow you to transfer your pictures using their computer. Photo retailers are likely the best for this, as they usually understand the need to back-up your pictures. Uploading can be fun, but costly. If you have access to the internet, and can upload your photos to a Dropbox or other cloud type storage, you may have the ideal solution. Armed with your laptop and a good WiFi signal, or access to the hotel guest computer and a good internet connection, you may want to consider this as your daily strategy. Watch for data charges though, and be ready for slow internet speeds outside major cities. Uploading gigabytes of photos will take time, and you’re on vacation, so be ready with an alternate plan if you find that the process is taking too long. Don’t let the realization of a slow connection stop you from protecting your memories. A last option for those travelling in major cities is to take your memory cards to a local photo retailer and have them back-up your pictures to a DVD. This is likely not going to be a daily trip, and you probably don’t want a CD or DVD per day, but backing up after major events on the trip could still save your most important shots. Most importantly, don’t come home with the story of the one that got away. With a few simple steps you can bring home the big one.   Protect against the loss of your pictures and most of all have fun!