Portrait

A long weekend in the Winelands, a road trip up the West Coast, a few days on the KwaZulu-Natal coast: the places we travel to within South Africa are as worth photographing properly as anywhere further afield. The trouble is that holiday pictures often come back flatter than the trip felt. The light was better than that, the view was wider, the food looked more appetising than the photograph suggests.

This guide sets out practical travel photo tips in three parts: the scenes you are most likely to shoot, the exposure and composition behind them, and how to choose a lens you will actually enjoy carrying for a week. Most of it applies whether you are travelling with company or heading off on your own.

Why an Interchangeable-Lens Camera Lifts Your Travel Photography

Most travel pictures are taken on a phone, and for a quick record of where you were that is perfectly sensible. If you want more from the images than a record, an interchangeable-lens camera changes what is available to you.

The

Somewhere between deciding to take a photograph and actually raising the camera, the moment you wanted has usually moved on. Snap photography exists to solve exactly that problem. You shoot first and think afterwards, trusting that the scene in front of you is already more interesting than anything you could arrange. Street photography is the best-known branch of it, but snap shooting covers a great deal more ground than pavements and shopfronts — children mid-sprint at an athletics meeting, late light raking across a harbour wall in Kalk Bay, someone on a stoep laughing at something happening just outside the frame. This guide sets out what snap photography actually is, how it differs from portraiture, the main types worth trying, and what to look for in a lens for street photography and everyday snap shooting.

What is snap photography?

A snap is an ordinary moment photographed in its natural state. Nothing is arranged beforehand: you do not choose the subject, you do not build the composition,