Avoiding travel photo cliches takes research

We've all seen the iconic travel destinations photographed from the same angle, with the same focal length lens a million times. Hell there's probably tripod pock marks in the spot where a plethora of travel photographers have set up to take a photo before us.

Take this shot above. It's the eyes of Buddha at the Swayambunath Stupa on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal and it is decidedly a cliche. The exact same eyes have been photographed from the exact same angle countless times before, and surely will continue to be for as long as it is beautiful. And how do I know? Just do an internet search for Swayambunath Stupa and see how often this picture comes up. No wonder it's never been licensed!

So before you go somewhere on holiday (or on assignment) you need to find out what has been done before. The internet makes this easier than ever. Just type in a famous location from your upcoming holiday destination into your favourite search engine and you'll come up with pictures galore. If you don't find out what else is out there the chances are the cliche shot is the first one you yourself would grab. Why? Because we're all so unoriginal? No, because often the cliche shot is taken from the best angle so we naturally fall into that trap. Unless we get on the internet and see a trillion examples of what not to photograph.

Firstly take a walk around and see if there is another angle you can shoot it from. Whether it's a better angle or not is kind of irrelevant in this particular mission. Remember you're looking for something different. Chances are that the cliche shot is taken from the best angle but it ceases to be your best option when everybody else has photographed it before.

So walk around and see what you can see. In the case of Swayambunath the cliche shot is the one which is closely focussed on the eyes so I switched to a wide angle and then to a vertical format to show the surroundings of the stupa.

By including the shadow of a pagoda in the foreground I wanted to show that there are other buildings around it. The quintessential Asian pagoda style also gives a feeling for the Buddhist culture that is represented in this Tibetan enclave.

After I tried the vertical I then switched back to a horizontal format. Again this is similar to the shot at the top but I have gone a little wider to show that the eyes of Buddha are not just on the one side but all four sides of the golden, square part of the stupa.

Also by coming around to the side and getting some side light I have brought out the texture of the surface, as opposed to just the golden colours.

Are these images better than the cliche? Depends on your taste I guess but whether they're better per se or not the main thing is that they present a different view of a popular place. They're the shots where people will say to you 'oh I always wondered what it was like on the other side of that monument' or 'I've never seen it photographed from that angle before.'

In a world where millions of people with millions of cameras travel everywhere on the planet and photograph the hell out of it standing out is a hard task. One way to do it is to find out what everybody else is photographing and still photograph the same thing but in a totally unique way. To be able to do that you firstly need to find out how everybody else has photographed it and then do something unique and interesting. When you start doing that you'll become known as the go-to person for unique images of popular destinations.

Monday's links moved to Twitter

Hi there everybody,

I just wanted to let you know that our regular Monday Links post has been shifted over to Twitter. Only it doesn't just happen on a Monday but pretty much every day. As soon as I stumble across a site I think you'd all like I put it up. So if you want to come and follow me just click here and you'll get those links. And it will automatically let you know when I update my blog as well.

Just today I've put up a couple of links - one to an article on what to look for when hiring a wedding photographer ( I know a bit OT but I thought it was a great piece) and another on the value of Copyright and the Licensing of images.

Go click on the Twitter link and join in.

People and wide angle lenses - you gotta get close!

I went to a photographic exhibition last Friday night. It was a great chance to get out and see some work by some amateur photographers from various places around the world. There were some really nice pictures but one thing really jumped up and bit me in the butt.

The vast majority of pictures with people in them - as in pretty much all of them except for a couple - looked like this one above.

In other words they were shot with a wide angle lens where the people were a long way away from the camera and there was absolutely no interaction whatsoever between the people and the photographer. Indeed there was no sense that the people even knew the photographer was there.

Which is all fine and good but the majority of the captions indicated that they were supposed to be photographs of people, which they weren't. They were photographs of a scene in which there happened to be some (tiny) people somewhere in the frame.

Now when I say that there needs to be some interaction between the subject and the photographer I'm not asking you to get people to look at the camera, smile and give you the proverbial peace sign. But I like to look at an image and know that there was some connection between the subject and the photographer.

Take this shot here. Now none of these people are looking at the camera. But you just know that they know that I'm there.

How do you know? Because I'm so close to them with a wide angle lens that they couldn't help but know I'm there. But it's still an environmental portrait because you can see the beach and everything around them.

Now granted both shots were taken for a commercial photo shoot (for Quicksilver cruises in Port Douglas) but you'll have to forgive me because it was the only two images I could find where they were both taken of the same group of people, in the same place, within a few minutes of each other but illustrate the point I wanted to make!

The point being this. If you really want to get over the shyness of photographing people then you have to make it fun. The subject of your photos has to feel honoured to be photographed. And they're not going to feel that way if you photograph them from a long way away with a wide angle lens so that they're hardly visible in the picture.

So get in close to people and say hello. Make some connections, break down some barriers. Once you've got past the smile and peace symbol stage they'll ignore you and then you can take some intimate, engaging portraits that will resonate with your viewers, and will make your subjects happy that they agreed to be photographed.

And if all that sounds a bit hard? Stick to landscapes. No need to have to interact with anyone. :)

Scurrying towards the future

This little fella is making a break for the ocean. Only 1 in 1000 thousand of his brothers and sisters will make it to being a fully fledged adult turtle. Remind you of a profession we all know and love?

Yesterday's post was about how editorial travel photographers are turning to commercial travel photography to make a buck. Well it ain't just commercial travel they're looking at - corporate, weddings, photo tours. You name it they're up for it.

And it kind of reminds me of this little turtle scrambling at full pace towards an uncertain future. But here's the thing. Travel photography has always been a pretty uncertain game.

I mean look at the odds. Your competition is anybody who travels, anybody who takes photos and anybody who would be happy to see their pictures in print. Now back in the days of large format cameras and heavy wooden tripods that wouldn't have been too many people who didn't have access to a couple of donkeys to get them to great locations and a lot of stamina!

Now all you need is the dosh to get you on a plane, a bag full of Immodium for dodgy meals, a donkey to carry all those cards, cables and batteries oh and a lot of stamina. :) It's always been a challenge making a living in this game but there has always been outlets for our work. Sure they mightn't have raised their pay rates in 20 years, they might be taking more and more of our rights but they were always there. But if the doomsday pundits are right newspapers and magazines won't be much of a market for too much longer. And with the plethora of great travel photographers sprouting up every year the competition for the few that remain will be immense.

So us wily travel photographers will have to put on our thinking caps and work out other ways to make money. Sending your spouse out to work is always appealing. :) Those of us who simply love photography and travel too much to even consider doing anything else will simply have to work smarter to do what we love. We'll have to create markets for our work rather than waiting for somebody to create them for us. We'll have to come up with lots of good ideas for images, rather than waiting on somebody to call us up and give us an assignment. And we'll have to be more proactive than ever before. Procrastinators can sit this one out.

As Dean so eloquently put it in the comments for yesterday's post, this shake up will weed out those who don't have the mettle to make a go of things. Bring it on I say! Deciding to go freelance means that you accept responsibility for being the master (or mistress) of your own future. Sounds better than having somebody else make all the decision for us if you ask me.

Have a great weekend and get those thinking caps on. If you can work out hyperfocal distance then figuring out how to make a buck shooting travel should be a walk in the park. :)

Commercial travel photography

As the editorial photography world continues to shrivel and die many 'editorial' travel photographers are turning their hand to the more lucrative area of commercial travel photography.

You know the kind of stuff I mean? Beautiful couples in a rainforest pointing up at some fictitious bird in the tree (out of frame) and smiling like a cheshire cat.

For those of us who are used to a documentary style, natural kind of photography adjusting to this new way of seeing the world can be quite a challenge.

This is an area of photography where the latest techniques in HDR, post-processing and 'fancy stuff' don't necessarily go down with everybody. Mainly commercial travel clients want to show their product as naturally as possible while at the same time making it as perfect as possible.

The challenge then becomes to create an image that stays true to your own style whilst selling what it is you're photographing. In many ways travel photography has always been a sell. Even when you do work for a magazine you're selling a destination. Granted it's a soft sell but you're looking for the attractive, interesting sides to a destination. With commercial travel photography you're selling what the client is paying you to sell - namely their travel product.

My style tends to stay as close to my editorial work as possible. I tend to go for strong, graphic compositions that attempt to look like they're not set-up. This isn't always possible because you have to show couples enjoying their breakfast on the balcony with the wonderful view etc. And yes you sometimes have to have them pointing at fictitious birds in the trees . The challenge is to go beyond the cliches and to have clients who want to go beyond what everybody around them is doing.

And so every so often it comes together and you produce a picture that could work both commercially and editorially, and really speaks to you as a photographer as a stand-alone image. This is one such picture for me. Taken at the beautiful Thala Beach Lodge up near Port Douglas, I used to run photo tours up there and had been on this beautiful headland looking down at the beach many times before.

So when they asked me to do some promotional shots for them straight away I knew I wanted to get up on this bluff at sunrise and photograph a couple walking along the beach. It's one of the most beautiful beaches you'll find anywhere and all the times I'd been up there nobody photogenic ever walked into view. The disadvantage of documentary photography - you have to hope somebody walks into your frame!

So I headed up to the bluff and instructed my models to walk down the beach towards me, turn around and do it again a couple times more until I had the shot I wanted. The light was perfect, the beach was looking great and the patterns on the waves were spectacular. When it all comes together like this I just love my job!

As magazine travel work (and magazines for that matter!) dries up, stock photography goes the way of the bargain basement and documentary images get in line behind the public's craving for images of Hollywood celebrities, traditional travel photographers are searching for ways to stay afloat. Commercial travel (tourism?) photography is one such avenue if you can manage to balance your own personal way of seeing the world with a new clientele. Who's up for the challenge?

Wide angle lenses, space and a giant fountain

Yesterday I showed you a shot with the telephoto lens (scroll down to take a look if you missed it) and how it compressed the perspective so it looked like the guy was about to get his leg chomped by a giant crocodile.

Today we've gone the other way to a wide angle lens, but ironically we're still emphasising size.

Now as I've mentioned before, when you use the wide angle lens things that are close to the camera appear big and things that are away from the camera look small.

That means that compositionally speaking if you want to make something look big one trick you can use is to get close to it with a wide angle lens and contrast it with something that you can make small and a long way away. Now this giant fountain is not small by any means. In fact it shoots up 48 metres into the air! So it really is big. It's in the middle of Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, Japan. The whole park is full of these wonderful slides and swings all in the form of abstract sculptures designed by a famous Japanese sculptor by the name of Noguchi Isamu.

Now if I walked back a long way and shot it with a telephoto lens the fountain itself would look big, but so would the people in the background. Not only would they look big but they would look close to the fountain, so you wouldn't get the sense of the giant amount of space around the gushing water. The water itself would look wide and powerful but you wouldn't get the sense of height and space.

So I chose to use a wide angle lens and lean far out over the barrier to get as close to the fountain as I could - which isn't very close mind you when you're only small! But the effect is that the gushing water looks big and powerful compared to the tiny little people behind. The other trick I've used is that I haven't shown the tip of the water. In other words how far exactly it goes up is up to your imagination. It could end just north of the frame or it could go a lot farther up. That gives even more of an impression of size and height.

So yesterday and today have used two different lenses with the similar effect of size, but the opposite effect in terms of how far apart or close to objects appear in the frame. The telephoto makes two objects look close to each other and the wide angle makes two objects look far apart from each other.

Telephoto lenses and crocodile compressions

When you want to make two things (or more) look really close to each other you want to reach for the telephoto lens. The longer the lens, the closer the objects will look to each other.

Which is exactly what I wanted to do here. This is the crocodile show at the Cairns Tropical Zoo. A guy in short shorts stands next to a shallow pool containing a giant crocodile and proceeds to feed it a chicken or two. All in the name of entertainment and giving the croc a feed.

Now this guy was pretty close to the edge of the pond. Much closer than any of us would ever want to be. And the best way to show that photographically, apart from standing right beside the guy and shooting with a wide angle lens, is to use the telephoto.

The only problem with the telephoto, and this is one that a lot of photographers forget. You have to walk away from your subject for it to work. You have to put some distance between you and the thing you're photographing for the telephoto lens to be truly effective.

If I was too close here you only would have seen the inside of the croc's mouth if I had zoomed all the way in. If I had zoomed back to fit the guy in I would have been at a shorter focal length and he wouldn't have seemed so close. So you have to move back. The more you move back the more you have to zoom in to get the framing you want, and the more you zoom in the closer the objects will appear to each other.

So to get objects looking closer together than they actually are in real life, walk back and zoom in with the longest lens you have.