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Doing Travel Photography in bad lighting conditions

A fisherman's silhouette is seen holding up a net at night with head torch lit

  Focus on details, get closer, get rid of the sky: As the thick cloud cover remains upon us, we can easily end up in backlit situations. As the sky and clouds are often brighter than the subjects on the ground (the bright clouds will reflect most of the sunlight), shooting wide and towards the…

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How to photograph busy situations

Crowded Places, Many Faces! To get people pictures, you have to go where the people are. Immersing yourself in markets and other crowded situations present a lot of photographic opportunities, but can also be quite challenging, and even overwhelming if you’re not used to the hubbub of Asian villages. For this tutorial, I present my…

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Body Gesture : The Travel Photographer’s Decisive Moment

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. – Henri Cartier-Bresson   According to photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the most profound photographs are those that capture the decisive moment…

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Photography Templates – Part 2

woman working in a factory in Bangladesh

Part 2: breaking the templates   As I mentioned in the first part of this article, while templates can help you capture the decisive moment, they can also be a trap that stifles originality. If you follow your templates too strictly you may end up capturing the same “predictable” compositions over and over again.  …

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Photography templates – Part 1

Bengali man at sunset

When doing photography in general, and in my case Travel photography, the use of a photography template can be very beneficial and help improve the overall performance. By photography template, I mean pre-defined, well-known and efficient photography composition templates that are recurrent and relevant in photography, and fit popular “good taste”. Knowing your usual and favorite…

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Creative portraiture

An up close portrait of Hmong girl in black and white taken in North Vietnam - Pics Of Asia Photos Travels Tours

In travel photography, and mostly in Asia, we tend to focus our photography on people. People in this part of the world are more relaxed and easy to approach. But portraits can look very similar if taken with the same angle. It works fine of course, but I personally feel the need to go beyond…

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Juxtaposition

A group of men posing in Sylhet Bangladesh

When taking photos of people in a dynamic environment (and here I am talking about South East Asia in general), it is very important to try and keep the photo as simple as possible. Capturing something too messy, unless it is composed in a very smart way, will catch the viewer’s attention away from the…

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Fill your frame

Lao rice farmer during the harvests

The more I teach photography, the more I realize that this is something I need to repeat… about 10 times a day 😉 This is actually now one of the first thing I talk about when talking about composition, once the camera settings have been covered. “Fill your frame”. There are variants as well: “fill…

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Shoot the light

Man sitting in a house drying cheroot leaves in the Shan state, Myanmar

Here is one of my most valuable tip. Here is the tip I will offer to someone who comes to me, complaining that after 20 years of taking photos they can’t get out of their usual compositions, and want to get into a new level of creativity. It may sound like something you have heard…

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Shooting in the sun

young shy Vietnamese boy hiding

The most basic composition lessons clearly state that whenever possible, you should try to keep the light behind you when taking a photo. If you don’t, you risk entering the dark dimension of the “backlit universe,” a terrifying land where your backgrounds are blown to smithereens and all of your subjects are underexposed. Did I…

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