Travel Photography - Gear - Editing - Sharing

Over the years its been fascinating to see the changes and improvements to camera gear and technology but also the options for sharing our photography with one another.

If you haven't got into this hobby/passion and want to get started, you only need an eye for composition and the willingness to experiment as the equipment and editing tools are so powerful you can fix most mistakes.

But, as good as you might think your smartphone or tablet/iPad camera is, it's no match for a true DSLR camera or a good Drone and thankfully these days there is a product to suit all budgets.

So I thought I'd get this post started and put together a basic outline of the issues you need to address:

1. Stop using your phone/tablet/iPad for your best travel photography - its ok for convenience, and for snaps of Places, and ad-hoc memories but the quality is just not there if you ever want to enlarge the image and print it and you cannot correct the image quality other than using the inbuilt "filters" or "apps".

2. When buying a Digital SLR camera (DSLR) there is a product to suit all budgets and needs. But do your research. Here's a good article I just quickly Googled if you want some buying tips - How to buy a DSLR camera. Take a read, then pop back here and ask some questions.

3. Once you have your DSLR, the next thing is to learn to use it. If you're just going to use the AUTO mode, you're probably wasting your money on a DSLR camera and may as well get a point and shoot compact camera. You must learn to shoot in MANUAL - as that's how you make the difference between a great photo and a "snap". And you must shoot in RAW if you want to be able to correct your images (shadows, highlights, colour, exposure - once you learn how easy it is to edit, you'll see it's like waving a magic wand over your images).

4. Next you'll see how much storage space your RAW images take up so you'll need a way to store all these GBs of images you'll quickly accumulate. Of course your camera will most likely use SD cards so when travelling it is sensible to have plenty of SD cards when one fills up. Some people manage to download the files off the SD card and then reformat to allow reuse of the SD card but only do so if you are confident that your downloaded files are backed up. If not, wait until you're back home or somewhere secure before reformatting those SD cards. Using a combination of disk drive/physical media storage as well as cloud storage is the norm these days. But do your research as pricing and services varies considerably.

5. You'll also need an image editing program, and a system for viewing/cataloguing your thousands of photos. Get yourself onto Adobe Creative Cloud and sign up for Lightroom - its both an image catalogue and image editing program.

6. Very soon you'll be so impressed with your photos you'll want to share them. Here's a few ways you can reach out to a very wide group of people that will be keen to see your photos -

* post your photos and video using your own social media media accounts and just add in our hashtags #exploroz #exploroztraveller #eotopo (for Instagram) or @exploroz @exploroztraveller (for Facebook) to share them across to all our audiences

* Upload photos to Places - simply locate the correct Place listing for the location where your photo was taken, and look for the Add Photos button.

* post your own travel story in Blogs - you can write up your story, upload photos, you can also upload video (but it has to already be stored in YouTube or Vimeo - just click the Embed Video link and follow the prompts to insert it), and you can also insert a map showing the route of your journey (click embed User Treks). Anyone that has the ExplorOz Traveller app can create a User Trek using the Positions Manager that records your position data when you travel, but only Members can create Blogs.

I'll open this post for comments, questions, etc but also invite input from other photographic enthusiasts to help respond. It's a huge subject and loads of options to suit all budgets but the basic principles are the same. It's quite an exciting era for photography and it can be a very rewarding pastime so I urge anyone, in particular those that are retired and travelling to give it a go!
Michelle Martin
Marketing & Customer Support
I.T. Beyond Pty Ltd / ExplorOz

Lifetime Member
My Profile  My Blog  Send Message
Moderator

Back Expand Un-Read 5 Moderator

Sponsored Links