7 tips for planning your perfect photography trip

 

 

Landscape photographer Nigel Danson has taken a lot of photo trips over the past year and during that time he has made mistakes. Fortunately, every mistake is a learning opportunity and with Danson’s excellent YouTube channel, we can learn from his mistakes as well. In the video below, Nigel gives us seven tips for planning the perfect photography trip.

For landscape photography in particular, it makes a big difference to plan ahead. If you are planning a trip to a specific place, especially if it is far away, you want to make sure that you have done everything you can to capitalize on your opportunities. In photography, there will always be things left to chance, so it is your job when planning a trip, whether it’s a day trip or a long expedition to a faraway place, to remove as many random things as possible. You can’t control the weather, but you can control the gear you take with you. That’s Danson’s first tip, to ensure you have the right gear. This means the photo gear choices, such as camera(s), lenses, filters and tripod, but it also means preparing for the conditions you expect to face. A comfortable photographer is a good photographer.

If you don’t have the space to bring all your lenses, Danson has a great tip for you. If you go into Lightroom or another similar catalog software, you can check the EXIF data for your recent images and see which lenses you used for your favorite shots. You might find that you almost exclusively shoot with a specific zoom lens and barely use a long prime, so there’s an opportunity to save space.

Gear is selected, clothes and equipment are picked and packed, what next? If you are visiting a location for the first time, you can do a lot of scouting remotely. You can of course scan photo sharing websites and see which places have scenes you might want to capture for yourself, but you can also utilize mapping tools to check where sunrise and sunset will be relative to an area you’d like to check out. For Danson, he planned out a specific shot from his home office and had a good idea of when the light would be best before he even left for his trip. His remote scouting worked and he captured a beautiful scene in a very efficient manner. To learn more about the resources Danson uses and how to plan the perfect photography trip, watch Nigel Danson’s video below.

(Via Nigel Danson)