Better Travel Photos With the Light in the Morning and Late Afternoon

Photography Tips  •  Travel Photography

You probably know the yellow “National Geographic” magazine. If you browse through its colorful pages you can see that many of the pictures are taken in the low, warm light of mornings and late afternoons or evenings.

The photographers of National Geographic are among the best we have. You can easily mimic this practice and create much more interesting pictures than most people bring home from travels.

The low light will model the landscape you see for your eyes, so for example the plough furrows or differences in topography and texture are highlighted.

As a traveling photographer I know, that even on a photographic mission time is limited and your circumstances are often less that optimal.

I can recommend you to take the pictures you must take during the day. And then take a walk around your hotel or campground during the last two hrs. before sunset and shoot additional pictures in this special light. Try to do the same next morning before breakfast. In that way you will combine the best possibilities.

With a digital camera you can easily delete the less successful pictures later.

Low light gives long shadows, so be careful with these. Normally you should not expect parts of a picture to show up properly in both strong shadows and in full sunlight.

If your digital camera allows the raw format you will keep more details in shadows to work with in Photoshop later if you choose the raw format instead of the usual jpeg compression. But it depends on how much you like to optimize your pictures at home in a picture editor program.

In practice you should avoid the heavy shadows. When you shoot your photos in cities the big buildings are among the difficult objects. So take them from an angle without the big shadows, if possible.

If you follow these instructions I am sure that the appeal of your travel pictures will increase.

Have good travels and enjoy your travel photography during the trip as well as afterwards.

Soren Breiting is a traveling stock photographer. See examples of Soren’s travel pictures in his photo galleries at A-Z Fotos, http://www.azFOTOS.com and read about pictures and marketing in Soren’s ezine ‘Stock Photo News’ at http://www.StockPhotoNews.com