Travel Photography. How to Get the Most Out of Lightweight Camera Gear

The Photographer’s Bag

If you don’t want the inconvenience of a heavily loaded bag, do your best with just the essentials, but choose them carefully. The basic equipment includes a camera body and a lens, at least one spare battery, and the battery charger.

Regarding the camera body, today the market offers a wide range of solutions. It’s no longer necessary to buy a full-frame camera to have large file sizes or good high ISO noise management. However, these are the two factors to consider: if you can’t get close enough to the subject you’re framing, being able to crop the image in post-production will come in handy. If you’re shooting in low-light conditions, being able to raise the ISO to at least 6400 without the noise ruining the file is essential. Your camera body will accompany you for several years, so allocate a fair portion of your budget to it.

As for lenses, versatility is the secret when traveling. You’ll constantly be moving to unfamiliar places, and it’s impossible to predict what will catch your eye. You need to be vigilant and ready. Don’t rely on being able to change lenses: some events happen quickly and unexpectedly, so opt for an all-purpose zoom lens. If I had a limited budget, I would definitely go for a 24-105mm lens, which allows you to capture all types of photographs, from landscapes to portraits, as well as distant details. If I had the opportunity to buy a second lens, I would focus on brightness: a 50mm or 35mm prime lens to use when the evening comes, with minimal additional weight in your bag.

Make the most of what you have

Once you have prepared your bag and boarded your plane, you won’t have time for second thoughts. If you’re a perfectionist like me, you might doubt whether you made the wisest choice, but remember that the biggest limitation you’ll encounter is not in your equipment, but rather in the lack of originality and creativity.

What kind of reportage are you creating? Do you want to depict the places you’ll visit with formal rigor or a more liberated emotion? Make a checklist of all the photos you want to take and start imagining under what lighting conditions and at what distance from the subject you could capture them. In any case, regardless of your equipment, you’ll discover that you have many more possibilities than limitations.

Make the most of the midday hours

The best moments to capture breathtaking images are traditionally at dawn and sunset. The light is soft, warm, and strikes objects from the side, casting long shadows on the ground. There are photographers who exclusively shoot during these times. However, when traveling, you’ll have to learn to make the most of the midday hours because you won’t always be visiting your destinations at dawn or sunset. Moreover, the brightest hours are precisely when your mid-range zoom lens works best. To capture interesting shots, it’s often enough to properly isolate the subject and play with exposure compensation. Yes, this is one of the secrets I ignored as a kid. If you don’t think in terms of exposure compensation, you’ll never get the most out of your camera. When the sun is intense, there’s such a difference in brightness between the well-lit areas and the shadows that it’s impossible to avoid burning out some areas or making others too dark. No dynamic range can solve this, so you have to choose what matters most to you.

For portraits, for example, you can isolate the subject from the context using a long focal length and, depending on the case, you can underexpose/overexpose. You can achieve a high key or low key effect with a significant dramatic impact.

I used this technique in Ethiopia while visiting the Afar village of Asso Bole to photograph a young woman who was watching me hidden in the shadow of her hut. A ray of sunlight adorned her cheek. I underexposed the shot by over one stop, making the background very dark. The girl seems to emerge from the darkness, and her expression gains significant dramatic depth. Asso Bole is a village lost in the Danakil Desert and is extremely difficult to reach. It is where the fossil remains of the Australopithecus Lucy, one of humanity’s ancestors, were found. The photo captures the resilience of this people who have inhabited the desert since the dawn of time.

On the contrary, in Varanasi, I overexposed the shot of a young woman selling souvenirs to pilgrims. It was a foggy morning, the sky in the background was hazy and gray, and my subject was backlit. A center-weighted average exposure would have darkened her face, but a slight overexposure solved the issue, and the portrait appears as if it were taken in a studio setting.

In landscapes, when the sun is high in the sky, you’ll need to manage flat and pronounced shadows, overly bright skies, and saturated colors. In this case, underexpose to ensure that you don’t blow out the blue of the sky, and then adjust contrast and exposure in post-production. If you have a tripod available, take three shots with different exposures and blend them to create an HDR image. You may not capture the atmosphere of a sunset, but you might be surprised by the result. In Mangystau, I reached the peak of the Bozzhira Canyon, the most stunning place in the Kazakh desert, with the sun directly overhead. The light was so intense that I could barely look through the viewfinder. Yet, as long as you avoid shooting directly into the sun, you can still capture pleasing photos.

During my stay in Varanasi last December, I encountered opposite lighting conditions. The sun rarely made an appearance. A thick blanket of fog enveloped the outlines of the ghats. At first, I was disappointed because India is known for its vibrant colors, and I was hoping for a glimpse of sunlight to make them pop. However, in hindsight, I couldn’t have asked for a better situation to give magic and mystery to my shots, which portray an unusual and evocative Varanasi.