snapshot

when you're on vacation you want to take images that are able to showcase not only what you're experiencing but are able to show it in such a beautiful way that they are more than snapshots that they're these memorable photos that you want to frame you want to share with people and that don't just look like everybody's vacation photos so that's what we're going to be talking about the first thing i'm going to say goes against everything i'm telling you but you need to take the snapshot i know in my own photography journey i was so stressed out with taking the photos that were better than a snapshot the creative composition the creative use of light that i ended up not taking the snapshots because i i didn't know how to make them amazing and and the thing is is as the people who take photos on vacation and of our lives sometimes you just need to take the snapshot sometimes you just have to take the photo of you and your family standing in front of something and that is perfectly fine and i want to encourage you to do that i do it myself on vacation but i challenge you is after you take the snapshot figure out a way to take the same shot but an interesting way and for me a lot of times sometimes that means maybe obviously i'm not in the photo or i have my children do something a little bit different so this image obviously was a snapshot we were in front of this amazing castle and so i actually took this shot before i rounded everybody up to take the family shot and that is another thing i would encourage you to do is maybe play around and get the shot that you want and then pull everybody in for the you know more traditional snapshot of the photo a lot of times in my own family once we do the snapshot type photo then they're ready to move on to the next thing and so i encourage you to just play around and i'm going to share some things in this video to help you take these photos but again i do want to encourage you to take the snapshot so again here we are the image of my children just standing in front of the castle at disney world and then the other photo that is actually framed in my house is the one them looking at the castle i love that you can see their names on the hat i love that you can just imagine what their faces look like as they are looking at this castle and you can't really get that same shot and the same expressions when the when your kids are you know just standing there smiling and looking at you from in front of the castle so when you are shooting out on vacation we want to use those photos to tell the story of our vacation and so we want to really drive home that you should shoot from at least three different um angles give yourself three different options for the types of photos that you're taking and this is something if you've ever listened to anything by me i really do stress this a lot but i found that what can be really hard is when you're photographing a building or something that is you know something that you you come to visit but it's a little bit of a challenge so here's a photo of westminster abbey i really love to look up and look down and look around and try to find different angles that you don't see very often obviously this is not the most original angle you've ever seen of westminster and really honestly it's hard to find those these days if you go on instagram and type in a hashtag with the location you're going you're going to see a ton of photos and a lot of them are taken from the same angle so you kind of just have to try new things so again i always like to look up so that was one shot and then these were the other two as i was looking up i noticed that there was just such really cool intricate work on the on the entryway and so i photographed that and then i also love the repetition of the way that they they made the side of the building and so i photographed this as well another example include showing your children is uh you know we were on a vacation with friends and we were doing s'mores and so just getting those different angles coming in from behind her to show that we had to do s'mores on this grill because we didn't have a fire pet and then her eating this more with that marshmallow just the string of marshmallow on her face and then my third option was getting down on my other daughter's level as she ate her s'more as well so it really is just about changing your position again you'll notice in these two photos i did not ask her to do anything in these images and so again it's that kind of idea of keeping them from being frustrated with me in the camera they're just doing what they're doing and i'm observing it another example at the beach we had my daughter playing in the sand and then i walked really far back and i got this shot of us this is towards the end of the day obviously it's gonna be really hard to get a shot like this with all this empty space all this negative space uh when you're at the beach and there's people everywhere but i love that at the end of the day we kind of everyone had pretty much left and we were kind of left with the beach ourself and so i kind of liked that idea of capturing what it looked like when we went to the beach and then after i got that shot i just turned and i noticed that i really loved the texture of um the grass with the sand and the way that the sky was looking you can see obviously why everyone had laughed a storm was coming but again those are just three different shots help tell the story of our vacation here's another example and this one these are a little bit different because each one of these tells such a different story of the exact same thing so the image on the left tells the story of a tourist taking a photo of um this beautiful cathedral in paris and then the other one i did include the police truck in there on purpose and the reason i did that is we were actually in paris uh when uh several years ago when there was a bombing at the brussels train station and because of that everything in europe kind of escalated their security and so when we were around this cathedral there were police heavily guarded everywhere and i wanted to remember that part of our vacation then i took this shot again all of these were taken within a matter of minutes of each other and they all tell a very different story and although i couldn't really change up my angles so much for this shot i was able to use different elements to create this different story and you i don't know if you've noticed but a lot of my images i do like to incorporate the trees in them i know sometimes people try to figure out ways to get the trees out of the photo but i like that extra texture of that tree coming in from the upper left-hand corner to show that there's just depth that i'm not right in front of this cathedral the eiffel tower right when you go to paris you have to take pictures of the eiffel tower and a lot of people have that picture of your stand bomb in the eiffel tower looking up so i was trying to figure out how can i take a picture of the eiffel tower that is a little bit different again i'm sure this shot has been taken it's not like i've come up with the most um unique no one has ever taken this shot but it's just a little bit different and so i loved uh the bottom of the eiffel tower with all the landscaping i thought was really cool and then i actually had and i do this sometimes i don't do this all the time but sometimes i will look up the hashtag of the thing that we're going to to kind of get some ideas the problem with that is sometimes i get what i see stuck in my head and that's definitely not what i'm going for because i don't want to imitate or i don't want to do the exact same photo i don't want to imitate it i want to be inspired by what i see and so i had looked up the eiffel tower and i had noticed that someone had taken a picture with some pink flowers in it but i had looked around we were walking around the avatar nothing was blooming yet but i knew that i was like i just i think you know i think this photo is current i want to find it and we walked around for a bit and sure enough i found the one tree in bloom it gives the idea that all the trees around the eiffel tower are in bloom but if you look closely you can see that a lot of the other trees have yet to even get leaves on them so i found the one tree in bloom and i just really played around with the composition to incorporate those flowers in with the eiffel tower and actually this is a photo i have framed in my house because i just love how it turned out when you're on vacation especially if you're going somewhere that you've never been a lot of times you are going to have things under construction and when we went to rome the coliseum was under construction and that made me so sad because this was not the photo that i had in mind there's nothing you can do about that right this is it that is what it looked like it is what it is and so because i have drilled into my head i do this whether i'm on vacation or at home that i'm always trying different angles i'm always trying to tell the story of what i see in different ways i was able to use my creativity and i captured this shot right here and so you cannot tell that there is construction going on but it's still a really cool shot of the coliseum and it works and so again it's one of those things that it's almost like a muscle you need to build up to to remind yourself that it's not enough just to pick up your camera and snap what you see that you really need to challenge yourself to keep pushing and trying new angles and sometimes they're going to work and sometimes they won't but if i hadn't done this then when we went there i might have just stopped at this photo and felt frustrated and so i don't want that to happen to you guys i always encourage people to turn around a lot of times when we are going someplace especially touristy type places where you know you're supposed to be looking at something you're taking all those photos and sometimes the thing behind you is a really cool shot and so this actually was taken when i was taking pictures of westminster and i i know that that rule and so i always try to challenge myself to turn around sometimes you guys listen there is nothing to photograph but sometimes there is and so i turned around and i actually really love this shot parliament big ben i've got a red devil decker bus the london eye there's even a um tube sign which i love photographing the signs of the countries that we are in especially street signs and those kind of things and so i really like the story that this one tells and i wouldn't have gotten it if i hadn't turned around because i had already been over to big ben and photographed it i'd already taken this shot so you would have thought i might have stopped there what i want to encourage you to do is use the environmental elements to take your image to the next level and so we were photographing these historic landmarks and we were trying to shoot through this gate actually and then i thought you know what i'm just gonna embrace the gate and have it frame this and i love it like this is one of my besides the other one this is one of my favorite photos from that trip again here we are on the pearl harbor memorial and you're walking through and i looked up and i just loved the way that this framed the american flag and photographing the american flag is something that i love doing as a military family anytime i see it i typically stop and take a picture of it i also typically stop and try to take pictures of flags in other countries because it's again just one of those things that's just different than what you're used to seeing if you live in the united states so i love to incorporate flags in my photos and so i was able to look up and you can see that it was framed so nicely i just i i had to snap this image this was a photo when we were in edinburgh and there was a protest going on outside which was the most peaceful protest what i loved is we were actually in the edinburgh castle and walking around looking at things and when i looked out the window and they had opened the window and you could see this protest going on and so i again it's one of those things i'm using these elements around me to kind of tell this story and show it in a different way i love using framing in my photography you'll see that a lot uh with our vacation photos and it doesn't always have to be a very obvious uh frame that you know like through the window or something like that sometimes it's framing like this through the door we found these um fun phone booths in london and my daughter asked if she could get in them and as she was going in them you can see that is such a bright day and all my photos are she's having a really hard time with them because we were out at noon there wasn't a lot of open shade and so when she popped in you can see that she was in some nice shade and i love that i was able to frame her in there kind of getting in the photo booth this photo i realized everyone probably this is something i want to tell you about your photos in general you may love a photo and everyone else may not love it as well i was actually showing my husband all these photos before i um we hopped on this and i said i love this photo from the vatican and he was like oh yeah i mean it's fine but i think it's so cool that these nuns are sitting there having their lunch it was super crowded but i was able to use the fountain and this other girl to the left and kind of frame them so that they are the showcase of this image and so i just want to say that not only use these elements obviously like i said but you are allowed to love photos that other people may not love as much here's another shot of not a traditional framing we one thing we realized after living here in england for a bit is a lot of towns here take a claim to some kind of harry potter uh thing and so but in edinburgh they told me a hundred percent that the smaller castle looking thing on the bottom uh right hand side of the photo is the inspiration for hogwarts and so when we were on the other side of the town i thought it was so cool the way that it was framed by this photo with these british flags which again i'm always on the lookout um for flags the union jack and i just love that it just kind of framed it and so it's you know the sun is on the flag but you can also see hogwarts or the inspiration i should say uh symmetry is something to be looking for i don't see symmetry a lot um just my eye i'm still trying to train myself to do it i i see framing a lot i see lines a lot uh but this is a really cool area and i just loved the way that the cathedral was framed but then actually there's a lot of nice symmetry as well within these buildings and you can find that a lot in architecture if you're looking for it i always suggest look for repetition and texture so again these are just things that i kind of keep in the back of my mind when we're traveling and so we were uh this is in london these cute little uh houses and i just love the repetition as well as the color of them and i love that there's people in them walking and riding their bike i know sometimes we're going to talk about crowds and people in your photos in another video and i know that sometimes we're tempted to wait until everyone is out of the photo to take it but sometimes you need those people to tell the story that this is an actual street where people live and their life is is happening and so i love that it's not there's not so many people that it's lost but it's enough people to help tell the story and here's an example of the repetition this was the uh american cemetery in luxembourg for the uh soldiers in world war ii and i loved one one it's amazing if you ever get there to visit but i love the repetition of the crosses and so you know after walking around and you know trying to figure out a way of how can i capture this so that we can remember just how vast it was i mean it's it's not even all captured in this photo and so that was one thing that i was really looking for when i took this shot again i like to look up like i said when i travel so i look up and i notice the repetition of the roofs of this building i thought they were very cool and unique not something you see a lot in in the united states and and that's something else that i like to think about when we're traveling uh is to find things that are different than what i'm used to seeing and photograph them so that we can remember them and again the repetition so one of the things i like to do is i like to think about what do i want to photograph when i go to this new place and so sometimes it's like oh i really want to capture a photo of this or i really want to capture photos and again that's something that i talked about in the other video share those things with your family and so i knew when we went to hawaii i wanted to capture a photo of surfboards so as we were walking around we walked to dinner one night we found these and i just had to stop i loved the repetition of the uh surfboards i loved that the the color of with the blue and the green the palm trees and then on the other image uh this is at the air force academy and again just the repetition of the ceiling and the lines and the rows and oh i love lines you guys and so i stood back you can see my husband and my children are in this photo and so i stood at the back of the cathedral to try and just again capture how grand it is that's that's really hard sometimes for us to capture with our camera and so when you come upon those things you want to do the best you can to kind of show just how big it is and that was another reason i wanted my children in the photo because you can see just how amazing this is when you see that there's actually the size of people here are some examples of texture when we were in taking the tube we had stopped at notting hill and when i saw this like metal locker bend thing i just had to stop because the red from the tube sign and the red from that locker band was just so amazing and the texture with the paint and the bricks oh it was just like a photographer heaven which i'm sure all the people walking around the tube station just thought we were crazy but those are the kind of things you're looking for is just that texture because it adds a lot of depth to your photo and the other photo on the right is uh when we were walking around bruce and it was dreary and cold and i was trying to figure out a way to capture that uh and and show the uniqueness of this city that you know you can see all the trees have lights on them and it's just this fun little cobblestone road and so i got down really low to the ground and and took that photo as well because i wanted that to be the subject i love the texture of with the rain and the cobblestone plants and bricks make amazing texture and so when i find those together it's kind of like a dream and so on the left is uh sandringham it's where the royal family spends christmas and we walked around and i just loved i mean it's a brick estate it's gorgeous but they had all these really cool plants growing up the walls and so there's just again that depth and texture and then the image on the right is actually in savannah and i i loved the texture of the brick with again the the iv growing up it this i have framed in my house whenever we go on vacation i always try to find one photo that i want to frame from our trip and typically it does not include anyone from our family in it i actually have a wall in my living room of vacation photos and i think only a couple of them have my kids in them because i i'm really drawn sometimes to the photo that tells a little bit more of the place we visited and i and i don't put that expectation on myself to save my child or my family has to be in that photo as well when we were in savannah we found this amazing texture wall in front of that had the most amazing light in it and you better believe that when i find that kind of stuff we put people in front of it and so again you can just tell the background all this brick and the light so these are the kind of things you're looking for and when you find them and the light and the texture come together please put your children in front of it put somebody in front of it because they just make such cool photos like i said brick i'm really drawn to i love the lines and the repetition and the texture and we were having ice cream and my daughter had made a huge mess so i wanted to photograph that and because honestly sometimes you just have to give up and say this is what it is and so i put her in front of this brick wall and just had her stand there so that i could capture this moment you want to look at things differently when you're traveling so use a lot of what i talked about where you're using the environment you're looking for repetition but just think about things differently if you see people photographing something just think to yourself how can i photograph that same thing but a little differently and so when we were walking around london i was walking with other photographers which is always really fun and we were really drawn in by these uh by the bread in the window they had such great texture with the flower and it was just a very cool shot but i liked the idea of including that with the cafe and that there's people in them and the spread is in the window and so again another shot that i have that i framed from my trip because this photo i felt like really showcased our time framing is a big thing for me that i've already talked about but figuring out ways to include everyone in your vacation in a photo in a different way is is fun and challenging and so this photo right here we had gone on a sailing trip and the bvi's with our friends and i had hopped down in the the cabin of the sailboat and i looked up and this truly i feel like we are very lucky when we can capture a photo that tells the story of the whole trip and so you can just see how relaxed my husband is you can see our friends are in the photo although it's not just like a snapshot of everybody smiling and so the only thing that would have been better is if i'd set my camera up somehow and i was able to be in this shot as well and again using lines leading lines is a really great compositional guide to play around with when you're on vacation but we are at a airplane museum and i wanted to capture my children looking at this and my husband loving teaching the children about it and so i kind of played around with my different angles but i love this one because i stepped really far back and i used the lines of this railing to draw the viewer end to them but also the airplanes are still in the photo so you can see what they're looking at and what's happening sunburst so we talked about this a little bit uh in the q a a video uh the last q a video but i feel like this is one of those things that just elevates your photo adding a sunburst or starburst takes your photo to the next level so in order to do that you want to raise your aperture number and so take it as high as you want but i would say at least to 14 if not higher and that will help you get those rays of sun you need something to partially block the sun you're not going to get the same look with just the sun in the sky coming through a cloud or by itself it needs to be blocked by a building or a tree or just something and so again this is something that can be photographed almost at any time of day and so it often means you're having to manipulate where you are the level that you're standing at to create this and so sometimes i have to bend weight down and so you just kind of keep looking around until you actually see the sun with the rays coming through and then you know you've found the right angle so here are just a couple examples you can see these have really strong race coming from the sun this is a garden of the gods and then just a fun little building in edinburgh and this is uh the back actually of notre dame i've taken pictures of the front and i just want to walk around and see what else we could find you can see again i have a tree in this photo again i love that layering that texture to add to my images and then i really played around with this one to try and see if i could get the the sunburst to come from behind the cathedral look for unexpected details or again it really all just keeps coming back to how can you tell the story differently and so in paris we had spent some time at the luxembourg garden which if you ever get to paris and can go there please do that was our favorite place to just sit and relax and it was just a fun place to photograph and hang out and so they had these beautiful flowers around the ground i had already taken a photo of the the you know vast building and and the beautifulness of it but i just didn't feel like i had captured what it was yet and so i just focused in on these flowers uh had the lines in the photo and then snapped this while we were there and walking around i was i'm always looking for different ways to take photos and and looking for those little details to tell the story and we saw this uh this man just pull up a chair and sit down and i i just found it so amazing that he's just sitting there reading his paper and there's the eiffel tower which i mean as an american that's just amazing to me and so but this is his life and so a lot of times on vacation i like to photograph the life of the people who live there and in savannah this fountain is one of the most photographed uh things in savannah it's uh very beautiful and when we were there these flowers were blooming and so we had taken pictures of the fountain in different ways but again i really like to focus in on the details of something to tell the story of what i'm seeing so instead of focusing on the fountain on this one i decided to focus in on the flowers and the fountain is still in the photo so it's still a part of it but it's not necessarily the subject at disney all the little mickey ears are super fun so if that's something that you like to photograph that's a really good way to kind of look around and look for things but i loved just the color of the the balloons and how playful they were and you know you're at disney with your kids and balloons are very childlike and so i actually sat down on the curb to get this shot uh because i wanted uh less crowd in the photo and i just wanted the focus to be on these balloons and against that idea of looking up and changing how you see things we were walking across the bridge and i looked up and i just loved all of the lines and it's just it's a different way to photograph a bridge right so again not something i'm necessarily going to frame but it helps tell the story when i put all my photos in my photo book i always like to tell people to think of something that you want to photograph while you are on vacation so like i said earlier you know if you're going hawaii you know you want to capture some surfboards right if you're going to parish you know you want to photograph the eiffel tower but try and think of something as like a scavenger hunt for yourself and when you see it you grab a photo of it so sometimes for me that's doors i find doorways super fascinating especially in other countries and so i'll stop and i love the texture of them and if it's something that i find really interesting i'll grab a photo of it another thing i like to photograph are the uh street signs uh sometimes it's just a simple one like this fish and chips one which was just again that idea we're in england it's fish and chips and then sometimes i really love the funny quirky ones and so the white heart is actually the oldest pub in edinburgh and it had the sign that said husband's daycare um do you need time to yourself do you want to go shopping drop off your husband with us i just thought it was a fun little clever thing so again these are just a couple of things i'm always on the lookout for uh doors street signs or even flags and so think about that when you're traveling like if you go to disney maybe your challenge is you're gonna photograph all the different disney ear things that could be the food the balloons different things on rides the mickey ears that you see there's just a lot of different ways to incorporate something like that

2021-04-30 20:49

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