Don’t spend your whole trip with your camera to the eye

I’m often amazed to see groups of travellers driving up to a location – all piling out of the bus for a 2 minute stop so that all forty people can run out and take exactly the same shot. Sometimes travel groups look more like press conferences.

Last time I was on a tour overseas I heard two fellow travelers talking about how devastated they were to run out of batteries at one location and to not be able to get a shot of themselves there.

While I understood their disappointment I was stunned to hear one of them say that the ‘whole day was a complete waste of time’ because they didn’t ‘get the shot’.

Travel is about more than just …

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Today I want to continue with the themes of Travel Photography and adding Variety to your Shots in a post with one on mixing up your shots when you travel.

I recently had a friend take me through the shots that they took on their latest trip away (all 600 of them) and was amazed to see how many of his shots were of largely the same thing – buildings. Not only that all the buildings were photographed in much the same way in terms of framing and composition.

Now to give him credit – he had been traveling in Europe where there are some marvelous examples of architecture, but I came away from the experience of viewing his shots wondering a few questions that I would have thought his photos might have answered like:

• Who did you travel with?
• Where did you stay?
• What did you eat?
• Who did you meet? etc

There’s nothing wrong with photographing buildings, but unfortunately exclusively photographing any one type of thing on a trip can leave the end results of your travel album looking a little one dimensional.

I made this mistake on my first overseas trip to Malaysia as a 16 year old on a trip with a school band. On my return I showed my shots to my parents who nicely pointed out to me that I didn’t have a single shot of myself or any of the people I travelled (not a single shot of the band playing. I’d been so amazed by the different landscapes and buildings that I didn’t take any shots that would personally mean anything to me years later.

These days as I travel I spend time each day reviewing the shots that I’ve taken. I often do in the hotel room at night (or on a bus between places) and as I do I purposely analyze what types of shots I’ve taken that day and more importantly ‘what’s missing’ from the day I’ve had.

Travel Photography is a topic close to my heart and is something that I know many others get excited about also. Here are a few tips that might help get the best out of your digital camera while on the road.

• Which Lens to Take When Traveling
• Mixing Up your Shots when Traveling
• Thinking about Context
• Keeping Photography in Perspective When Traveling
• Photographing People When Traveling
• 8 Techniques for Photographing People when Traveling
• What to Pack in your Camera Bag when traveling
• Photographing the Smaller Things When Traveling

While I’m a big fan of digital camera users learning techniques to improve their photography another technique that can help with improving the chances of that ‘perfect shot’ (is there such a thing?) is simply to take more shots.

I learned this the first time I was asked to photograph a wedding for one of my friends. To say that I was nervous would be an understatement (I’m sure I didn’t sleep for days before the wedding). I’d never done anything like that before and to be the ‘official’ photographer was scary.

In the lead up to the day I decided to buy five extra rolls of film (yes this is back in the 90s before I discovered digital) to have in my case just in case something went wrong.

On the

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