Professional Travel Photography Tips (Video) |  |
- Professional Travel Photography Tips (Video)
- Interesting Photo of the Day: Sunrise Over Prague
- Photographer’s Project to Capture Urban Life in Slow Motion (Video)
| Professional Travel Photography Tips (Video) Posted: 22 Feb 2014 11:19 PM PST In a recent article titled Lasting Impressions: How to Create Memorable Travel Photographs, PictureCorrect provided detailed coverage of a lecture by Luke Ballard, an esteemed travel photographer who has successfully combined his two great passions—photography and globetrotting—into a successful career. Ballard returns in this video with fresh instruction on how to survive in this highly competitive industry without resorting to selling one’s carefully contrived images for less than their worth: Good Habits Make Good Travel Photographers1. Time your travels to coincide with photo-worthy events. Then try to capture those iconic events in fresh, new ways. 2. Always carry a camera with you. Better yet, carry the equipment you’ll need for each particular situation that you might encounter while you’re out exploring. 3. Use filters—it's not cheating! Ballard uses Cokin graduated ND filters, Hoya variable ND filters, and Hoya circular polarizing filters. See this article for an overview of the different types of filters and when to use them. 4. Set yourself an assignment. Deciding on achievable, photographic goals before going out on a photo walk is important. Even a very basic theme like “circles” or “blue” can provide focus and pave the way for growth, productivity, and creativity, eliminating those thousand ill-contrived snapshots.
 At the beach, one of Ballard’s goals is to shoot beach furniture devoid of people. 5. Follow the rule of thirds, but when you decide to break it, break it dramatically. Ballard estimates that he composes according to the rule of thirds 95% of the time and that he breaks the rule only on the grounds of symmetry and the rule of tenths. Symmetry, like the full reflection of a tree in a body of water, balances the image so that a composition with the horizon line in the middle of the frame makes sense. Similarly, Ballard’s rule of tenths also replaces the rule of thirds with balance, but instead of two things getting equal weight, the rule of tenths calls for the subject to fill 1/10th of the frame and for negative space to fill the remaining 9/10th’s of the frame, or vice versa.
6. Know when and when not to include people. Ballard believes that landscape photography shouldn’t include people, but that in many other types of travel photographs (sports, portrait, and event photography, to name a few), including people is often critical to being a good storyteller.  Portraits often make striking travel photographs. 7. Accentuate your foreground. The foreground is possibly the most important aspect of a travel photograph—especially a landscape shot. The farther a focal point is from the camera, the less impact it has and the less it contributes to the story being told by that particular photograph. One way to accentuate your foreground is to shoot as close to eye level with your focal point as possible. 8. Use single point auto-focus. Or as Ballard says, “A lot of red dots don’t help you a lot.” Using single point auto-focus, centered in the middle of the viewfinder, actually affords a larger measure of control because it becomes much easier to lock in the focus and re-frame to compose the final shot. 9. Shoot local—go global. Look for ways to make the locations in your photographs identifiable to the viewer without shooting the same shot that everyone takes. The best travel photographers don’t need those iconic landmarks to capture the vibe of a location. Try photographing demonstrations, art, street performers, architecture, and even identifiable signs, street locations, and graffiti—anything that will give the viewer a sense of where you are without that world wonder or landmark.
 The iconic streetcar instantly clues the viewer in on the location of this photo: New Orleans. 10. Take every photograph like it’s film. In other words, be intentional about the photos that you take. Really stop and consider your goal(s) for each shot and the story you want to tell before you click the shutter. Ballard believes that the photographer who is willing to slow down and study the craft will likely produce higher caliber images and, ultimately, succeed in the end. 11. Shoot in RAW. In Ballard’s words, “Shooting in JPEG is like driving a Ferrari and keeping it in first.” The RAW file format allows the most control over the final image in post processing. 12. Streamline and optimize your post production workflow. While post production workflow will necessarily look a bit different for each photographer, Ballard’s recommended process is as follows: adjust exposure, tweak contrast, slightly adjust vibrancy and clarity, add more graduated filter, dodge and burn with adjustment brush, straighten crop, and remove noise.  Jefferson Memorial — before post processing.  Jefferson Memorial — after post processing. 13. Take your portfolio seriously. Even in our digital age, Ballard believes that nothing makes an impression like a printed portfolio, although he also maintains a digital portfolio on his iPad.
14. Be careful when selling images as stock photography. Stock photography used to provide photographers with excellent means to make a living, but the digital age has caused the value of stock photos to plummet, which means that stock photographers get paid little for their work. 15. Submit to magazines. Since it’s much more cost effective for magazines to purchase images from stock photography websites, selling images to publications has become difficult, so it’s important to know how the proper steps to take when submitting images.
16. Create a professional online gallery where you can sell your work easily. As mentioned earlier, make sure that your gallery includes a biography and a profile photo… and make sure that it isn’t Flickr. For this, Ballard recommends Zenfolio, SmugMug, and personal professional websites. 17. Price yourself fairly but competitively. Research photographers in your area who sell the same sort of work that you do and price yourself similarly. 18. Watermark your images. Make sure that your watermark includes the URL to your full gallery. 19. Use social media. Create a Facebook page that links to your gallery and ask your friends to join, like, and share your page. Share one image each day or every other day with a link to the purchase page in your larger gallery and ask your friends to share those too. Additionally, submit your images to photography competitions, photo-of-the-day websites, and Facebook pages. 20. Remain consistent and don’t give up. You can make a living behind a camera.  When Ballard shoots a community event, he always finds the event’s Facebook page and posts his best 1-2 photos there with links to his purchase gallery.
Go to full article: Professional Travel Photography Tips (Video) |
| Interesting Photo of the Day: Sunrise Over Prague Posted: 22 Feb 2014 08:14 PM PST In the striking image below, photographer, Markus Grunau, captured the Charles Bridge under a most impressive and colorful sky as the sun began to make its appearance over Prague. The bridge, a historical landmark and main point of interest for tourists to the Czech Republic, is typically bustling with people all throughout the day. But Grunau was able to beat most of the crowd to create this masterpiece:  Gorgeous colors fill the sky as the sun rises over Prague. (Via Imgur. Click for larger size.) Armed with a Nikon D700 and a tripod, Grunau set up at daybreak to capture this rare, serene photograph. Shooting at a focal length of 100mm at 1/6 second with an aperture of f/11 at ISO 200, he was able to capture the mood and atmosphere remarkably well. Go to full article: Interesting Photo of the Day: Sunrise Over Prague |
| Photographer’s Project to Capture Urban Life in Slow Motion (Video) Posted: 22 Feb 2014 02:15 PM PST Anyone who has lived in a large city can relate to the experience of using public transportation– when you take the same trip every day, it becomes monotonous, anonymous, mundane. Hungarian photographer Adam Magyar has taken that experience and transformed it into something personal, contemplative, and mesmerizing with his “Stainless” series, which exists somewhere between still photographs and slow-motion films: The idea of the intersection between stillness and motion was precisely the inspiration for Magyar’s project. To pursue this concept, however, he needed to create a custom device from an industrial camera used on assembly lines. To make the setup portable, he coded an iPhone app that would control the camera’s input. He also had to create his own post-processing programs to handle staggering amounts of data. Magyar made three films with his creation, each in a different metropolis: one in Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, one at Grand Central Station in New York City, and one at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. He filmed from a train window as the train pulled into the station, capturing city dwellers in great detail at an unexpected moment. There are scenes of impatience, anticipation, and exhaustion; there are also instances of lightheartedness, as when a schoolgirl can be seen running among the crowd in Berlin:  Magyar inadvertently caught a young girl running alongside the train with his high-speed camera.
Go to full article: Photographer’s Project to Capture Urban Life in Slow Motion (Video) |
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