Travel Photography 101 (and Then Some): Capturing Moments for Beautiful Memories

In this episode of The Wild Photographer, host Court Whelan dives into a long-awaited deep dive: Travel Photography. It’s an episode designed for photographers who want their images to capture the moment during travel and adventures in a more meaningful, creative, and artistic way. 

This is both a comprehensive breakdown and a highly practical guide, whether you’re shooting with a full-frame camera, a mirrorless setup, or just your smartphone. Court pulls from decades of experience as a travel photographer himself, photo guide, biologist, and expedition leader to distill what one should look for and how to capture stunning travel imagery when in the field.

Listeners will learn:

• Why travel photography shouldn’t be an afterthought—and how prioritizing it leads to stronger memories and better storytelling
• How to instantly improve compositions using angles, layers, and intentional framing
• What to look for in great light, including golden hour, blue hour, and creative use of white balance
• When to use shallow versus deep depth of field, and how shutter speed can either freeze action or create dynamic motion
• Practical, respectful approaches to photographing people and street scenes without being intrusive
• How all of these techniques translate directly to smartphone photography, including exposure control, portrait mode, and simple long-exposure tricks

Whether you’re preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition or documenting a weekend trip close to home, this episode delivers tools you can use immediately—no matter what camera is in your hand.

Here is the small travel printer (great for sharing in-the-moment with the people you photograph) he mentions - Selphy printer - https://amzn.to/3NSi8xp

Court's Websites

• Check out Court’s photo portfolio here: shop.courtwhelan.com
• Sign up for Court's photo, conservation and travel blog at www.courtwhelan.com
• Follow Court on YouTube (@courtwhelan) for more photography tips
• View Court's personal and recommended camera gear

Sponsors and Promo Codes:

• ArtStorefronts.com - Mention this podcast for free photo website design.
• BayPhoto.com - 25% your first order (code: TWP25)
• LensRentals.com - WildPhoto15 for 15% off
• ShimodaDesigns.com - Whelan10 for 10% off
• Arthelper.Ai - Mention this podcast for a 6 month free trial of Pro Version

Transcript

Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to the podcast. I've got a fun one today, something that's been really on my mind of doing a recording of for quite some time, travel photography 101. It's, the goal of getting you to take your best travel photos, make your best memories from photography, traveling near and far. Before I get into the episode, I wanted to do a little intro of myself. I know I have a lot of first time listeners, a lot of folks that may not know me personally or have heard an intro in the past.

I'm court. I'm your host of the show. The format of the show is teach you tricks and tips and advice and perspective on nature photography. includes landscape, wildlife, macro, and now travel photography. Well, it's always been travel photography, but this is a dedicated episode to that topic. I've been in the travel industry for about 20, almost 25 years, but I am a guide. I'm a photo guide. I'm a naturalist guide. I'm a biologist by training having studied.

ecotourism and entomology. That's right. I studied bugs. you know, there are some episodes of macro photography that get me extra excited and nerdy that I've done throughout the years. But yeah.

And when I'm not wearing the Wild Photographer hat and recording these podcasts, I am a professional in the conservation

I work in the travel industry to help elevate responsible travel and to plan some pretty amazing expeditions. And like I said, many of those I guide from a photographic standpoint. So, you know, I've been photographing since I really took my very first trip 20 plus years ago, and it's just been practice, practice, practice since I've learned a thing or two having taken probably what amounts to a couple million photos over last 20 years.

And my job, my passion is to distill those things down into some of the most important takeaways on topics that, well, are the titles of each episode. So that's a little bit about me. If you want to learn more, you can go to my website, www.courtwhelan.com

I do have a travel conservation and photography blog there as well. And yeah, shoot me a message for my website and I'd love to stay in touch.

But let's get into the main episode itself today. Travel photography 101. Well, first of all, what is travel photography? Well, gosh, it could be anything that you take while traveling. But I like to differentiate it away from the other main pillars or main buckets of of wildlife and landscape and that sort of thing. And that is kind of like the catch all for all the rest. It's street scenes, it's cultural photography, it's it's people photography, it's documenting your journey, the vehicles, the

Community or around traveling near and far it's kind of everything else when it comes to being out there in the world other than Your classic landscape classic wildlife type shot. So it is a big big bucket, but I think maybe more than anything It's really the act of portraying the journey. It's the intention of making some really awesome memories and Elevating your storytelling through photography storytelling is a huge part of travel photography

So that when you look at that single photo, that single frame of your journey through the streets of Thailand or through the canals and, waterways of Borneo, you're reminded of all the feelings that came about during that one snapshot moment. Remember that's kind of one of the challenges with photography compared to videography is that we're distilling an entire scene, an entire day, maybe an entire feeling down into one single snippet, one snapshot. And so you have to think.

a lot to layer that complexity of storytelling in. And the tricks today are going to be about how to set up your shot, how to take the right shots, how to use your settings, how to use your creativity, how to use your tools. This might be big fancy lenses, or if you stick around to the end, I'm gonna do a full dive on how to do everything I'm talking about today in your good old smartphone iPhone. These are amazing travel photography tools.

I'm gonna talk about how to go stealth mode when walking around streets so that you can take photos of street scenes without looking like paparazzi. There's a lot of great tips in today's episode. I'm really looking forward to getting into it.

I'd like to thank one of the sponsors of the episode, Bay Photo. They are a photo printing lab, a photo printing company that I've partnered with because I am just such a huge fan of people printing off photos. We live in such a digital world. It's getting more more saturated by the day. And I think printing off your work is such a wildly rewarding thing. And Bay Photo, they're simply the best. These are professional quality prints.

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So with travel photography to do it well,

it really can't be an afterthought. that's, I'm just coming out the gates with that because it is a really important consideration. think a lot of people when they're traveling and they're on a safari, they're going to rainforests around the world. Heck, they're going to the polar regions to photograph Antarctica or the Arctic and polar bears. think, well, wildlife is number one, landscape is number two, and travel photography is number three.

That's fine. I'm not saying I'm much different, but if I want to get the best travel photos, I'm going to have to prioritize travel photography as number one, maybe not throughout the whole trip. And that's the beauty of these multi-day trips that we often take as photographers going on these photo expeditions. But you do have to prioritize it. Can't it can't be an afterthought. And as you're going to hear from the various examples of strategies, it's because when you are faced with that amazing sighting, you're going to need to get.

the vehicle in the shot. You're going to need to get fellow travelers, fellow photographers in the shot to tell that story. And while I don't want you to come away from any trip without the core classic photos, I do think that incorporating travel photography with a lot of intentionality and a lot of prioritization will give you better memories and just really better work from your trip, which I can tell you when I go back through albums from over the years, I'm so happy I took those shots.

Do I need another full frame shot of a lion's face? You know, even on a 12 day safari, you're going to get dozens, if not hundreds of those step back, think differently. And I'm going talk about all those techniques today.

The other thing I wanted to get out the gates right off the bat is travel photography, especially of people or street scenes with people is getting trickier. ⁓ People are frankly more leery of being photographed in this social media world. It's just a fact. People are kind of super saturated with getting photos taken of them. This was not a challenge. 10, 15.

plus years ago because it was kind of a privilege and something unique to get a photo taken of you, especially if you're in another country where you're not used to that. But even folks in our traveling world and our Western world, like we're getting a lot of photos taken of ourselves, too. So whether you're photographing people in street scenes in other countries or photographing your fellow travelers, it is important to note that we're getting to the super saturation point where you have to be very mindful, very cognizant, very

aware, very polite about taking photos of people. And so if you stick to the end, I'm going to tell you a couple of really tried and true methods for doing this that I've found works quite well over the years.

Okay, so right off the bat, I want to talk about the best lenses out there. I'd like to start with gear. This is an important part. Like I said, I'm going to get to an iPhone section towards the end where I go back through each of these topics I'm about to go through and tell you how you can do the same version of that more or less in a smartphone. But for those with bigger fancy cameras out there, lenses, it's an important consideration because I think travel photography really needs to have some sort of extra umph. It needs to have some sort of

you know, interesting shallow depth of field that needs to have an interesting perspective. You can absolutely go out the door with a kit lens, you know, some some sort of walking around lens like a 24 105. And that's fine. Like all these techniques are going to apply. But it's worth considering, you know, when you want to get very interesting storytelling scenes of travel photography. This is where weird lenses like primes and ultra wide angles and even fish eyes might shine.

They're not that weird. know, we often all bring ultra-wide with us and primes are certainly not weird. They were the standard in photography for many years. Primes, of course, I'm talking about those lenses that have fixed focal lengths. You can't zoom in and zoom out. It does make travel photography a little bit trickier, but the upside is that most of those lenses are not only just super duper sharp, they're a little bit more affordable for how sharp they are.

and they often have very, small F numbers, i.e. big apertures. You can get those really interesting shallow depth of field, which I think makes things look great. You know, the lenses specifically I'm talking about would be like the Nifty 50, the 50 millimeter class of lenses. This one is such a trophy piece in the travel photography world because you can get a 50 millimeter fixed lens at like F 1.8, F 1.4 for just a couple hundred dollars.

The image sharpness is not going to compare to the same version at a couple thousand dollars, but the image quality is going to be pretty darn similar to your big couple thousand dollars zoom lenses because again, it has fewer working parts that 50 millimeter class of lenses is just kind of easy to make from an optical physics standpoint. So you get 50 millimeters like an F 1.8 and that gives you a really, really shallow depth of field. Great for portraits and street scenes and in

food and night markets and transportation and just kind of like a putting yourself here type vibe. So I love that lens for travel photography. The classic 16 to 35 millimeter is really, really great. It's kind of limited because you don't have that telephoto. ⁓ Oftentimes, you you want something that gets you a little bit further in there, but what it lacks there, it really, really benefits from from being able to shoot in very tight scenes in making small confined spaces like

the aisles and alleyways of dimly lit markets in other countries like night markets, ⁓ vehicles, you're riding in a tuk tuk in Southeast Asia, you're roving the tundra in polar bear country in the Northern Canadian Arctic, and you kind of want to show the whole scene in a very unique way that ultra wide is going to do a very, very good thing for you. adds a very artistic element to things.

If you don't have one, again, a kit lens is just fine. Like oftentimes what the 24 to 105 or 24 to 70 lacks, meaning that super ultra wide or very, very fast aperture, it's going to benefit you greatly by having that zoom. And the zoom essentially is that you can go from 24 all the way to 70 or 105. And a lot of lenses out there on different platforms will go even further than that. Some of these all in one lenses, they do have very big upsides.

You may not get that same background separation and blur, but that ability to zoom is absolutely huge. So another lens I really like for travel photography, it's not probably what most people are thinking of, but it is the 70 to 200 class of lenses. And I would say at the F 2.8, you get so many benefits here. Not only is it a crazy sharp lens, you can crop in, you get just great crisp, high contrasty, beautiful natural shots, but 200 millimeters at F 2.8.

is really shallow, so it's an excellent portrait lens. And then 70 is actually fairly wide, so it's really good for street scenes, for things like temples

various

elements in the landscape that you might be exploring. So it's a really good one to think about. And as you'll hear later, I love zoom compression and I love kind of the candid photography that this lens class allows.

So now I want to go into working with angles and angles. This can happen with any camera out there, but it's not being complacent and not just settling for the eye level shot. think we're, we're very often walking around in areas and you know, whether we have a phone or a big fancy camera and we're just kind of documenting and looking at, what our eyes sees, but you have to remember it's not about what your eye sees, it's about what the camera sees

So you have to kind of look at the world through your camera and through your lens. You have to think, well, how wide is this really seeing? Like, you know, should I point the camera down? Should I kneel down? Should I put the camera over my head? I really recommend thinking about almost never shooting at just straight eye level when it comes to travel photography.

There are techniques to just tilt your camera, like twist it 45 degrees so you're not at a flat level horizon. You might have interesting spires from a stupa or a Buddhist temple that are coming out the side and you wanna create some abstract art. You might see a street scene where a tree is jutting across the road or heck, a power line. You might be out in nature and the curvature of the vehicle you're photographing, you wanna level that off at the expense of leveling the horizon.

So angles are a huge quick way to level up your travel photography. And I'm not saying that every shot should be angled like left to right or top to bottom, know, just be cognizant that a top down shot of a flower arrangement or of a koi pond is really interesting.

getting down at level of a boardwalk and shooting up into the trees so that the railings are on either side and you get the silhouetted of the palm trees and Borneo around you can be really, really captivating. So the practice and the exercise here is really, some shots might actually be better at eye level. However, challenge yourself with almost every shot you do to think, how do I get the level perfect for the shot the way the camera sees it?

what's in my foreground and what's in my background. So just don't settle for that eye level shot because it's usually not the most interesting when it comes to travel photography. And again, we might be photographing with travel photography, very mundane things, but we're making them look interesting and making them look deep and layered. You know, we have that foreground, mid ground background. We have those layers that show a full

complex, yet relatively simple story.

And this is where using the newest cameras that have those swivel LCD screens can be absolutely huge. Being able to, you know, just kind of get down a little bit towards the ground and then holding your camera below you, yet swiveling the screen up so you can frame the shot or holding your camera above you, swiveling the screen so you can see the shot and getting those photos. Some of my favorite shots of like hiking and trails is when I'm behind a line of people, you know, my hiking buddies, and I take the camera overhead and just kind of shoot.

down so I get a lot of the scenery I get the entire trail I get the terrain I get the textures so again thinking big and small thinking at extremes you know as high as you can be as low as you can be so tilting and angling it's all going to add more interest and intrigue into your shot

Court Whelan (15:49)
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Court Whelan (17:48)
Another big one is finding and maybe more importantly, identifying unique light. You need to train yourself to see and be aware of light that is unique. And this might sound kind of weird. It's like, well, I have eyes so I can see light, you have to start to look at

different types of quality of light. Is this strong top down light? Is this low angled light? I'm often looking for gradients of light. Like think of an alleyway that doesn't have direct sunlight on it, but there's sun just kind of just fading into the darkness. And as soon as you start to train your eye to see those gradients and those fading qualities of light, you're to start to see and get some really great photo opportunities. So

There is always light in our scenes. Even if we're shooting at night, there has to be some sort of light. Otherwise the photo wouldn't be a photo, but you have to remember that light is not an on or off switch. it fades, it reflects, it bounces. And just simply being able to understand what light looks like in your environment is a huge, huge thing when talking about captivating travel photography. Remember we might be photographing a dim alleyway in downtown New Delhi.

And it's kind of interesting, but is it a really aesthetic photo? Well, what makes it aesthetic is that this light just happens to be coming in at an angle, shining in on this one vendor, And then it fades into the distance, into darkness. So we have to start looking for this. Not every shot is gonna be this perfect combination. In fact, it's...

probably the exception and not the rule to find really unique light. mean, that's why it's called unique. It's the exception, but being able to train your brain into not just what you're seeing, but how the camera is going to see that light.

The other part about light is what about the color of light? ⁓ You know what? What is illuminating your scene? Is it a flat blue LED light bulb? Is it reflecting off of a red mural and giving this kind of reddish pinkish hue onto the thing you're photographing? Is it top down sun? Is it sun that's filtered through a really beautiful orange sunset? Is it from neon lights?

starting to recognize this and realize that the color of this light is going to be a really interesting component is huge. But the big thing here is that you have to be able to get a handle on your white balance if you're going to be capturing and harnessing the power of uniquely colored light as well. And so there's a few ways to do this. So if you've never set your white balance in camera, the number one homework assignment is to go out on your next photo walk or your next photo trip.

and just toggle between auto, cloudy, and daylight. And just look at those three photos and look at the difference. Auto is always going to be kind of like your most neutral, you're not especially colorful or poppy, or there's no real interesting tone or hue to it. Your cloudy is going to be more warm and more yellow. It's very akin to putting a warming filter on back in the day. And your daylight is going to give it more of a blue, a cool blue hue.

And which one you like better is totally up to you. You are the artist. You get to decide that. That is not for me to tell you. But I will tell you that I personally tend to enjoy warmer shots. I like to bring out the yellows and the reds and the oranges with a little bit more saturation by putting my camera on a cloudy white balance.

white balance sometimes and that's gonna generally be when I'm photographing in cooler environments. So it may just be ⁓ the fact that I photograph in warm tropical environments a lot that I like that warming look of a cloudy white balance. But when I am in the Arctic, when I am at the poles, I do like giving that cool blue Arctic look and a daylight white balance is really gonna be the thing that gives that to me.

As a little bit of explanation, know, we're not, we're not just telling the camera like, Hey, make this different colored. What we're really telling it is how to perceive pure white. And as you can imagine the way a white sheet of paper looks in a yellow sunset versus an inside fluorescent bulb versus in the middle of the night looks very, very different. It's, not the same color. So white balance is a way for your camera to try to compensate for that.

So the reason I'm telling all this, this is probably the biggest takeaway point is that if you have your white balance set to auto and you're in front of these really interesting lighting schemes, these unique colors of light, like street scenes, neon lights, ⁓ fluorescent bulbs, or anything that's just giving a very interesting hue. Think of these photos that you may have seen of like downtown Tokyo or, you know, Times Square at night. There's just all these interesting colors going everywhere.

If you have it on auto, it's going to probably give you very muted colors across the board. Maybe nothing all that interesting. And so if you have it on auto,

You might find that your colors don't actually match what you're seeing in your eyes.

this is why I again do recommend that you consider toying around with actually setting a white balance versus letting your camera just try to figure out from its sensor. Better cameras will do this better. They might have better computers in them to figure out what color of light is actually coming through, but still for street photography, for travel photography, for experiential storytelling photography, getting a little bit weird and wacky with colors is something I personally love to do.

You can always change white balance after the fact in post-processing like Lightroom and Photoshop, Camera Raw, all that.

But here's a little trick. One thing that I've found is that if you set it in camera and you then put it on computer,

You're going to be far less likely to think that it looks off than if you were to adjust it on the computer. And this is totally psychological, but that we're very psychological creatures. We humans, if you start changing it so dramatically, such that the color is just way warmer, way cooler on the computer, you and your brain, at least myself, I started to think, ⁓ gosh, I'm, I'm really Photoshopping this. I'm really changing the color. Whereas if you did it in camera,

and you look back on that moment, that memory, you're probably going to say, yeah, that was the vibe I'm taking away from this scene. It was a really, really warm, sweaty night when we were walking through this night market It was a really cold Arctic day when we were out in the tundras in the Canadian Arctic. was just, it felt cool and blue. So I do recommend if you want to level up your travel photography to consider setting your white balance in camera.

rather than adjusting the computer. You can always change your white balance on the computer and it doesn't degrade it by much at all, especially if you're shooting in RAW. However, there's a creative element in travel photography is all about creativity. Creative element with setting it in camera while you're shooting.

While we're on the topic of light, let's talk about the times of day. ⁓ And also as an aside, working with difficult times of day. So short answer is the best time of day to get captivating, beautiful shots is going to be, in my opinion, your golden hours. This is sort of the hour after the sun rises. It's still very low in the sky. It's usually very warm and yellow. And then as it sets towards the end of the day, so like the hour before sunset, those are two amazing times of day. You have enough light.

You get some really cool opportunities for backlighting. get some really cool opportunities for side lighting. It's that low angled, slightly diffused light because it has more atmosphere to go through. So it's not as harsh as those top down days. So the reason I'm saying all this is if you are in a really great area and you know, gosh, I've got to go get some really cool photos of this thing that I saw, you know, my, amazing safari vehicle is parked outside my safari lodge. I just want to get a really good photo of it. When do you do it? Well, you do it during those golden hours.

That was probably a bad example because you're probably driving during the golden hours on Safari. That's like the best times a day to be on Safari. But let's just use as an example for what it is when you want to photograph something that you know is there and you want to prioritize the best time of day for the most interesting light. It's generally the hour or two after sunrise or the hour or two before sunset. Pro tip here. If the closer you are to the equator.

the shorter that time gets. if you're if you're thinking that you're on the equator, say in Kenya and you have this two hour window, it's not going to be the case. The best light is more like a golden 20 or 30 minutes. It's a short amount of time because the sun, you know, It rises and sets and moves across the sky very, very fast. Conversely, if you're towards the poles further and further away from the equator,

that golden hour on either side of the day is quite a bit longer. If you're close to one of the solstices, like the winter solstice in one of the poles, you might find that you have like half of a day that is a golden hour. And that can be really quite cool. So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about if you need to photograph, if you want to photograph in the ideal time of day, it's generally at that time. I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that.

There are other great times of day to photograph as well. Don't feel like you only get two hours a day to take great shots. There is a time just before sunrise and just after sunset that can be fantastic for travel photography. I didn't name this as my top pick right off the bat, but it is called the blue hour. I actually have a whole episode just on photographing the blue hour. The crux here is that you really need a tripod.

It's not your your quick draw travel photography bop over here. Take this shot. It's it's much more planned is way more intentional. It can yield some of your favorite shots the trip, but this time just before the sun rises or after it sunsets, there's enough light in the sky that it reflects. Well, you know, I'm not going to get into the physics of light here, but it makes the sky look very very dark and rich blue.

Hence the blue hour. So it's really great for photographing static scenes, like maybe the cute little table you have set up for you when you're at the jungle lodge. Maybe this is a good time to go photograph the vehicles if you're trying to document that. It's a great time to photograph the welcome sign at the hotel or the camp that you're at. It's a really nice time of day. You just are gonna be forced into like half second or one second exposures at least because you are losing light very quickly.

But what about all the rest of the times a day? Well, you know, it's a going back to that alleyway analogy, you know, I realize this is a nature photography podcast and I've been talking about alleyways a lot, but I do love photographing street scenes as much as I love photographing wildlife and landscapes.

street scenes and I'm recalling back this one photo I took an alleyway in Cusco Peru that was painted the whole thing was painted like this real beautiful sort of pinkish red

The light was bouncing off of this and reflecting. So the whole alley had this really interesting eerie glow to it of kind of like pink and red and orange. Yet the inside of the alleyway where I was standing, it was completely black. completely silhouetted. Anyway, it's hard to imagine all this over podcast and radio, but nevertheless, the idea is midday can be really nice.

when you look for these kind of confined spaces that aren't getting direct sunlight, but have a lot of ambient light. the other thing midday can be really great at is photographing black and white. Now I never photographed black and white in camera. I'm not using film and I'm not programming my camera to make it black and white, but I just know when I go back and do the editing that if I have a lot of street scenes and I have a lot of harsh contrasts, you know, a lot of

really light lights and dark darks that I'm gonna be able to play around with the gray scale. I'm gonna be able to play around with black and white. And with all the more or less advanced editing programs like Lightroom and Photoshop, there's generally a single button that you can push to turn your photo black and white. And then the fun begins. I boost the contrast, I darken the shadows, I might even blow out the highlights just to create really high and low key effects. We call that high key if it's very, very bright, like too bright by.

normal metrics, low key if it's too dark, like you're losing data in the shadows. there's no rule that says you have to get the photo perfectly lit so that every pixel has just a little bit of light in it. You are the artist, you can create dramatic scenes. So I love that with, with travel photography where I'm photographing things like vehicles and photographing boardwalks and bridges and street scenes and modes of transportation and all that.

when I can just create really interesting dramatic art with it.

And so that leads me nicely into another topic and another idea here, which is over and under exposure of your shots. And this is exactly what we're going with with like the high key and the low key thing. pertains to any photography at any time when we're talking about travel photography. And so the idea

is that an even exposure when you're looking at your little exposure meter, you're at zero, that's even. It's a great starting point and I certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity to take a photo there, but sometimes it might be really interesting, especially with travel photography, to dramatically under or over expose your shots. It can make it look really ominous and dark and moody and that's beautiful. ⁓ If you overexpose, you can make it look very like magazine cover worthy where

You sort of have a lot of real definition in certain parts and there's big open spaces and these things are great. There's no right way to do it, but considering over and under exposure is a really great thing. And I'll tell you one very easy way to dive into this challenge, so to speak, is not necessarily just manually going to over and under exposure for certain shots

where you just have no idea which direction you should go, rather than do that, I recommend when you do have that hour or two to walk around a market

or take an hour to go photographing the camp and the surroundings that you are at in Africa or in the tropics is set your camera's exposure to spot metering. So most of the time we have it on some sort of evaluative that's the Canon's term or like matrix metering where the sensor is looking at the whole thing, the whole scene. But if you put it on spot metering, it's only going to meter on the dead middle of your frame. And what you're going to quickly find is that

it's going to dramatically change the exposure from shot to shot because you might be photographing a scene with lots of darks and lights and focusing and metering in the shadows one second makes your scene overly exposed. Whereas focusing metering on a tree branch that's firmly in the sunlight makes it very, very dark. And this is a quick way with kind of just one or two button click to switch over to spot metering, a good way to inject a lot of creative photography.

And once again, creative photography really lends itself to travel photography and vice versa.

Okay, so it's about time to talk about the good old apertures and shutter speeds, right? Like those are the settings we're mostly talking about in this podcast and often with advanced wildlife and landscape techniques. With travel photography,

Let's start with apertures.

I am very intentional and very precise with my apertures and look that I want to give my photos. And I'm usually photographing at one extreme or the other, meaning I want everything in focus or I want very, very little in focus So with travel photography, I'm typically bouncing back and forth between like an F 2.8 or if I have one of my prime lenses on like an F 1.4, and then I'm kind of skipping all the other numbers. And if I want

everything in focus, I'm photographing it like f8 or f11, f11 if light allows, of course.

And I'm not saying there are no times where a good old F5.6, just something middle of the road, isn't applicable, but really to inject a lot of interesting creative vision into the shots, I'm either trying to take a slice of focus or I'm trying to show you, the viewer, how wildly textured and colorful something is.

And this actually is a good time to talk about, you know, going beyond apertures to show those two things. There are two other things you can do in order to exaggerate that slice of focus look and exaggerate the deep depth of field look is if you're trying to take a slice of focus of something, like a market vendor that is displaying beautiful strawberries or something is I'm not squaring up.

Completely. I'm actually shooting at an angle down the line so that way when I'm at an f2.8 or at an f1.4 Only the thing I'm focusing on is in focus and everything before or after that is out of focus It almost gives this kind of like tilt shift look where it's a very very thin slice of focus that creates I think a beautiful artistic look compare that to the opposite is if I'm standing in front of ⁓ a big bin of strawberries or let's say it's a huge barrel of chilies and

I might wanna get every single chili pepper in focus. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna square up my lens so that the plane or the flatness of that barrel of chilies, like let's just say that the chilies are topped off and they're level, I'm gonna make sure my lens is parallel to those chilies so that when I'm shooting at an F8, every single chili is in really crisp focus.

And so this is a great example where I a couple of years ago, I was walking in the streets of Kuching Borneo and there was this beautiful barrel of little Thai chili peppers. And I wanted to get this full frame, almost like a desktop background of just beautiful red and green and yellow chilies with everything in crisp focus.

but since I'm, not above the barrel, I have to take my camera and actually put it above the barrel and shoot directly down. Okay.

so aperture to me in these cases is really a way to create intrigue and a little bit of cinematic drama into the shots. Do I wanna make it look kind of mysterious with a lot out of focus with that shallow depth of field, i.e. small f number,

do I wanna make it look kind of big and impressive and textured and very defined?

with a big depth of field and a large F number.

so shutter speed is another time where I'm really shooting at extremes. I'm either shooting slow enough to inject motion in the scene, or I'm just shooting fast enough to freeze motion. Okay, so there's really two things going through my mind when I get in front of any sort of travel scene.

Right? So the numbers associated with these are quite subjective, but I will say in general,

if you shoot one over 200 or one over 320, then you're generally going to freeze motion unless people are running or vehicles are driving. But oftentimes when I do see fast motion frenetic motion, that's when I'm starting to think the other direction and actually going to slow my shutter down. Because if something's moving fast enough, I know I can shoot handheld at like one 30th of a second, but that

30th of a second is slow enough such that the motion going through is actually going to blur the shot. So it's like this balance again, if I don't have a tripod and I'm not trying to do some sort of really perfected studio shot, which I'm rarely doing with travel photography, I need a balance between the shutter speed where I can be handheld. it's really hard to be handheld under one 10th of a second.

But how much motion is that 10th of a second really going to capture? Well, once again, if children are playing, running through a market, if a tuk tuk is driving in the road, one of my favorite shots that I have from a, uh, not too long ago, a trip in Thailand is I'm sitting in the tuk tuk. These are these little motorized bikes that are zooming through Bangkok and Chiang Mai and all these cities. And I'm in the back and I'm just taking a slow shutter shot focused on my driver who's right in front of me. And.

we're all in focus because I'm at one tenth of a second, but the world is zooming and streaking by like all my left and all my right is streaky as if we're like a race car. So there's some really fun opportunities with travel photography to take slow shutters, but you have to look for something with decent motion. Someone just walking through a street scene, not enough motion necessarily. You need high, fast motion, like people running, kids running, vehicles driving. ⁓

You know, it might be knives chopping in a chopping block in a wet market, you know, whatever it might be. These are the things where you want to start saying, well, I could freeze motion. This is pretty cool. But if I can get a slow shutter and inject some motion here, I think it might be even cooler.

Court Whelan (37:49)
All right, friends, quick pause before we jump back into the episode. So let's talk about something that every photographer eventually runs into. It's that moment when you're ready to buy new gear and perhaps sell or trade it. Basically upgrade your gear. That's something that we're all thinking about. At least I am quite often. That's why I'm genuinely excited about having MPB as one of the sponsors of the show. MPB is

The right way to buy, sell and trade used camera gear. I, and I love it because it makes the whole process feel so much safer and easier than dealing with random online marketplaces where you really don't know who you're selling to. And more importantly, the actual internal condition of the lens you might be buying. It's hard to assess that in a parking lot when you're having cash in hand selling on these again, online marketplaces. So here's the thing when you buy from MPB.

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You want that certainty and you want that professionalism and MPB delivers. And also if you've just got gear sitting around collecting dust, you can sell to MPB without even leaving your home. That's fantastic. You can get a quote in seconds. They arrange free insured shipping. And once your gear is inspected, they'll pay straight to your bank account within days. It's easy, simple, clean, and most importantly, no awkward meetups and haphazard, rapid.

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Court Whelan (40:24)
Okay, so I'm going to move on to a topic that is probably one of the more complex, but we've, we've already made it this far, right? And this is how to photograph wildlife and people together for your travel photography shots. So this is something that is kind of my bread and butter because I do a lot of travel photography for my, my travel company where I want to showcase where wildlife are at in the world. And I want to showcase how we're viewing them. It might be from vehicles, it might be hiking on the ground and photographing wildlife and people together.

I think is a great thing for the average photographer. That's not necessarily trying to sell their photos or anything, because it really gets your viewers to put themselves there in the moment. When you photograph people in a safari Jeep that are photographing tigers in front of you, when you show that to your friends and family or shared on social media or put on your website or your blog, you are showing your viewers where you were to take the photos that ensue. Like when you get the great full frame tiger shot.

That's the reference photo, that's the travel photo. the trick is how to get both in focus, right? Because that's the biggest trick is that no matter what, hopefully, wildlife and people are not that close to one another, right? I mean, they might be 30 feet away from one another, but they're not like two feet, away from one another. They shouldn't be. That might be the last photo you ever take if that's the case, right?

Um, so the trick is, is how do you get a super deep depth of field? Well, it's kind of interesting. What you need to do is obviously you've got to get the biggest F number, right? So if you can, if you're in the daylight F 11, F 16, F 22, that gives you that deep depth of field. then contrary to what you might think, instead of using your lens to zoom in, you actually need to zoom out. some of my favorite photos of this.

you have people sitting in a line, they might be 50, 60 yards away from grizzly bears. However, I step back as far as I can to create as much space between me and my foreground subject. So I move way far back and then I use my widest angle. actually shot a shot at a 24 millimeter with a group of people and then bears 60 yards away and they all appeared in crisp focus. Now the trick is, is I had to crop in a lot.

So it's kind of a couple of things that are really not intuitive is that you have to move away from your foreground, meaning the people, then you have to set your aperture all the way up to F22, that's kind of obvious, but then you have to zoom all the way out so you're not using.

that relationship between telephoto and aperture to create a shallower depth of field. You actually need to shoot as wide as you possibly can. then fortunately, unfortunately rely almost entirely on cropping. However, with our bigger, better digital sensor these days, I'm able to do this and I get some great shots all the time. Things like people and bears, whales and people and boats. You know, there's so many great times that we're with wildlife and you see these shots and you're wondering, how do I get it all in focus?

It's really quite challenging because if you focus on the person, the wildlife is going to be blurred. If you focus on the wildlife, the person's going to be blurred, but you want both together because they're both subjects in the scene. You're portraying people viewing wildlife. So if one of them's blurred, does, it gets pretty challenging.

Not saying it's easy to do this every single time, but those are the steps and it has worked for me quite a bit in the past.

Okay, so I love zoom compression and you've heard me talk about this before and

zoom compression is using a telephoto for what could be normally accomplished with a wide angle shot. So you're essentially zooming in instead of physically being closer instead of walking closer. You're putting yourself further away and then you're zooming in to make it look as if you were kind of right in front of these people or right in front of the subject right in front of the landscape. And it does wonders for travel photography because of that creativity and that intrigue that it imbues. So.

What I like to do to put this into practice is I usually put some sort of telephoto lens on my camera. It might be a 70 to 200, it might be a 70 to 300. Maybe all you have in this range is a 100 to 400. That's great, but plan on doing your street photography or your travel photography with this the whole day, or at least for the next hour as you're walking around and start to see what it does because it pulls the

person closer to normal distance, but then it brings the background closer to, and it fills the frame dramatically. And it's a really, really cool technique.

So you have to start to train your brain when you see a subject, it might be people or a vehicle or what have you, against a really interesting background. it could be a mountain, it could be a safari camp, it could be a temple, it could be a market, know, all these classic scenes.

If the subject is in front such that it would be really interesting to make the entire background, that texture of the, the, the rock wall and anger watt, or the, the chaos of the market. If you want that look, you should step back, use a telephoto and then zoom in.

Mix that with the idea that a 70 to 200 at F 2.8 has incredible background separation too. And I think you're going to get some really great travel photos this way. In addition, it's, it's very good for just kind of being low key and not being in people's faces, photographing them, because you can just be a little bit further away.

So a question I often get is whether it's better to take people photos during travel as candid shots or as posed shots. And I say yes and yes, both are great. Candid shots are probably better when they're really good candid shots compared to like a really good posed shot, but you're gonna get more really good posed shots. That's just the thing. It's hard to take really good candid photos.

unless you are doing nothing but taking photos of people all day every day like a wedding photographer. That's their job. They're experienced. They practice. They've done this for years and they take five thousand photos and a hundred of them turn out really well. So it's hard to take really good candid photos. However you can stack the deck in your favor a little bit. Like I was saying I think using some sort of telephoto is to your advantage. So that way you're you're not

changing behavior by being in front of someone, you know, if you're in front of someone with a camera, they're going to look at you. They're going to they're going to say, gosh, or they're going to smile. It's just not natural behavior. So being a little bit further away with some telephoto is a really, really great thing for candid photography. But probably the best thing that I've found over the years is actually setting my camera to burst mode. And this is like the high drive motor where you're taking multiple shots per second that you're holding the shutter down. And this does wonders. So

What happens is that when people, let's say you're photographing people at a sundowner, which is kind of like an African happy hour on the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, is people are, you know, they're cheersing, they're clinking their glasses, they're eating really nice snacks, and they're getting a little bit of champagne or a gin and tonic, and people are smiling. They're laughing, they're joking about the day, they're celebrating the successful viewing and photography. Great time to do this.

But if you just take one photo of that couple that's chatting it up with one another, the chance that they're both going to have a good smile or expression on their face at that one time is kind of slim to be totally honest.

need to shoot in burst mode in order to get as many possible photos.

as you can so you can pick and choose because there will be one that works out great or maybe three that worked out great. But if you're relying on simple single shots for your candid people photography, just not going to be as good as if you were to have multiples to choose from. And this goes for street scenes, this goes for marketplaces and all the other things we're talking about. Shooting on burst mode really levels up your ability to get that one shot that rises above all the rest.

But the reality is that with photography, posed shots are very, very good. They are almost as good as candid shots. I wouldn't steer away from them. wouldn't shy away from them. And the brilliance is that as photographers, we're capturing one moment in time. So it's not like videography where if you're taking a video of people posing for a shot, it looks pretty cheesy. It's like, okay, so these people are looking at the camera. What are they doing? now they're looking off to the left a little bit.

But if you are posing a photo, taking that single moment in time, and you say, tell a joke while you're taking the photo, and they burst out in laughter, and you're on a high drive motor, then all of a sudden you find some really organic laughter and smiles and cheers that capture that single moment in time. You don't have to necessarily tell a joke. Maybe if you hear someone else starting the joke, you can hang around a little bit and get ready for that shot. And as soon as people...

start to hear the punch line or sometimes even before they start to kind of roll their eyes in a coy sort of cute way. That can be a really great time to get a candid shot because again, we're just trying to capture that one moment and the one moment in a camera might actually look a little bit different than what that whole sequence of moments looked like in real life. So this is a big leg up we have in photography to be totally honest.

The other thing is if you are out and you're really trying to prioritize people photography in your travels, which, you know, again, I do a lot is that you do want to work with the people that are probably going to be the most into your photography, the people that play along, the people that pose ⁓ very, very willingly, the people that want to have photos taken of them. It's a little bit hard to suss that out at the get-go of being with a group of people.

but pretty quickly you'll figure out who likes to be photographed, who are the cheery ones when it comes to standing and posing and hearing my dumb jokes to get them to laugh, to take the shot. So it's just a note to say, work with the people that want to be worked with. And it's pretty quick to identify, but just a note to say,

you know, focus on the people that really are working with you there.

Okay, so I promise at the end we're gonna go over a couple really important things. One of how to go stealth mode when doing street photography and also how smartphone lessons apply to all these different things. So stealth mode is really an important thing if you plan on doing a lot of street photography. I always wanna underline that you definitely want to be respectful of local customs and traditions and beliefs around photography. I'm not advocating that you go take photos of people that 100 % don't want their photos taken.

but sometimes taking street can be some really, really great memories and they can be relatively innocuous if you do it right. The trick with stealth mode is you want to have your camera at your chest, like around your neck. So it's either the strap that your camera came with or you might buy a strap that's a little bit more comfortable and you want to start to get really good at carrying your camera around, holding it, but not looking through the viewfinder.

Okay, so this is really important. You have to be nonchalant. You gotta be really casual and make it look like you're not taking photos. Again, you gotta be respectful if it's a culture or a place or people that you don't think should be photographed or don't want to be photographed. I'm not saying do anything unethical, but if you're just walking down the street,

in New York, if you're walking down the street in, Ecuador and Quito, and you're just want to document how cool this place is. Like look at the buildings, look at the architecture, look at people going about their daily lives, walking to work and being busy and, selling flowers on the side of the street. And this guy's making waffles over here. ⁓ I think it's very, very okay to document that, but

it sometimes can be a little bit tricky if you constantly have the camera up to your eye in the viewfinder. So again, getting good at having a wide angle on, keeping at your chest and taking those photos and not reviewing them constantly, but just taking those photos as you walk down when you see something relatively unique, I think is really, really quite cool. Now,

the other thing you can do, which is less stealthy, but more polite, of course, is to ask people if you can take their photo. And I think that this is becoming less and less successful in today's day and age, you with smartphones and just the excessive amount of photographs people are taking. But going up to someone, even in a different language where neither of you speak the same tongue and you just hold up your camera, you nod in a very polite looking face and just kind of like a questioning nodding of the head.

And they'll quickly know what you're asking for. And if they don't want to be photographed, they'll shake their head. No. If they're okay with it, they'll say yes. If they're okay with it and want some money for it, they'll hold out their hand and you it's your choice. If you want to go down that road of paying for a photograph, it's becoming more and more common, especially, especially as you have people wearing traditional garb and looking like they're sort of being on show for photographs in various places. This is just getting quite common. Um, you should pay them. They do want to be paid.

If you don't want to pay them, just don't take their photograph. But a lot of times people still like getting photographs taken. These might be traditional cultures. They might be just interesting people you see on the sides of streets. And asking permission is huge. If you're going to be taking like a close portrait, especially if you're going be doing anything with these photos, like if you're going be posting them online, you definitely want to ask permission in those cases. But you'd be surprised how just showing the person the photo, how long of a way that goes is just

Hey, here's the photo I took. Look how good you look. This is so cool. sometimes people may have never seen a photo of themselves in certain countries. I think that's changing rapidly with smartphones, but nevertheless, it was a thing at one time. And then you can go a whole level further and you can get what Canon sells.

And it's a little selfie printer and the selfie is SELPHY, but it's pronounced just like selfie on a phone. And it's this really cool thing that I picked up and I've had just a ball with it. The selfie printer, it's essentially, it's a contained little printer about the size of like a graphing calculator or a small notebook. If you haven't used a graphing calculator, a little bit bigger than a smartphone. And this thing comes with me now on all my travels.

You can bring spare ink and spare paper and it prints out like a little two inch by three inch Polaroid. And I find that, you know, I don't even need to do anything with these photos that I take of people in other countries, but I love giving the photos to people at lights their day up. You know, they may have photos on their phone of themselves. They probably don't have something printed off. And this is a really cool thing.

It's a great way to interact and make new friends during travel. So yeah, it's that selfie printer I do highly recommend. I'll put a link in the show notes for the exact make and model.

Okay, so the last thing I told you I was gonna talk about is how to apply smartphones to all these different things. working with angles, that's one of the first thing I talked about. No brainer, you can 100 % use a smartphone there. In fact, it's probably even easier to use a smartphone. Oftentimes, I like to use the volume down button as my shutter instead of trying to tap on the screen. A lot of the newer iPhones and smartphones now have an actual dedicated shutter button.

but if you just tap volume down on anything prior to iPhone 16, it's gonna take the photo and that gives you that angle ability rather than having to see the screen and tap the button. You can not even see the screen. You can completely hold it over your head and hit that volume down and it'll take the shot. So that's a great one.

The unique light and unique times a day, unique color of light, 100 % with smartphones. This is completely doable. I'm often asked if I use any of the advanced like settings, you know, like the, the vivid versus the dramatic kind of coloration on an iPhone. And the reality is I just generally don't. just keep it on the normal setting. And then I do plan to edit a little bit. I plan to do a little bit of contrast, a little bit of shadows, maybe a little bit of exposure, maybe a little bit of the warmth and tint.

just to edit it a little bit, but I don't really have any preset settings. I just keep it on the normal kind of photo setting, but using light and working with light is just great with an iPhone. The key thing is that you want to understand how to properly expose your shots or perhaps better put, you need to learn how to change the exposure of your shots. So the trick here is that when you see a scene and you think the lighting could be

better meaning it could be darker or could be lighter to suit your needs of what the ending photo should look like. Do you want a little bit more ominous? Do you want it to be a little bit more high key and more visible? You just tap on the screen where you want it to focus and then you drag your finger up or drag your finger down as you drag it up. It lightens in very, very small increments, but it does so. So if I want to dramatically brighten something, I usually have to swipe up.

two or three times to really get it to brighten or if I want to dramatically darken again, two or three drags down the screen. But the key thing is after I've tapped on the screen for focus that locks in focus, then I can change exposure. And this is a really powerful tool for smartphones. I don't, still don't think a lot of people use it, but you know, cameras just don't get exposure right all the time. You need to intervene. You need to do something to adjust exposure. And by swiping one way you lighten

and swiping the next way, you darken and you can get some really, really great results.

for shutter speeds, you'd really don't have to think about the upper end of that spectrum. You don't have to think about how fast you're shooting to freeze hand movement. They have stabilizers in them. They're going to shoot fast enough unless you're in really, really darn low light, in which case.

Frankly, I don't even worry about my smartphone. That's the drawback is that it doesn't do great in low light. It takes photos in low light, but I'm a little bit of a stickler for higher quality. So I'm not using my smartphone for low light stuff. However, if I do want a slow shutter speed, there's a really cool trick. What you can do is if you shoot on live mode, and this is for iPhone specifically, sorry for ⁓ Android and Google users out there, but on an iPhone, if you shoot on live mode, and then once you take the shot,

of something moving. So it's got to be like a waterfall. It's got to be street traffic. It's got to be you in that zooming, tuk tuk or motorcycle down the road. You go back in and view the photo. There's going to be a little dropdown menu that says live at the top left. You hit that and all of a sudden you're going to see an option that says long exposure. You hit long exposure and voila, after a couple of seconds of processing,

your photo turns in this beautiful slow shutter shot.

For apertures, similar. You don't need to worry about the upper end of apertures, like the deep depth of field. By its very nature, the small sensor of iPhones makes everything in really crisp focus. That's kind of a downside if you do want shallow depth of field, but let me stick on that deep depth of field for a moment. So not only do I have a lot of shots that I take in my travel photography where I do want everything in focus, but going back to that wildlife in people shot.

Sometimes I put my big camera away and only shoot those on an iPhone because again that small sensor size gives you a Dramatically deeper depth of field where you don't have to even try you can just get people and wildlife that are actually quite far away from one another Both in good focus. This is again a big superpower of smartphones So when you want to photograph things that have or need deep depths of field

especially people in wildlife, the smartphone is a great choice. If you wanna go for that shallow depth of field, that's when you're gonna need to switch over to portrait mode, okay? Plain and simple. You're gonna notice for most of these phones is that once you go to portrait, there's gonna be a little button in the upper left-hand corner that says F slash, and who knows where it's set to by default, usually like F2 or F2.8. You can actually, on most modern phones, get that all the way down to F1.4, and it is dramatically shallow.

I think it's a little bit fakily shallow to be totally honest. I don't typically go below F 2.0 or F 2.8, but nevertheless it forces your camera into that really shallow depth of field mode. And even though it says portrait, I don't use it only for people portraits. I use it for flower shots. I use it for macro shots. I use it for market shots. It's just a great way to force your camera into that shallow depth of field. Like we talked about with apertures.

So when it comes to candid and pose shots, the same rules apply of, I think it's, great to use a little bit of telephoto power. I typically have my camera on two times or three times zoom for those sort of candid shots across the street, or if I'm away from the group and trying to not intervene and just kind of photograph from afar, I don't typically go all the way to my maximum zoom. Like I have a lens in my iPhone that goes to five times. I just find that it's either a too shaky handheld or B the quality just

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it just doesn't look nearly as good as the two times. So I tend to stick with the two times just to give me a little bit of reach in there, but I don't go much beyond that.

And then for burst mode to take multiple photos at once, you typically just hit volume up. Now I know on some new iPhones, you have to go into your your camera settings menu to enable that. But once you just toggle that little button that says volume up for burst mode, then all of a sudden, every time you want to take a lot of shots on one sequence, you can just hit up and it takes a ton of shots, maybe too many. Or you just stick with shooting on live mode. And then when you go back and edit your photo in live mode, you can actually

swipe and scrub what we call kind of left to right along this sequence of shots because live mode is basically recording, I don't know, a half a second or a second of ⁓ photos the whole time. So if you're trying to find that one photo to rule them all, the one photo of the better expressions, just photographing on live mode is enough, but know that you also have that high drive mode or that burst mode with volume up.

And then the final thing here, you know, going stealth mode, doing street photography, it's a great tool for that. People are used to seeing phones. They're, less worried that you're a professional photographer trying to document them and, they're going to wind up on some cover page of a news story. So smartphones are great for that. You can go stealth mode for those too.

So I do recommend smartphones for street photography. This is the one time that I might be getting into different sort of camera modes where I might

put it on black and white for an entire day. I really like the high contrast black and white that iPhones have. I also like the dramatic tones. It gives a little more blue and teal and just instantly creates a different vibe. It's nothing that's going to go on my wall. It's nothing that's going to be professionally published or anything. But as far as using iPhones for for general travel photography, super fun for that sort of stuff.

All right, and there you have it. So yeah, that was a heck of a deep dive. I must say we covered a lot in travel photography 101 here. If you, if you like this podcast, you know, consider sharing, consider subscribing, or I think they call it following these days on the major platforms like Apple podcasts and Spotify, but it does more than, know, to help me grow this podcast and get this word out to more folks. So I would love if you were to subscribe, share with a friend.

And also while you're at it, if you want more photo resources, more travel resources and conservation resources, I've got a YouTube channel that I'm working on. it's just youtube.com slash at court whelan That's just at all one word. C-O-U-R-T-W-H-E-L-A-N. And last but not least, if you'd like to get in touch with me, pop on over to my website, just www.courtwhelan.com. And I'd love to hear from you. Well, once again, thanks so much for.

Tune in today, hope you learned something and I hope wherever you're gonna use this around the world, you get some great shots. I know you will. Thanks folks.