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Archive for the ‘travel photography’ Category

A Stroll in Boris Gardens, Sofia, Bulgaria

Is this a travel photograph?

I suppose it depends if you believe that a travel photograph can be taken, where you live, even more or less just across the road from where you live in your own backyard so to speak.

In other words, to take a travel photograph does the photographer have to travel? And does he or she have to travel any particular distance?

This is something I think worth thinking about because the stereotype of travel photography is where somebody visits some far-flung location and brings back pictures to their home turf.

Now, obviously lots of people live in these places and quite likely there are photographers living there too.

And if you go to any country – go to Greece – go to Italy – go to China anywhere you’ll find that the local photographers have been busy.

Many manuals on travel photography advise you to look at the local postcards so that you can see the standard views.

Really, that’s just a thought, but I’m not dealing with this photograph just as whether or not it’s a travel photograph but because it’s got people in it.

You can have a lot of views about people in pictures.

I suppose many of you have stood in front of some well known world site – I well remember many years ago standing in front of the Nine Dragon Screen Wall in the Behai Park in Beijing in China while crowds and crowds of local Chinese stood in line to have their photographs taken.

Sometime they roped me in to photograph their groups.

And I was just hoping there might be just a moment when I could take a photograph with nobody in it.

As it happened I was successful and I was quite pleased about this because I wanted a photograph simply of the wall itself.

I also remember many many years ago when I was very young photographer, and I was a member of various photographic clubs and societies, and there was a lot of discussion there about how people brought scale to the picture.

How people in just the right position would make the picture

How the right kind of people for example, some old peasant walking down the track in Tuscany rather than somebody in jeans and a baseball cap would give the appropriate local colour.

I also read in the photo press about how successful photographers would take their family members around with red coats on so that they could ask them to pose discreetly in various parts of the picture.

All of this deals with what you might call the aesthetics and integrity of photography.

This blog is at least partly concerned with Stock Photography.

One of the great problems in Stock Photography is people.

It’s a simple problem.

The stock photo that is the most successful is the one that can be used in every possible circumstance. It can be used in both editorial contexts – that is in newspapers and magazines where it is considered reasonable and acceptable to have people in the picture going around their everyday business and they have no cause for complaint and in commercial contexts.

If, however, a photograph is used in a more commercial context and particularly in advertising, then you simply can’t have a photograph of a recognizable person unless that person has actually given their consent to be photographed and has a clear understanding of the particular rights of the photographs.

Let me give you an example.

I remember reading of a photographer who had not done this when he described how he took a picture of his friend, a young woman, and later on, it was published in a newspaper with an advertisement for birth control pills.

If I remember rightly this young woman was a devout Roman Catholic and she was very very unhappy about this and quite rightly so. Being a friend she didn’t sue!

So the rule is no people in photographs, unless they have signed a Model Release.

A Model Release is a legal document, where people clearly and explicitly say that they have agreed that the photograph can be used in certain contexts.

Quite often the contexts have to be specified quite clearly.

Now, it’s fairly obvious there are going to be some problems if you go in for people photography.

There are those, I suppose, who believe that if you take a picture of a mountain shepherd in Bulgaria. or a camel rider in Egypt, that is unlikely that they are going to either see their photographs used for publicity or that they are going to complain about it.

On the other hand, even if you could talk to them and get them to sign a form it might be very, very difficult unless the form were in a language they understood.

And this is where there’s only one or two people.

When there’s a whole bunch of people it’s clearly quite impossible to get a model release from all of them.

So one of the things that you sometimes have to do is to see how you can take a photograph with no people in it.

My photograph has I think three people in it.

Usually the rules of commercial photography are that the people should not be recognizable.

(Anybody who has seen the cult Antionini film, “Blow Up” with David Hemmings playing the fashion photographer will know that recognizing people in photographs taken in parks can be quite a tricky business.)

If we take the three people concerned in my picture, you might argue that the figure sitting on the bench on the left could not be recognized but I would not want to be on the receiving end of a legal argument on that.

The two men walking along the path in front of the trees are clearly recognizable.

Now the question is, how can we get rid of them?

There are whole range of choices and some of them are made possible only now that we have come to the age of digital imaging.

What are the options now?

Once again, I could wait.

The trouble with waiting is that while some people disappear from the viewfinder frame, other people soon appear and if your pictures takes in a very wide sweep, it’s really quite difficult to wait for a moment when there are no people there.

If you have somebody sitting on a bench, and you don’t want them to be in the picture, one of your choices is to wait until they move

This might be a very long time and meanwhile of course, the whole lighting situation might have changed.

If the people are walking along it seems to me that there are a number of options that you can take.

The most obvious way of dealing with people in a picture is to use various copying and cloning techniques to take them out.

This needs quite a high level of skill and if the people are fairly prominent in the picture it really isn’t easy to do this in a way that makes it absolutely undetectable.

So, I think that now that we have digital imaging there might be other ways of dealing with this problem.

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Does digital imaging make photography too easy?

It’s certainly something to think about.

There are lots of photographers who have found making the switch from film to digital very difficult. And some of them just don’t like it.

And of course digital is still not the obvious choice for some types of photography.

There’s nothing new about this.

The influential Victorian photographer, Charles Dodgson, better know to many as Lewis Carrol, author of the famous Alice books, gave up photography in about 1880.

It’s not quite clear why but one reason seems to be that he had mastered the painstaking wet collodion process.

When the new dry developing process was developed he didn’t want to use it. Perhaps photography had become too easy. Anybody could do it.

We’re in a similar situation today. There is an explosion in photography and all sorts of people are taking photographs today using digital cameras who couldn’t, wouldn’t or just didn’t before.

From my point of view, I welcome this. I personally have had no trouble switching.

I think it’s worth thinking, What makes it different? What are the new opportunities created for us as photographers by the current technologies?

And, this take me back to the Sphinx

I’d like to concentrated on three points which are related

• Composition
• Size
• Cropping

Clearly, every time you crop an image to improve or change the composition you take away information from that image. Perhaps in the days when I used a medium format film camera this didn’t matter so much.

But once I made the switch to digital capture it was clear that I didn’t want to do much cropping because the image would get smaller and smaller and small images become pixalated and noisy.

And this is a time when you have to start thinking. Take as an example, the Sphinx.

There is a sort of riddle. I’ve finished with this picture in more or less the square format which I felt suited the subject matter. And to do this I had to crop.

And so I thought that while I was in Giza I would try some things that I wasn’t well prepared for.

Photographers who are well up in taking panoramas and stitching pictures will know that ideally you should have a firm tripod and a panoramic head to ensure that the nodal points of the lens are properly adjusted.

I wasn’t prepared like this so I thought I’d just have a go.

My shooting position was behind quite a high wall at a long distance from the Sphinx.

I was able to balance my camera on the wall. I was using my Canon 350D SLR – a camera with an 8.5 megapixel cropped sensor. Lens choice was my Canon 70-300 IS zoom – a lens which maintains quality at the telephoto end.

I took my pictures as usual – first of all on Programme, shifting the shutter speed when appropriate and then on Manual, carefully checking the histogram to make sure my highlights weren’t blown.

While I was doing this I decided to something else as I didn’t want to end up with small, cropped images.

I switched the camera into portrait format and zoomed in closer and took two images of the Sphinx side by side with some overlap. These are the pictures at the top of my post.

I was careful to use exactly the same manual settings for both.

Because I was a long way away I took the chance that this would have a very small effect in parallax terms.

When I got home I stitched the images manually and using various programmes – some from my local friends. Programmes such as Realviz Stitcher, Arcsoft Panorama Maker and Photoshop.

I found that just for these two images the Photoshop Merge facility did a great job.

So this was my experiment: I wanted to produce a picture which had:

• A square composition

• A high pixel count – ensuring good quality.

I think it worked out pretty well and for me there are some lessons to be learned and this is obviously a technique that can be refined with other static subjects – some more examples later.

The most important lesson is not to become too bogged down by technicalities. It’s the final picture that matters. So,

Have a go.

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A dog resting in Luxor

This is another shot from my recent Egyptian trip.

Perhaps this is the real travel photo,

Of course looking at this photo. It doesn’t really give you any idea of place so does it qualify as a travel photo?

Is this dog a particular type of dog? I don’t know. Is there anything about the location that shows where the dog is?

As it happens I was walking through one of the many thousand year old temples near Luxor when I saw this dog walking behind me.

As it clambered on the stones there to have a rest I thought I would take a photograph – I even had time to change to my macro lens and the lighting was pleasant and defused.

Perhaps this dog was a stray dog or maybe it was attached in some way to the administrative staff of the Temple.

But nevertheless the point about it is, that it was taken in a particular location. It did live in a particular place. A place far from my own normal habitat.

So from my point of view, this is just as legitimate as a travel photograph as the photograph of the great Sphinx at Giza.

The problem is that it’s not immediately apparent to the viewer as a single shot that there is anything particular about this dog.

It is just conceivable, although I have no idea, that this is a type of dog found only in Egypt, but as I say I don’t know about that.

I believe that travel photography throws up many many dilemmas of this kind. It’s so easy just to shoot the obvious great sites.

Speaking of course from the purely commercial point of view, if you go to a location such as Egypt, where at least for a lot of the year, the lighting is fairly constant, and if your time is limited anyway, so you can’t choose much concerning what time of day you take photos or indeed in the night, you may very well find that the photographs you take are very similar to those taken by many other competent photographers.

An obvious question then is why should anybody buy your version rather than one of the others?

There are of course some equally obvious answers to this question.

Perhaps it’s the only picture of this particular view sold through your particular agency.

Or maybe there’s something about your photograph that makes it a little bit different.

Another point you can easily see is that the picture of the great Sphinx is a picture of something which has been there for thousands of years and will no doubt be there for thousands of years more.

The dog on the other hand had come to rest for a little while so it’s only for that relatively short time that that particular photograph will be available.

Anyway that’s one or two thoughts on travel photography and perhaps, just to wrap that up just for the moment, at some point I ought to have a look and see what makes what is from one point a very standard picture of the great Sphinx at Giza just a little bit different.

I give one other clue .

As I said on this blog, in the past I used to use medium format equipment based on the Bronica system. And perhaps because of that I have quite a hankering for the square format.

However, shooting square format on a digital SLR greatly reduces the pixel count. Or does it?

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