P#9 Q7: Which Photography Techniques Can Improve My Travel Photographs?

Exercises To Perfect Your Photography Techniques

Brenda Tharp: Photographing people is a very big deal. You definitely want to practice on people you're comfortable with.

Practice photographing people at local events and with your friends and family.

Try getting shots in a public situation, like a farmer's market or a parade, where people are expecting to be photographed. Especially in a parade, when they've all dressed up in their costumes. Those people are on display. They know they're going to have their picture taken. Photographing at places and events like this make it much easier.

After you've gotten comfortable in these situations, practice approaching strangers. The more you practice approaching strangers and asking if you could take a photograph, the better you will be when you finally get to take that trip to Asia or to Scandinavia and get an opportunity to photograph people there. That is definitely one of the things I think is a good exercise to do.

Tell a Story About Your Hometown

Another exercise that works well is creating a picture story in your hometown. While you're at home, work on a project in which you're going to tell a story through pictures you take of your hometown. It doesn't have to be something that you're going to get all in one week. It could even turn into a lifelong project.

Most of us have more time at home in between our work and life schedules to go out and take pictures of nearby locations. You can build a body of work about your hometown. In the process of doing that, you're learning to actually see. You're learning what to look for when taking shots.

This helps you figure what to capture when you travel. By learning this at home, you'll be ready when you go to a place like Notre Dame. You'll have a sense of how to capture that location because you've worked on capturing the details of your own local cathedral or church.

Audri Lanford: That's a great exercise.

We've talked about a lot of different ideas and tips today. What would you say is the one, single-most important thing we've talked about today? The one thing you most want our listeners to remember from today's interview? The one thing that will make the biggest difference in terms of their travel photography?

Brenda Tharp: I think if I could sum it all up, all of the things that we talked about are really about pushing beyond the ordinary picture.

Don't settle for the snapshot. Ask yourself: what you can do to take it up a notch and go beyond that ordinary viewpoint and picture to make it something more extraordinary?

It's everything I said. It's getting closer. It's trying to get higher or lower, getting new viewpoints, trying to work with dramatic light conditions, whether it's sunrise or storm light, and trying to just really see a place with fresh eyes.

To summarize

Practice makes perfect. Start photographing locally. Learn what to look for, practice different viewpoints, take hundreds of shots with different lighting. This will all prepare you for the shots you'll be taking when you travel.

Following Brenda's advice, these photography techniques will have you taking awe-inspiring travel shots when it's time to go on your next trip.