A great picture is worth a thousand travel miles

Photography & Videography on the road

Before you start packing your $700 Nikon and assorted lenses, stuffing rolls of Fuji into a lead bag, and buying extra memory chips for your digital camera, you need to come to terms with one thing.

Someone with an array of equipment much more sophisticated than yours, who could afford to wait 365 days for the best light, and had a tripod and could waste 36 exposures to get everything just right has taken a much better full-frame picture of that monument, church, or painting than you could ever hope to get.

It’s called a postcard. Accept this and buy a shot of Notre Dame or the Mona Lisa that was made by a professional.

Of course you’ll take a picture of it anyway, but don’t waste more than one shot on an overall view. Instead, make your photos interesting, make them unique, and take home a lead-lined bag full of memories and great pictures, not just snapshots. The next page contains tips for doing just that.

Before you leave home: Know thy camera

Unless you’re a professional or a real heavy-duty amateur, the fanciest camera-lens combo you need is a basic 35mm Single Lens Reflex (SLR) with a 28 to 70mm lens. Get a lens cap with a little string to dangle it from the lens so you don’t lose it.

Of course, you can also get by perfectly well with a pocket point-and-shoot camera or a good consumer digital camera. You can get quality digital cameras that shoot 5 to 8 megapixels and come with all the bell-and-whistle features for well under $700.

Should you stick with film, even basic point-and-shoots are getting more advanced every day. Some even let you switch film halfway through rolls (great for moving from outdoor shots that call for 100 ASA to dark cathedral interiors that want at least 400 ASA).

Invest in at least a low-end pocket camera; don’t bother with the disposable kind, which only take passable pictures under full, bright sunlight. The only useful disposable cameras are, if you think you’ll need one, the ones that work underwater.

Practice with your camera before you leave the States, especially if it’s a new one and you’re not sure how it behaves. Visit the sights of your home city, pretend you’re in Europe, and snap away. Get to know the camera. Bracket your shots by shooting the same thing several times using different settings, with and without flash, and so on. Write down carefully exactly what you did or varied in each shot so that, later, you'll know which ones worked best.

Sure, you’ll drop $20 to $40 to buy and develop several rolls of film (free for those who make the switch to digital), but it’s better to know how the camera handles with different films and in different situations before you go off and shoot 20 rolls on vacation.

Don’t leave home without it: Buying film & memory chips

Buy all your film (and, for that matter, memory chips for your digital camera) in the United States. It’s cheaper, and you can be sure it hasn’t been sitting on the shelf since 1982. Buy enough film to shoot at least one roll a day, more if you know you’re the shutter-happy type. Bring more than you think you’ll need. You can always use the extras after you get home, and it might save the day if you run into a festival and find yourself going through a roll an hour.

If you've gone digital, take chips totalling far more gigs than you expect (I'd say a minimum of 1 gig per day)—and perform triage as you go, deleting extraneous images each evening (those too blurry, underexposed, or poorly framed to be worth keeping) so as to free up more room on the chip for teh next day.

If you're still using film, hold on to the plastic film canisters and store them in big, see-through plastic baggies so security people at the airport will pass it around the potentially harmful X rays (the higher the film speed, the more likely multiple exposures to X rays will fog the film).

Bring several spare batteries (if you're using rechargables, you must pack these in your carry-on bag due to new TSA rules as of 2008). Use a UV filter on the lens to protect it from scratches (not a polarizing filter, which messes up more shots than it helps if you don’t use it correctly).

If you do have to buy photo supplies, film, or memory chips abroad, go to a camera shop or department store. Never buy film from a souvenir stand near a tourist sight; the markup is almost criminal.