Travel Photography How To

We’ve all been there. You’re packing for a big trip that will have dozens of great photo opportunities but you realize your camera bag is getting heavier and heavier with every lens you add. Don’t you wish you could just bring one piece of glass to do it all?

Professional travel photographer Mitchell Kanashkevich gets asked one photography question more than anything else: what is the best lens for travel and documentary photography? The answer’s not so simple as he explains in the below video.

It’s often helpful to include people in travel photos, to add a sense of scale and local interest. Other times, like when photographing famous landmarks, it’s nice to capture an uncluttered image, devoid of unwanted crowds. The tutorial below explains how to do that with a bit of Photoshop magic.

Creativity is an elusive gift: Sometimes it’s there, other times it’s not. And sooner or later, even the best photographers find themselves adrift in the doldrums and can’t think of anything interesting to shoot. To prepare for the next time the winds of creativity stop blowing, watch the video below from one of the world’s most prolific and notable photographers.

When we think about great adventure/travel photographers and spectacular imagery, National Geographic magazine immediately comes to mind. And the folks at Nat Geo just picked their best images of 2017, including the lead photo above of a black crested macaque captured on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi. This striking shot appeared in the magazine’s March issue as part of an article on the social structure of monkeys.

Shooting evocative portraits in the field requires special skills, especially when photographing indigenous peoples in faraway locations. In this interesting tutorial, you’ll learn why one pro says the key to travel portraiture is “knowing where your subject’s eyes should be looking.”

I ended the March 2017 column on my must-have lenses for travel photography and the tripods that support them with a promise that there’d be a part two on the gear that goes beyond cameras and lenses to enable me to get the pictures I envision.