By Ken Hubbard
For the past few years my family and I have been taking vacations together the first week of July, this year was no different. We decided to head up to Maine and rent a few cabins on the Blue Hill peninsula overlooking Penobscot Bay, this is a very low key and quiet place to escape to. It is always nice to travel and spend time with family, but as a photographer it can be a test of patience at times, considering all you have to take into account when traveling with so many people. From experience, I've learned that these trips will yield very little in the way of "fine art" images, but that is OK. I've also learned to appreciate taking fun pictures of family and the places we go together without worrying about having to get the perfect image to use somewhere or print and hang for a gallery. With all that being said, my camera bag that usually weighs in at about 35-40 lbs is cut down to about 15lbs with only the minimal amount of gear being packed and brought on the trip. One of the ways I kept weight to a minimum was packing the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD lens, I ended up using this lens for 90% of the images I shot while in Maine.
Even on trips with the family I am always ready to take a picture, many times while driving you pass something that will make a great image but your gear is packed away and you convince yourself not to stop and you keep on driving to your destination. I always keep my camera bag open on the back seat of my car and the camera set with either the 18-270mm (for the APS-C sized D7000) or 28-300mm (for the full frame D700), this way I can pretty much stop the car, pick up the camera and start shooting. In this image I came across an antique (it seems everything is an antique these days) sign shop on the side of the road, I quickly pulled into the parking lot grabbed my camera and started shooting. I wanted to keep a straight on perspective of the outside wall, so I lined up my back bumper in the middle and then climbed onto the bumper to gain some height. I positioned myself as close as I could to center both top to bottom and left to right, keeping all lines as straight as possible.
I agree that it can be a different photography experience while on family vacation. I've still managed to grab some excellent photos and rework many of them in post production software. I'll correct lighting and exposure for example. And will even go heavy with cloning and other editing tools to manage away distractions that creeped in to the photo due to limited time that was able to be spent composing a better photo. Check out these photos on my Flickr page (from July 10 forward) to see some examples of images I took on the go while on vacation in West Virginia a few weeks ago: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbhaber/
Posted by: JB Haber | Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 12:08 PM