Travel Tips

You can't talk photography without talking about the camera. Not that the quality of your pictures depends on how expensive your equipment is, but good gear that you know how to use will enable you to tranform good shots into great ones.

The first rule about equipment is to remember that you'll have to carry it around and, if travelling by plane, you can't check it into the hold if you want to see it come out intact. So, make sure you travel relatively light.

If I am going somewhere for business, I usually take a small compact digital camera that fits in a pocket rather than the bulky SLR. However, when I can, I do take the SLR but still try to keep weight to a minimum.

The most basic SLR equipment is obviously a body and a single lens. For the lens, try to chose a reasonnably good mid-range zoom. This will enable you to take most landscape easily. My chosen lens in this case is a 24-85mm. It is quite wide but still allows me close ups, although it is not ideal for portraits.

If you can, add to the above a telephoto zoom, which will enable you to take good portraits and potentially photograph wildlife. I use a 70-300mm, which is ideal to cover most of those situations, while being rather light weight.

Make sure all your lenses have skylight and polarizing filters. The skylight filters will be useful in very hot countries but will also serve as a protection for the lens. It is much less expensive to replace the filter than the lens if you scratch it. The polarizing filter will enable you to make the blue of the sky come out more or enhance light reflection and refraction effects.

Finally, if your camera doesn't have a built-in flash, consider taking a flashgun.

Some of the most fantastic pictures are taken at sunrise, sunset or in low light conditions. In most cases, if you want to avoid blur, you will need a tripod but this is extremely heavy to carry, not to mention bulky. The solution to the problem is to have a mini-tripod, a spirit level and a cable release.

A mini-tripod costs about ten dollars in most camera shops and will enable you to stabilise your camera on any type of support, such as a wall or a car. A spirit level that fits in the flashgun horseshoe will enable you to make sure the camera is perfectly horizontal or vertical. Finally, the cable release is essential to make sure the camera doesn't shake due to vibrations when you press the shutter button. Note that the last two are also very useful with a full-size tripod.