This article appeared in April issue of Terrascape, a travel magazine for which I am an editorial consultant and also write a column on photography.

Because they are full of life and usually active, children make great subjects for photography. Their lively company makes the whole activity of photographing them a pleasure. Similar to any genre of photography, getting familiar with the subject, looking for the right composition and right moment play an important role in photographing children too.

Make friends with kids. It is easier to shoot children whom you know well. It could be your own son, niece or a friend’s daughter. Familiar children make good learning subjects, since they are at ease with you. Even when you are shooting outside, it is important to talk to them and make them comfortable with you. Take plenty of trial images and make them get used to the camera. Eventually they will get used to the camera and continue doing whatever they were up to. When they stop being camera-conscious and remain natural, you are likely to get your best photographs.

Catch them in playing. Look for small group of children involved in a game. When they are playing, they are usually completely immersed in their game and are hardly bothered about anything else, allowing you capture their natural expressions. But make sure you are at a distance and your presence doesn’t disturb them.

Catch them smiling. Children usually have a natural, qualm-free and photogenic smile, even when they have broken teeth. A smile or laughter without any inhibitions makes the photographs look very lively. Again, talk to them, amuse them and get them to smile. Show them their photographs on the LCD that could make them happy. Or catch them smiling when they are playing, when they see something interesting or when they are in a group of their own kind.

Wait for the right moment. Keep your camera ready and wait for the right moment, like a good smile (or even a frown), an intimate moment or an expression of curiosity that you can frequently see in a kid. When you do see it, it is important to be ready to shoot or you may miss the moment. Have your camera aimed and ready. Wait as long as it is necessary; take your time and never be in a hurry to get a picture. Best shots will take time and effort, but they are worth it.

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+ Buy prints of these and other images of India Travel Blog

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When you put together a sequence of pictures, they effectively tell a story far more quickly and easily than what words can do. More often than not, we focus on the objects and expressions in front of us and not think about getting behind the scene. You may have bought good-looking pots from a potter’s shop several times, but have you ever thought of finding out how they make these pots? After you take pictures of beautiful pots at display, it would be worthwhile visiting their backyard and make images of a pile of mud slowly taking a definite shape. When you come back and put together a few good images from each part of the process—from kneading the clay to giving it a final shape—they can tell a story so effectively that you have need very few words to go with the images.

The costumes for a Kathakali show, unpacked for the night’s performance

Choose subjects that interest you. It is not easy to create a story on every topic. Choose a subject with which you can associate and enjoy spending time to understand and learn. Creating a photo sequence requires studying the subject and knowing it well to ensure that every aspect of the story is covered. So it is easier to work on a topic that naturally interests you.

In the initial stages of getting ready, the artist applies make up on his own

Spend time with your subject. Start your work by leaving the camera at home! Take time to understand every aspect of the story you are about to capture. It helps to create a story in your mind before you are ready to shoot and tell your picture-story to everyone.

They are helped by make up artists in the next stage

Be trigger happy. Even with careful planning and study, it is never easy to conceive every image that will become a part of the final story. Keep clicking and never miss an opportunity to shoot every moment. Professional photographers often take hundreds of photographs to make a story in just half a dozen images.

While some are being helped with their make-up, others relax as they await their turn

Not everything is a story. A sequence of related images may not always make a story. Putting together five good images of an animal, a monument or any such entity will not make a chronological sequence that speaks of itself. A surprisingly simple guideline helps here: a story is something that has a definite beginning and an end and a series of events in the middle that help achieve the end. Also see if the events have visually compelling aspects (like a potter turning the wheel) suitable for making a photo story.

The costume

IMAGES

This image sequence was shot during a Kathakali performance. The images not just show the action on stage, but also depict all the work that happens behind the stage. The actors spend more than half a day to put on their make up and costumes, giving the photographer ample time to document the events before the show.

On stage.

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Whether you are taking pictures of a magnificent landscape, a large beautiful monument or scenes from every day life, a human element carefully included in the frame can make a great difference to the image. You would have seen photographs of gorgeous mountainous landscapes with just a silhouette of a man waving from the top of a hill or edge of a cliff. As your eyes move around the picture admiring the beautiful landscape, they eventually settle on the human figure that makes the viewer realize the scale and might of the scenery.

When you include a human factor in just the right part of the frame, it adds considerable value to the photograph. Listed here are some tips of how to do it.

Find a strategic location to place a person. Don’t make it an obvious image of someone posing in front of the camera with the subject behind the person. For example, it would be worthwhile having someone walking away in the last bend when you are photographing a winding road. Get someone colourfully dressed to look out from the middle floor of a tall monument. Get the picture of someone climbing halfway up or standing on the summit of a tall hill.

Allocate only a small part of the frame. This helps the viewer to understand the scale and significance of the object against the person in the image. Allocating anything more than 10% of the frame to a person makes the human element dominate much more than the scenery and spoils the effect. It is best if the person is small enough not to be recognized easily.

Show some activity. It helps to have a person performing a task that blends with the environment. A climber is best shown trying to make his way up with all the necessary gear tied to his body. The picture of the Ghats of Varanasi shown here with someone sweeping the steps blends well with the atmosphere than having someone standing idle.

Show contrast in the image. Some one wearing a red coloured dress is likely to stand out well in a snowy landscape. A white dress will do excellent job in an expanse of sand dunes.

Position your subject off-center. It is more pleasing to the eye to have your subject slightly away from the center. Use the popular rule of thirds: if you slice the frame into three parts horizontally and vertically by drawing two horizontal and vertical lines each, the four intersections of the lines provide ideal position in the frame to place your subject.

Go black and white. Black and white images work best when there is a lot of contrast, such as an occasion when there is a variation of light and shadows in a frame. Black and white comes to the rescue in times like mid-day or cloudy skies when colours tend to get rendered washed out. The high contrast between sky and the ground and the gentle lines leading out of the subjects made the picture below a perfect candidate for black and white conversion.

It doesn’t have to be people. The human element doesn’t have to mean people all the time. A building in the middle of the mountain, a ship in the sea, a colourful house in a vast meadow or such structures that provide a sudden distraction in a natural setup can also have a great impact on the viewer.

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This article appeared in March issue of Terrascape, a travel magazine where I write a column on photography.

We undertake long journeys with the intent to find something new and interesting, see interesting things that the world offers us and acquire a wider vision and fresh perspectives of life. Photographers too, strive to bring in such new perspectives with every image they take, trying to make composition beyond the jaded repetitiveness suffered by everything famous and in circulation.

How often have you seen that perfect image of Taj Mahal with its precise symmetry reflecting in the still waters? You would perhaps see it in every travel brochure, magazines or in countless personal and commercial websites. Although it is a monument of unsurpassed beauty, you would have seen the same stereotypical image so many times in the past that it no longer brings in the freshness and awe you felt the very first time you saw it in photographs.

This brings in one of the biggest challenges faced by travel photographers—to look beyond such obvious composition and bring in different perspectives that infuse freshness into even the most photographed entities. They spend hours looking at their subjects, trying out various perspectives and searching for inspiration to bring out a previously unseen charm.

Bringing out new perspectives to the same subject requires spending ample time to study the subject in leisure and understand it better. One can discover new ways to project the same entity by looking it from every possible angle. The subject may reveal a new façade or motif from a different corner, from a faraway location or from a high vantage point. The structures in its neighbourhood may add to the beauty when seen from a carefully selected corner. Hours of studying the subject may reveal a previously unseen fragment of beauty rarely observed by most people passing by. It calls for patience and perseverance and an urge to look beyond the ordinary, though nothing can be as helpful as an innate fascination to your subject.

It also helps to visit your subject in different times of the day when the quality and position of the light can vary and affect its appearance considerably. Morning fog can create a dreamy mood while the orange hues of the evening sun can bring its colours alive. Tastefully done artificial lighting in the night can greatly enhance the contours and depth of a subject.

Like change in daylight, change in season too can make drastic difference to the way things appear. If your subject is a vast forest landscape, its hues change from dark green before fall to a dull brown during winter and to lush colours in spring. Monsoon can change the complete mood of the location and bring in a surge of life in the surroundings.

The key to making better images and showcase new perspective lies in spending a lot of time and make repeated visits to observe and gain familiarity of your subject.

Images: The cenotaphs of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh may just elicit a passing interest if you see them from their vicinity. But spending a few days walking around the town and looking at them from different places in different times of the day, they reveal beautiful abstractions otherwise unseen.

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India Travel Blog reader Bala sent me an email and asked me a question about travelling with expensive equipment.

Love your work, regular reader of your Travel & Photography blog.Have a request, since you are prolific traveler and photographer would love to see a blog post on traveling with expensive camera gear in India. Kinda tips, suggestions & experiences.

I usually do carry expensive photography equipment with me during my journeys. My digital SLR costs a lot of money and so do my lenses. Since I spend a lot of time taking pictures of a variety of subjects from monuments to landscapes to birds, I tend to carry at least 2 lenses, sometimes more. If I am likely to stay at one place for a long time, I also pack my laptop, which allows me to work on the move. Together, they are expensive enough that I can’t afford not to be paranoid about loosing them. Yet, with photography being one of my greatest passions and my livelihood partially depending on it, I can’t imagine leaving home without them. Naturally I always keep an eye at my equipment and ensure that it never leaves my hand during the journey. Here is how I care for my camera gear when I travel.

By Bus. I often make overnight bus journeys if I am going somewhere within 8-12 hours distance from Bangalore. I can’t sleep in a bus, so I don’t really require maximum comfort. Instead of keeping my camera bag on the luggage rack above the seat or in the luggage box, I keep it on my lap through the journey. If I get down when the bus stops for a break, I necessarily carry the bag with me. At times when I have a lot of luggage, I split them into two bags and keep all the valuables in one bag which remains on my lap. My legs used to pain a bit after a few hours of keeping the (often heavy) bag on my lap, but now I am so used to it, I feel I am missing something without a bag on the lap.

By Train. Usually my train journeys last longer than a day. Although I have never experienced it myself, I presume theft in long distance trains is fairly common. Like in the bus journeys, I ensure that all my expensive equipment are in one bag and keep it with me all the time. Another risk in train comes during the night. When I drift into sleep at night, someone may flick the bag even if it is right next to me. If possible, I try to stuff the bottom of my bag with some cushioning material (a jacket, shawl or anything possible) and use it as a pillow. If not, I put my arm around a strap and let the bag lie next to me. Let me admit, I am very very paranoid about my luggage during train journeys.

By Air. There is not to much to worry about safety of equipment as long as it is not checked in. No one can steal your bag, open the doors and runaway with the booty! But it is important to take all the equipment in a carry-in baggage, so that they are not mishandled or stolen.

Safety in unknown places. Sometimes it may be a bad idea to walk alone in the middle of the night with a big and obviously expensive looking camera. It pays to ask for advice with your hotel owner, your guide or anyone you know and trust before you head out in an unknown location. I have probably not gone out alone in the night, but many times I find myself in deserted places early in the morning. But such places are usually remote, like a village in the middle of Himalayas, somewhere in a forest where we have camped or some such places where safety is not an issue. But I would be more careful if I were to plan shooting the streets of a city in the middle of the night. It may be a good idea if there are 2-3 people together in such occasions.

Get an Insurance. If your equipment is worth a lakh (Rs.100,000) or two, it would be prudent to spend another thousand rupees to get it insured. While my equipment are insured and I have known a few photographer friends who have done the same, I do not know of any one who has made a claim. If you know of anyone who has claimed insurance for theft or damages to photography equipment, do share the details in the comments. It doesn’t cost much to have them insured. I paid just Rs.800 per lakh for insuring my equipment.

Experiences. Personally I have never lost any equipment due to theft or robbery. But I do know of a friend, a professional photographer, who had all his equipment – a camera and a few lenses – stolen. Obviously it was very painful. He had saved money to buy a car, most of which had to be diverted to buy new equipment. How was it stolen? He had given the bag to a friend to keep it during the bus journey. This friend had kept the bag somewhere in the luggage rack. The bag was missing when they reached the destination.

While I haven’t lost any equipment, I have occasionally seen my equipment getting damaged because of carelessness. I once mounted my camera on a tripod on a rocky shore and turned out to see someone calling. The tripod was not standing firm. Before I knew I heard a thud. The tripod was on the ground and my camera’s LCD was broken. Thankfully it did not fall with lens facing down, which would have left me a lot more poorer. But I still came home poorer by about Rs.7,000. The camera was insured, but the disorganized person I am, I still need to claim the money.

If you have any tips about safety and caring for your equipment when travelling, do let us know by leaving a comment.

If you have any questions for me on travel photography, you can write to me here.

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I have trekked to Goechala via Dzongri earlier in summer(See trip report), but I was keen to go back there again to do some serious photography of landscapes deep in the Himalayas. We are starting the trek on 13th and we can take a few more people along. Here is an open invitation to join me on the trek.

It will be an 8-day trek and this being December, the weather is likely to be cold. But I am hoping that the winter mornings and evenings can be so spectacular that the trouble will be worth it. If you are interested in joining, see my earlier trip report to know more details. The trek starts from Yuksom Village, where we need to arrive a day earlier to get the permits made. You can contact me here or email me at arunchs -a-t- yahoo -d-o-t- com for more details.

Below are some images from the trek.

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In September, I gave a 30-minute presentation on Photographing mountainscapes at Club Mahindra Whispering Pines Resort at Mashobra near Shimla. The audience included the winners and jury of Club Mahindra My Trip of a Lifetime travelogue contest.

In this presentation, I took some images from my archives and spoke about a single feature in the image that made me take the picture, or a feature that stood out in the image. Below are the slides of the presentation.

Photographing Mountains

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This week’s travel photography article is about not getting overwhelmed of taking care of thousands of images you have shot with your digital camera.

As always, the Travel Photography article has two sections. The first part is about keeping the photographs organized, such that you can easily access what you are looking for. The second part contains an image review. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.

ORGANIZING IMAGES

Organizing photos was never a big deal in the days of film. You would shoot just a handful of pictures in a whole year. And when a film roll is complete, give it to a neighbourhood studio which would process it, print it and put it in an album for you. Nothing else needed to be  done. Since the time the world has gone digital, we have been shooting so much that there is a deluge of photographs churned out from the camera. An active photographer may end up shooting tens of thousands of images in a year. Managing them becomes a big a job. Here is how I try to keep my photographs organized.

Delete Unwanted Photographs. This is something we always postpone. Very often, more than half the pictures we shoot are junk. There will be images that are shaken, blown out, completely dark, undecipherable pictures, or things that you don’t intend to keep ever but have shot for the heck of taking a picture. When we save it to the computer, they all get stored along with the good ones until the day comes we start complaining about lack of space in the hard drive.

When you know that you have unwanted images, delete as many pictures as possible in the camera itself. Quickly go through the photos after you download them, and again delete anything you don’t require. It leaves a lot less number of images to manage.

Organize them in folders. It is important to put the photographs in some order. If you download images to desktop or to a temporary folder and hope to put them together sometime later, it is never likely to happen. You will move it out of desktop to some other unknown place, and eventually forget about the location. After some time, you have a dozen different places where your photos are stored. It will only result in having to search hard later when you need those images.

I use the hierarchy of folders to store my photographs, as shown in the picture below.

• Level  1 and 2. Since the volume of pictures I shoot is high, I have partitioned the hard disk and have dedicated a drive only for storing images (The drive ‘Images (F:)’ in the picture). If you are just getting started with a new computer and expecting to store a lot of images, it would be a good idea to dedicate a drive for pictures (plus perhaps videos). If not, you could simply create a folder where all the images are stored (folder ‘digital images’).
• Level 3 and 4. Located under ‘digital images’ folder are all my photographs. I further divide the photos into folders based on locations or events. In the picture above, the folders ‘Bangalore’, ‘Coorg’ and ‘Ladakh’ fall into this category. It could also be events, such as ‘marriage in family’, ‘Ugadi celebrations’, etc. If I have too many images from a location such as Bangalore or Ladakh, I divide them further into subcategories such as ‘City by Night’ under Bangalore, or ‘Leh’ under ‘Ladakh’.
• Leve 5. I don’t store the images directly under the category of locations or events. It can very much happen that I return the same location again and again. As you can see in the picture above, I have made two visits to Coorg. It is likely that the first set of pictures are entirely different from second – I would have experienced and shot different things, and would have gone with different people. So I prefer to keep images from each visit apart.
• Level 6 and 7. Under the date folder is where my RAW images go for the given location. Within the date folder, you see another folder called ‘processed’. This is where all the processed jpeg images get stored. If you don’t shoot raw or don’t process your images, you can do without this additional level.
• Level 8. Here, I store small size images for posting on the web. From the ‘processed’ folder, I downsize the photos to smaller sizes such as 640×480, 500×375, etc. They often get re-used for uploading in various websites (such as paintedstork.com, flickr, facebook, etc), so I keep them at one place instead of discarding them after uploading.

With this arrangement, it is easy for me to find any picture that I am looking for. If I need an image from my 2006 visit to Coorg, I know exactly where to find it. Instead of fumbling through haphazardly located folders all over the computer, I usually know where is the image that I am looking for, and manage to get hold of it in less than a minute.

Tagging and Rating. This would be useful for people who have hundreds of thousands of images and find it hard to manage even with organized folders. Software like Picasa (and many other such solutions) discover all the images in your computer and let you keyword them and rate them. It may help you get hold of the precise image you are looking for in no time. The only problem is, it also takes some some additional time and effort, which would be worth it only if you have very large volumes of pictures.

Backing Up. Backing up the photos is a wise thing to do if you value your photographs. It insures your photos against possible computer crash, virus attack, physical damage and theft. I use an external hard-drive to keep a copy of all my photographs, and synchronize them once a month or so. You can also opt to burn photos into DVDs and stack them away.

IMAGE REVIEW

The image below is posted for review by flickr user mridula

It is a photography that easily makes me envious, and makes me want to be there. The location looks great and the rainbow is beautiful. The framing of the rainbow, with a fading mountain in the background and the tent in the middle gives a clear idea of being out somewhere in a remote location on a nice day. The pictures would have looked much better if the tent was kept erected. A few more combinations or framing ideas could enhance the picture: it could be a lone tree or a big rock in the foreground, or someone standing/sitting at the edge and staring at the rainbow. There is sensor dust popping up in many parts of the frame. The camera sensor can do with cleaning, but the dust in this picture can be removed using photoshop.

If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag them as itpcritique.  Only tagged images are taken for reviewing. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.

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The weekly travel photography section is back again, after a short two-week gap. Read all earlier articles in the series here.

As always, the Travel Photography article has two sections. The first part of today’s article is about protecting your camera in the monsoon season. The second part contains an image review. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.

In my earlier post on Photographing The Monsoon, Shrinidhi left a comment saying, “pls add some tips on how to protect the camera in rainy season- My fear that camera may get damaged due to water entry forces me not to take out the camera if it is likely to rain.” I would have liked to treat it as a Q&A at the end of an article, but the topic was worth a separate post in itself. Here it goes.

PROTECTING YOUR CAMERA FROM RAIN

Fungus. One of the biggest problem that haunts camera lenses is not caused by the rain itself, but the damp weather. If you keep the cameras and lenses packed away in the closet and wait for the monsoon season to end, you may be surprised to see fungus growing inside the lens. Fungus in the lenses is usually a grey fibrous material that slowly spreads in the inner surface of the lens. It grows in moist weather when the lens is stored for prolonged duration without exposure to light. The simple solution to keep fungus away is to keep using the camera often, instead of tucking it away in a closet during the monsoons.

If you do happen to notice fungus growing in the lens, do not panic. A little bit of it doesn’t make a significant difference to image quality. If you explore the lens to light frequently, the growth of existing fungus will be stunted. If it hasn’t spread too much, fungus may even shrink a bit on continuous exposure to light. But if there is a lot of fungus on the lens surface, it may be time to take the lens to a service center.

Using camera in the rains. I would not go ahead and ask you to expose your cameras freely to the rain, but at the same time, there isn’t a need to worry too much about precipitation. Most cameras are robust enough to let you shoot for a short while in a drizzle. But when you do that, ensure that you wipe the camera free of all the raindrops when you are done shooting. Do not let the water droplets linger on the surface. Don’t stay in the rain for long enough to get the camera completely wet. If you do, water could seep deeper into the body. Avoid exposing the camera in heavy rains. In case you get into a situation where the camera is accidentally prolonged to rains for a long time (or has fallen into water), remove the battery immediately and leave the camera for drying in a warm place. If you are lucky, your camera may function properly again.

Plastic bags. If you are going for long walks or treks in rainy days and intend to carry the camera with you, wrap it in multiple layers of plastic bags, or in a ziplock bag. It can keep your camera safe even if you are getting yourself wet in the rain. That way, when you reach a beautiful location and if the rains have subsided, your camera is dry and ready to work for you.

IMAGE REVIEW

The image below is posted for review by flickr user Guzman Sanchez

I am struggling to find areas for improvement in this image. There aren’t many I can think of. The positioning of the performer at the right side corner, with smoke moving towards the left works very well in the photograph. Despite being shot at a very low shutter speed(1/5 sec), the image seems to be sharp. The blurred hands are effective in showing motion. The streak of smoke on the top adds well to the image too. The image conveys the overall atmosphere very effectively.

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This week’s Travel Photography article is written by Anoop. Anoop blogs about his experiments in photography on Me and My Camera Obscura. I am a fan of his images of birds in action in Mysore’s Karanji Kere. Today’s article is about a filter commonly used along with SLR cameras – Circular Polarizer. Circular Polarizers can help enhance outdoor images taken in sunny days and are also useful in eliminating reflections.

As always, the second part of this article has weekly image reviews. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.

CIRCULAR POLARIZER by Anoop

‘Circular Polarizer is a must for daylight outdoor photography’ – this is probably the only line I would write if I had to write just one line about them!

Circular Polarizers are filters mainly used in photographic situations involving reflections. These filters consist of two rings. The inner ring screws on to the front thread of a lens and the outer ring is freely rotatable.

Though I have my circular polarizer always screwed onto my 18-55mm lens, there are circumstances where I have had to use my camera without them. In such cases the thumb rule I follow is ‘If there is enough light for shooting photos without bothering about camera shake, leave the polarizer on the lens.’

Photo taken at Central Park New York City

Both the above photos are taken with a Circular Polarizer on, and are good examples for the two different extremes of polarization. The only change between the two images is the alignment of the circular polarizer.

The photo on the left almost completely eliminates reflections from the horizontal plane (water). Here we can see the increase in contrast of the water lilies, but on the other hand we can observe that the sky is captured as it really appears.

The photo on the right does exactly the opposite, the reflections are left alone and the direct light from the sky is filtered as a result of which we can see a bluer sky.

Both the photos above are taken with the same camera settings and with the Polarizer mounted; the difference was just in the alignment of the filter’s outer ring. Rotating the outer ring controls the plane of polarization and lets in the light selectively.

Mounting the polarizer normally increases the contrast of the photographed object, as it almost always eliminate some percentage of reflections and reduces glare, and hence bringing out true colors of the object. Being so used to shooting with the polarizer on, I would consider it a sacrilege shooting in following conditions.

• photos having a lot of sky
• photos having reflections of water
• bright outdoor photography

There is one limitation I have encountered frequently while using a Polarizer – the Polarizer does reduce the amount of light coming into through the lens. While this is a hindrance in low light scenarios, it’s not a hassle for daylight outdoor photography.

Note from Arun. If you can see the example images, there is some compromise in either of the pictures. While the first one has a dull sky, the second one lacks the contrast and rich colors of the leaves on the water. Circular Polarizer has definitely helped get the best of the situation. But it can be further improved, if one can devote time and has patience to wait for a day with better lighting. Shooting in the morning or evening on a day when the sky is naturally blue would give the best result without any compromises. Patience has a lot of value in photography!

IMAGE REVIEW

The image below is posted for review by LeFlic17

Technically, I can’t find much fault in this image. The image is sharp and in focus. It is exposed properly, and eyes are not in shade as it often happens in outdoor images. It is framed well too, emphasizing the face properly and not having any distractions. But it seems more like a posed shot to me, void of any natural expressions. The man appears conscious of him being photographed. His face is stiff and has lost all the candidness. The picture would have had a lot more life, if some time was given to get him used to the camera, or if the image was made without keeping him aware. For more about this, read the earlier article in the travel photography series: dilemma of asking permission before taking pictures of people.

If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag them as itpcritique.  Only tagged images are taken for reviewing. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.

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