Prior to leaving on a long travel adventure, I came across a great photography tip that I applied to nearly every picture. It is the Law of Thirds. When taking a picture divide the view finder into thirds, both horizontally and vertically so that you now have 9 imaginary boxes. Where the lines intersect are the four natural focus points when looking at a picture. Pick one of these points and this is where you want to put your subject. The bottom horizontal line is where you want to put the horizon. Or you can put it on the top horizontal line if you want more foreground, so that you have 1/3 sky and 2/3 landscape. If you want the focus to be on the sky, 2/3 sky and 1/3 landscape. The beautiful part of digital photography is that you can do both and decide later which you prefer. The picture to the left demonstrates the Law of Thirds pretty accurately with Olivia’s face placed at a focal point where the horizontal and vertical imaginary lines intersect.
Bottom line: do not put your subject in the middle. It will be a far more interesting picture with your pride and joy off-center. You are setting composition and telling a story when you apply the Law of Thirds and it becomes a natural response the more you take pictures.
Another travel photography tip I can offer, I came across by accident. My 5 year old daughter has a fabulous pink Noor dress from a prior season of Tea Collection. I am now kicking myself for not getting it in every bigger size possible because it is the perfect dress for posing in pictures. The Stav Dress in the current fall collection is a great alternative. We call her pink dress “the traveling dress” because it has been to 5 different countries in its short life. It shows up great from a distance enhancing the picture and close-ups are not distracted because it is without any pattern. Specifically the pictures we have from Egypt, where everything is a nice camel color (except the camels which were white), really popped with the solid bright pink dress.
After our travel adventure we shared our pictures with our friends. The oft-dreaded travel pictures your friends are obligated to view politely. We were shocked at the responses. Our friends were “amazed at how great the pictures were” and most asked what type of camera we used. It was not the camera so much as it was the composition telling the story.