Top 5 things a casual travel photographer should do

Unless we are professional travel photographer, what we normal shoot and how we capture a scene normally is, we take photos of those scenes of our travel destinations whenever we find it attractive or important to capture (as a travel blogger) by the time when we are there in whatever season and under whatever ambient lighting. We don’t care much on the perfect lighting and timing it should be. This is called casual travel photographer.

We travel and we shoot photos. To which we put more priority depends on every individual traveler. Some might travel more places and shooting less for each place, or, some might travel less places but shooting lots of photos from there at different day, time, angle and under different lighting. But we still travel to different places and shoot. We don’t travel to one place again and again just because we haven’t captured the most beautiful moment of the scene. Because we are not professional travel photographer. We don’t take photo for our living and we don’t travel to get paid either.

So, don’t upset if you can’t capture the best moment of that tourist spot. Don’t worry if the weather was overcast when you were only allowed 1 hour to shoot photos of Eiffel Tower. We travel and photograph as our hobby and passion to do so (also hobby to blog about travel 🙂 ). We have budget for our hobby, don’t we?

What we should do to produce ourselves some nice photos of places we’ve been to (not bought from pro travel photographer) is more important. If a casual travel photographer could take fantastic photos, it would be great pleasure. If a casual travel photographer could capture what only a pro can, it would be more satisfactorily. Here are the top 5 things a casual travel photographer should do:

1. Set your travel plan along side your photo plan. We know the best photos come from the best surrounding lighting to the scene. So fix your travel period to that country or city to suit the weather we want for our ambient lighting. If you plan to photo snow scene, go now!
2. Take as many photos as you can. Shoot the same scene with different composition of light, different exposure compensation EV value, high or low key setting (I’ll come to this other time), different shutter speed and aperture or even with and without flash.
3. Bring along your camera accessories like ND filters, polarizer, tele-convertor, tripod, flashes and so on. You could then explore different ways of capturing the same scene. If you don’t have any of these, buy them now!
4. If we still couldn’t get what we wanted or no where near it, plan your travel to be less ambitious. Travel lesser and spend more time or days on each place;
5. Thank god. If nothing from the above has been achieved, we still have our final tool. In this digital era, we have photo editing tool like Photoshop CS4, lightroom or Elements! They can savage poor lighting, poor colour or even poor composition!

Finally, we should be more happy to be a casual travel photographer. We can shoot whatever we like. We don’t have to worry about copyright infringements, contract requirement or so on. Happy shooting and traveling! – Travel Feeder.

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.