The culture club: 6 expert tips for art-worthy vacation snaps
The Culturites are currently aboard the Silver Spirit, Silversea Cruises’ newest ship. First port of call was Venice, followed by Croatia and Greece. So far we can’t complain given we have a butler looking after our every whim, 24 hour room service, Frette linens, an in-room entertainment system featuring hundreds of complimentary movies on demand, champagne around the clock and 5-star cuisine. (You can follow our adventure at thesocietyglobal.tumblr.com.)
One thing we can’t leave home without when travelling are our Canon PowerShot cameras, but what we’ve learned from past experience is that snapshots are one thing, good documentary photos from your trip are another.
So before we set sail, we asked our dear friend and one of our city’s most talented young photographers (who just shot one Culturite’s wedding in Bahamas), Tory Zimmerman (toryzimmerman.com), to give us six tips to help us capture the best for our (and your) travel photography collection:
Don’t take photos—make photos! Play around with your camera’s manual settings and get to know its pre-programmed ones. Most digital cameras (even point and shoots) have exposure settings you can play with, have manual focus allocation points and settings that you can employ. Try the sepia toning, try underexposing, try longer exposures. Don’t let the camera be the brain–you can make your own decisions!
Turn off the flash. Use the sun to your advantage and learn to see the way light falls on a subject. Whether it is side-window lighting in the cabin of your cruise ship, or silhouetting someone by shooting into the sun, when you turn off the automatic flash you will start seeing and appreciating light in a whole new way.
Compose carefully. That old standby known as the “rule of thirds” has been around since the Renaissance–and that’s because it works! Try and picture your frame in a grid–three planes horizontally, three planes vertically. Now divide your composition and fill it—two thirds empty/artistic space, one third subject–or vice versa. Even you’re trying to shoot an architectural detail and not your significant other, do that statue or cool wall justice and think of your composition in planes.
Use the rule of thirds three dimensionally. Imagine that the picture you are taking is like a theatre stage. Use elements around the subject to lead the eye to what you are focusing on. For example, if you’re shooting down an alley at a lone chair, or pretty window, use the wall to lead your eyes to subject. The chair on its own is not that exciting—it’s only when you put it in a context that it stands out.
You are your own best tripod. Move around! Bend your knees! Don’t zoom all the time– move your body toward the subject. Lie on the ground, see the world from the perspective of a grain of sand or a blade of grass.
Don’t be afraid to waste shots. With digital cameras, you can take an almost infinite number of photos. Buy a big storage card—4GB or even 8GB (they are SO cheap now)–and remember that at the end of the day, you can just download them all, re-format the card and start all over again the next day. This isn’t like the film days–you can experiment, fail, try again, surprise yourself, and come away with some really unique shots. But always remember to back your photos up! Burn them to a disk, organize them in your pictures folder on your desktop, and keep them on an external hard drive.
We’ve been playing around with our cameras and using Tory’s tips over the trip. See some of the results below!
Ashleigh Dempster and Amanda Blakley are the co-founders of The Society Global, a social club with chapters in Toronto, New York, L.A. and Miami. For more info on The Society Global, visit their website, thesocietyglobal.com, or follow them on Twitter at twitter.com/culturites.
One thing we can’t leave home without when travelling are our Canon PowerShot cameras, but what we’ve learned from past experience is that snapshots are one thing, good documentary photos from your trip are another.
So before we set sail, we asked our dear friend and one of our city’s most talented young photographers (who just shot one Culturite’s wedding in Bahamas), Tory Zimmerman (toryzimmerman.com), to give us six tips to help us capture the best for our (and your) travel photography collection:
Don’t take photos—make photos! Play around with your camera’s manual settings and get to know its pre-programmed ones. Most digital cameras (even point and shoots) have exposure settings you can play with, have manual focus allocation points and settings that you can employ. Try the sepia toning, try underexposing, try longer exposures. Don’t let the camera be the brain--you can make your own decisions!
Turn off the flash. Use the sun to your advantage and learn to see the way light falls on a subject. Whether it is side-window lighting in the cabin of your cruise ship, or silhouetting someone by shooting into the sun, when you turn off the automatic flash you will start seeing and appreciating light in a whole new way.
Compose carefully. That old standby known as the “rule of thirds” has been around since the Renaissance--and that’s because it works! Try and picture your frame in a grid--three planes horizontally, three planes vertically. Now divide your composition and fill it—two thirds empty/artistic space, one third subject--or vice versa. Even you’re trying to shoot an architectural detail and not your significant other, do that statue or cool wall justice and think of your composition in planes.
Use the rule of thirds three dimensionally. Imagine that the picture you are taking is like a theatre stage. Use elements around the subject to lead the eye to what you are focusing on. For example, if you’re shooting down an alley at a lone chair, or pretty window, use the wall to lead your eyes to subject. The chair on its own is not that exciting—it’s only when you put it in a context that it stands out.
You are your own best tripod. Move around! Bend your knees! Don’t zoom all the time-- move your body toward the subject. Lie on the ground, see the world from the perspective of a grain of sand or a blade of grass.
Don’t be afraid to waste shots. With digital cameras, you can take an almost infinite number of photos. Buy a big storage card—4GB or even 8GB (they are SO cheap now)--and remember that at the end of the day, you can just download them all, re-format the card and start all over again the next day. This isn’t like the film days--you can experiment, fail, try again, surprise yourself, and come away with some really unique shots. But always remember to back your photos up! Burn them to a disk, organize them in your pictures folder on your desktop, and keep them on an external hard drive.
We’ve been playing around with our cameras and using Tory’s tips over the trip. See some of the results below!
Ashleigh Dempster and Amanda Blakley are the co-founders of The Society Global, a social club with chapters in Toronto, New York, L.A. and Miami. For more info on The Society Global, visit their website, thesocietyglobal.com, or follow them on Twitter at twitter.com/culturites.[gallery columns="5"]){kind=link}