Vacation Shooting With Limited Time

Vacation Shooting With Limited Time

by William Lulow

I have written about this before as well. We often find ourselves at a location where we have limited time to shoot. We may be on vacation, or traveling to some place and staying for a short time only. In these instances, it is difficult to wait for the perfect lighting conditions or even to find a spot that yields a spectacular view of a place. So, what can you do?

I try to take in my surroundings and see if I can come up with an image that might convey what I feel about the place I am experiencing. It’s not too difficult to do this and it might serve to help photographers hone in on exactly what they want to say in an image of a place. Here’s a recent exercise I did with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, while I was visiting cousins there:

I spent probably less than 45 minutes walking around the beach area in Rehoboth and tried to get a sense of what made it special. There were these beach grasses that I found interesting and I tried to get some photogenic angles on them. There was also a boardwalk that is well-known in the town and surroundings. These were shot with my 20mm f/2.8 with an ND gradient filter to darken the blue sky.

Local photographers who know an area well, also know the best spots and vantage points for making strong images of a certain place. One thing I have done is to Google something like “Best spots to photograph Rehoboth” or something similar for any place you happen to visit. Sometimes articles will have some good suggestions and then you can consult a GPS app to find directions to the spot. This can save a lot of time driving around an unfamiliar area looking for vantage points from which to shoot. I also sometimes go into a local drug store or souvenir shop and look at postcards. They usually have some of the best vantage points because printing companies utilize the resources of the best local photographers who have lived in the area a long time and know all the best spots. Then you can find those spots and make your own images.

Great photographs of a particular vacation or tourist spot are made by photographers who have the time to visit an area repeatedly at different times of day, in different seasons and under different lighting conditions. They can wait for the exact right light and weather in order to make spectacular images. When we are simply “passing through” a tourist spot, we don’t have that luxury. I met a photographer once at a craft show where he was displaying his images and asked him what he did to get such amazing photographs. He said that he just goes to one spot and camps there for sometimes two weeks at a stretch. He wakes up before sunrise and tries to anticipate the lighting. Then he will go back to sleep during the day and begin shooting again at dusk to capture the most unusual type of light for a given location. That’s the kind of thing you need to do to get really great landscape shots. He makes his living doing this. I cannot be away from my studio for that amount of time.

So, when traveling, I try to look for interesting situations that could be indicative of a place or maybe even help define it photographically. The beach grass shot above, could possibly be at any beach and if I knew my beach grass genus well enough, I might be able to pinpoint these as indigenous to Delaware. But, to me, it was a beautiful shot, captured on the spur of the moment.

Sometimes, when traveling or touring, you have to deal with elements over which you have no control except to use them to convey a sense of place. I happened to see this water tower with the town’s name on it and decided to show it with cars parked on the street and some of the same beach grasses in the foreground. My thought was to create a kind of well-composed snap shot with no people in it.

Here are a couple of images I recently made in California:

In each of these two compositions, I was only looking to create strong images. The first is a typical sea coast shot where I tried to keep the horizon line fairly high. The second (of the ice plants) was designed to showcase the flora with an interesting lighting as well as to focus in on them a bit.

The idea with both of these images was to create interesting photographs that both had a sense of place. That’s it! I wasn’t able to wait for more favorable conditions as far as the lighting was concerned, so I tried to make them the best I could. You can find material for photographs in almost anything, anywhere. It is always about how you look at scenes, objects or humans that makes the shots meaningful.

The take away here is that if you only have limited time in a place, you can still use your visual acumen to zero in on elements that can offer “defining images” of any particular place. You just need to think about what you want to show and use the tools you have to do it.