Are you looking for tips on how to shoot amazing photos during travel and music festivals? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, Joseph Darren, a gig photographer from the Australian Writings shares photography tips for beginners.
Read on.
Travel photography isn’t as easy as people may think but when you learn the tricks, you will find it enjoyable. Equally, photographing music festivals is one of the incredible experiences for any photographer.
People take photographs when traveling and during music festivals and either upload them to their blog or store them on their hard drives so they can look back and enjoy later. If you are a photographer you can learn how to start a photography blog on 9 Mousai.
Remember, when traveling, you will encounter different cultures, history, stories, landscapes, people, etc. As such, you need to learn how to capture all these elements so that other people can see and get a view of what the places look like.
Well, you don’t have to go to a photography school to learn how to take awesome photos. Many of the professional photographers who also double as bloggers have never gone for training to become experts.
You can learn by watching online tutorials, reading photography books and keep improving your skills each day.
Below are seven tips to improve your photography.
Let’s get started.
1. Understand the Rule of Thirds
With travel photography, you need to create a more balanced shot as possible. For that reason, you need to understand the rule of thirds.
Some expert travel photographers say that this is the same rule babies use to identify their mother’s faces.
The rule states that you break down an image into different sections horizontally and vertically to focus on important parts of the photo.
For instance, placing an image on the left of the grid line and not at the center.
To use the rule of thirds, you need to switch on your devices “grid” feature and before you take a photo, identify the key points of interest of the image, and where you should place them on the grid. This way, you will improve your travel photography tremendously.
2. Don’t Forget to Capture the Crowds
Music festival photography isn’t complete if you haven’t captured the crowd. You need to observe the time of shooting the crowd though and the best time to take photos is when a song has just ended since in most cases, fans will still have their hands in the air.
Don’t forget to switch your wide-angle lens on if you have a second body as this will allow you to turn around fast from the main stage and capture that wide-angle crowd shoot.
3. Leading Lines
Usually, when taking photos, you have the subject and other objects that could either be above, behind, to the left or right of the subject. You want to make people who will look at the photos know exactly what your subject and point of focus was.
To achieve this, you have to use leading lines. The person looking at the photo will first look at the hill or trees behind your subject then their eyes will be drawn to the main subject.
You can use roads as your leading lines as well. This way, you can draw the eyes of the person looking at the photo into the frame to the subject.
4. Carry a Lightweight Tripod
If you want to improve your travel photography, then carrying a travel tripod is a must. With a tripod, you can set your camera in a fixed position and set the perfect composition. This way, you will capture still photos.
A tripod will also allow you to capture slower shutter speeds such as waterfalls, landscapes, self-portraits, and many others because your camera will not shake. Besides, you can set a low ISO or capture with smaller apertures thus keeping the subject in focus.
5. Shoot From the Mixing Desk
If there is a better location to take photos of the cord and capture stage shots then it’s from the mixing desk.
Position yourself in front of the desk area, hold your camera high- if you have a tilting screen, it could help you big time here.
The good thing about shooting from the mixing area is that you are on an elevated angle so you can capture amazing shots.
6. Be Patient
Professional photography is observing images with your eyes, heart, and mind. As such, you will not compose awesome shots if you are in a hurry. Before you press the shutter, spend some time to check the surroundings.
Observe every detail. Sometimes there will be no clouds so you will need to wait for some few minutes before composing a shot.
To capture good photographs, you don’t just get outside and compose photos, it takes time and if you are not willing to wait, then don’t expect to get better travel shots.
7. Don’t Forget to Play Around With Your Camera Settings
As a rule, you will want to adjust your camera settings based on your preferences and for different purposes but giving your camera more control could help when it comes to capturing beautiful stage photos.
Here are important camera settings to play around with to get better music festival photos.
- Aperture
You can select the depth of field depending on your preference but keeping the aperture wider could help to draw more focus to an object. Keeping the aperture wider could also help when taking photos in low lighting areas.
- Mode
When the sun in high on the skies, just don’t use Manual Mode. A good rule of thumb is to let the camera pick the best shutter speed.
However, when on low lighting situations, you should decide whether shooting in Manual Mode works better than in Aperture priority.
Remember lights keep changing and moving constantly on festival stages. And while shooting in Manual can capture a better exposure in the beginning, you may end up over-exposing the next shots.
If your shutter speed is slow, increase your ISO to make the shutter speed shoot at least 1/160thof a second. Shooting with a slow shutter speed may make the artist appear blurry.
- Drive-Mode
Since people are moving all over the stage, it will be almost impossible to time all of their faces.
Make sure to shoot in high-speed continuous so that you capture multiple shots within the same moment. You can then choose the best photos later.
Bonus #1: Use Manual Mode When Composing Travel Photos
Although the latest DSLR cameras are packed with excellent features including the Auto mode, and others, they aren’t smart enough to compose amazing shots on their own.
Of course, they are favored for their ability to capture amazing pictures, but if you want to compose outstanding shots, understand how to work with the manual settings of your device.
There are quite multiple camera settings you can adjust including the shutter speed, ISO, and aperture. All these elements work hand-in-hand to get you better composition. As a beginner, you need to know how to adjust the settings perfectly.
When in Manual Mode, you will have full control of how your images will look like. Adjusting the aperture will give you more control over the depth of field in your shots.
Bonus #2: Post-Processing is Important
People are still with the belief that editing photos is cheating but that’s not the case. Ask any professional photographer and they will tell you that editing digital photos using software is important. There are plenty of editing applications out there. Choose one that’s easy to work with.
To get better in travel photography, you need to learn how to edit your images after composing them. Understand how to adjust contrast, reduce highlights, lessen sensor noise, tweak exposure levels, and other elements using software.
Bonus #3: Keep Learning
Learning never stops. We just stop learning ourselves. And when it comes to photography, you can take advantage of online photography tutorials participate in photography workshops, and then put what you learn into practice daily. This way, you will get better in photography no matter what device you are using.
They say practice makes perfect and when it comes to taking amazing music festival and travel photos, you need to learn and practice as many times as you can. We hope these tips will help you learn how to improve your photography skills.
Let us hear the photography tips you use in the comment section.
About the Author
Michael Gorman is a professional photographer and blogger at paper writing pro, the best writing company. He is also a proofreader at some of the best paper writing service providers in the UK. Besides, Michael offers essay writing help with my assignment, a professional essay writing firm. You can connect with him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.