Travel Photography Tips: Taking A Cool Photo Is Only Half The Fun. Now You’ve Got To Share It!

 

© Dr. Alan Sloyer

Dr. Alan Sloyer, traveling with his son in Kochi, India, somewhat reluctantly agreed to a sunset cruise. “It wasn’t really my thing,” Dr. Sloyer says, but when sunset turned startlingly dramatic it became very much his thing: a passion for photographing memorable travel moments.

He took pictures of “the amazing red ball of the sun,” and then things got even more amazing as the sun set and the Chinese fishing nets became silhouetted against a blazing sky.

Shooting in low light at a relatively slow shutter speed from a small boat whose pilot was not concerned with accommodating a photographer required some postproduction vignetting to lose detail in the areas of the photo that showed noise.

Then came promotion of the image, which included posting to social media, entry in a regional Audubon Society photo contest, where it took a category first place award, and submission to the reader’s photo section of The New York Times, where it appeared on the opening page of the web edition and in the printed paper’s Sunday Travel section.

There’s more, but you get the idea: for Dr. Sloyer, taking the picture is just the beginning. “I’ve always entered contests, always displayed my photographs,” he says. “It’s my personality—I’m a push forward person, I’m very driven. I like to see it all, do it all, and once I do it, I like acknowledgement. Where other people may think about it, I do it. I push the work out there.”

Or, in other words, sharing the memorable moments is part of his passion.

You can see a selection of Dr. Sloyer’s work displayed at sloyer.phanfare.com.

Tech Talk: Dr. Sloyer made the photo with a Nikon D90 and an AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED lens. His settings were 1/15 second, f/8, ISO 640, aperture priority, and Matrix metering.

Editor’s Note: If you have a fabulous photo you’d like to share with the world, one of the best places to start are Shutterbug’s online Galleries: www.shutterbug.com/galleries.

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