Making Great Images When You Travel
by William Lulow
I have often written about making images while traveling and I have had another opportunity for doing just that in the last week or so. When you are touring, going from place to place, sometimes on your own and sometimes with others, it’s relatively impossible to concentrate on the kinds of images you might like to make if you were just by yourself, with no particular agenda. If you are touring with another person, couple or group, you have to keep up with other people’s schedules. This means that you cannot literally focus on the subjects that would interest you if you were alone. Not only that, but when you are going from place to place, you often have hotel reservations or planes to catch that would prevent you from just staying in one place and waiting for the light to change.
This time I went to France to visit an old friend who just happens to be a photographer as well, so when I stopped to make a picture, he knew exactly what I was doing. Photography is different from other arts in that you are often capturing what’s actually in front of the lens at any given point in time. What you see is literally what you get. But, it can be altered somewhat in post-production. I have found myself lately making some minor changes in vibrance and saturation of a few of my images. Here are some examples:
My friend lives in Normandy, and on this particular visit, the weather was mostly cloudy with some rain. This day was fairly clear, so I used it to make some pictures near his studio in the small town of Evreux. What caught my eye here was the red umbrella combined with the red store front and the red roof. These were all made with my Canon 90D handheld with a ND gradient filter which allows me to intensify the effects of the blue sky. This one also has some great “leading lines” created by the river and its embankment.
Here’s another shot:
This is just an ordinary street scene made with my 20mm lens, which on my cropped-sensor camera, acts more like a 32mm on a regular full-frame camera. It is still wide enough to provide a fairly encompassing view of the landscape in front of me. The colors on the street were intensified again with some post production tricks and I removed a few people from the scene as well. Again, when you shoot with a wider angle lens, you need to concentrate more on the foreground. The backgrounds tend to be too small to really see good detail. That’s in the nature of the lens itself.
This is a black&white image made at the ruins of the Abbey of Jumieges near Rouen, France:
I made a few images of this place in the rain, knowing that I would do some fairly major work on them in post production. When making images of buildings without a tripod or leveling device, you want to make sure that all your vertical lines are as vertical as you can get them in the camera. This one was pretty close, but still required some lens correction in Photoshop. I also reduced the contrast in the entire image and selectively reduced it in the shadow areas at the right of the image.
When you have to take what mother nature gives you, it’s difficult to make great pictures when the weather doesn’t cooperate, which it often does not. Traveling photographers must learn to find images that work even when the environment is contrary. These examples made at Abbey Jumieges are perfect illustrations. When it’s raining, either carry an umbrella (which my friend did for me, thank you, Jean) or place yourself and your camera in a protected spot:
Wet pavements or sides of buildings make for interesting photographs, so don’t despair if it’s raining. Just make sure your equipment is protected and go ahead and shoot.
This is the interior of a former school in Rouen, France. You can see how the leaves, the wet table and the stones just glisten, adding some visual interest to the images.
Here is another example where you can see how the wet ground adds visual interest to an image. All these images prove that you can make compelling photographs when the weather doesn’t make it easy. You just have to be aware of other elements that help to create good photograph.
If you are always on the lookout for image opportunities that excite your visual senses, you can often come up with compositions that create artistic-looking landscapes rather than just the normal tourist image of people in front of known landmarks. Here’s one that I made of my friend, Jean in front of his town’s city hall. But instead of placing him right in the middle of the frame, look where he is:
If you must show a landmark in your tourist images, you don’t always have to be right in front of it with your subjects standing stock-still, facing the camera. I asked Jean to rest his foot on the base of the the sculpture and just look a bit more casual. It made for a much more interesting image and showed enough of the landmark.
So, in the constant search for more graphic and interesting images, weather need not play such an important part. Learn to make use of what the it does. Maybe use heavy rain clouds as an interesting background and bring them out a bit more using post production. Many of us feel as if we are documenting the world as we see it anyway. The trick to these kind of images is always to be looking for different ways to showcase what you see. Try to make it more interesting by using the techniques I have described in previous blogs and have illustrated here.
