Photography News Issue 56

Photography News | Issue 56 | photographynews.co.uk

Technique 24

On the road Travel Adapter Follow this month’s handy travel tips and change the way you shoot on holidays and city breaks. We put these five travel techniques through their paces on a lightning trip to Berlin – give them a try and you’ll get better shots and enjoy your photography more than ever

Words and pictures by Kingsley Singleton

Bigger scenes need a bigger format

1 Ever struggled to fit every part of an exciting view into the frame? Sometimes a scene is just too big for a one shot, especially when travelling means you’re restricted in lens choices. It’s then that youneed to turn to a panoramic treatment. Stitching multiple frames into one, panoramas not only give you a much wider – or taller – view, but they can also increase the amount of information in your travel images, allowing you to capture more fine detail, and print larger. To start off though, try to get away from the idea that simply creating a panorama will make a better image. It won’t. You should only use a panorama if the scene naturally presents itself as one. It’s not an excuse to get slack on your technique either – for the best results, you still need to shoot at the most photogenic times of day if you can, like sunrise, sunset and blue hour.

Above If a scene naturally reads in a way that’s wider than a normal frame, take the time to record it as panorama. But remember, shooting a panorama doesn’t in itself mean the picture will be better, so still concentrate on shooting at the most photogenic times of day if you can.

Only use a panorama if the scene naturally presents itself as one

There are some other things you can do to make your panos more successful, too. Firstly expose and focus manually, so that the sharpnessandlightingisconsistent.Andshoot from tripod if possible, rotating the camera

as though its lens was the axle of a wheel if you can – this will make stitching in software more successful. Work out where the panoramic framing naturally begins and ends, then set the far

edge of your composition in the middle of the first shot and fire the shutter. While keeping the camera position level, rotate slightly to take the next shot, making sure you get lots of overlap between the pictures.

Get a safety net for your exposures

2 On your travels, time can be at a premium and you may not be able to shoot in the best light. Likewise, you may not have the time or the gear with you to control the light in the way you would normally do. For that reason it’s usually best to shoot in Raw image quality mode. Raw files give you greater latitude in your adjustments than regular files, so you can shoot with some reassurance that you can fix an exposure in editing Left If you don’t have your usual filters with you, or time and conditions don’t allow them, you can achieve greater control by shooting Raw files. Here, it’s mainly the Highlights and Shadows sliders that have improved matters.

if required; JPEG files offer no such safety net. The image on the left of Berlin’s Fernsehturm tower was taken in early eveningwith the tower lit by the setting sun, but the street in shadow. The camera can’t cope with this in a single exposure, leading to the tower and sky being too bright and losing detail. Thanks to processing the Raw file in Photoshop’s Camera Raw interface I could correct it. I set the Exposure to a negative value of -1.20, darkened the highlights by moving the Highlights slider to the left, and brightened the shadows by moving the Shadows slider to the right. A small increase in Vibrance returns the colour to overexposed areas, and I straightened up the framing using the Transform and Crop tools.