David Lazar wrote a great piece on How to Photograph People When You Travel. Here’s a little blurb from his post:
“People often tell me that they find it difficult to take good portrait photos when they travel. Approaching strangers and asking to photograph them, usually with a language barrier, can be a daunting prospect. And how do you take a portrait that is creative and meaningful rather than just a simple snapshot of the person? I have developed approaches and techniques over the years to help become confident as a travel portrait photographer.
1. Encounter people that you meet while exploring a place and ask to take their photo, usually after an initial interaction. This is how I’ve taken the majority of my travel portraits.
2. Organise a shoot by paying ‘models’ for their time which involves some kind of meeting and prior planning. I’ve done this on a few occasions, such as shooting the Masai in Kenya, the fishermen at Inle Lake in Myanmar, and some of the Amazon portraits in Brazil.
3. Shoot without any interaction with the person in a documentary/reportage style. Perhaps the most common approach, but it is hard to capture engaging facial expressions and there’s little control over the elements of the scene, which is why very few of my portraits are taken like this.”
This is definitely something I’d love to work on and it doesn’t even need to be when I go on vacation. I will definitely have to keep this all in mind the next time I leave the country or leave the house with my camera.
PS. I love it when photographers describe their whole photo taking process. I also like the fact that David shows a comparison shot of what the photo looked like prior to and after post-processing (something I DEFINITELY want to learn more about). Here’s another link to one of his stories about how he got a photo of a Girl with Green Eyes in Bangladesh.
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