Tuesday, June 17, 2008

SEOUL | Street Downtown + Travel Photo Tips

Street Photography is quite different from other type of photography, such as Nature Photography or Landscape Photography.

Many factors have to be considered in doing Street Photography, such as types of lens to be used, what sort of gears to be brought/used, weather condition, available time, and human/vehicle traffic etc.

Depending on the situation, it is advisable to carry as little and as light as possible, but if want to carry all your lenses and all your "heavy-weight" camera bodies, then it is up to, as long as you can withstand to carry all the load on your shoulder, than it is fine by me.

Blend in with the community as much as possible, don't be a tourist! (Although it helps at times to be a tourist.)

Sometimes, it is "impossible" to stand still to capture the scene, as the people are moving in all different direction, so you will be "shoved" here and there, hence be prepared for that.

It is nice to be artsy-partsy with your photo some times, (shallow depth of field, or in the ordinary lingo some blurred some focus), but most of the time it is safe to have a greater depth of field (i.e. everything in focus), the rational is that, the background is important to tell you where you are, and sometimes it is the background where the action usually occurs.



Bunch of friend, in the midst of playing boardgame on the street of Seoul.

This is just a sample photo of which I need the background to be focused as well, so that this single photo can tell that it is taken in a foreign place or for those who knows to read the character it shows it was taken in Seoul.



You can spend some more time, chit-chatting with the locals, come closer and do an artsy shot like this, BUT, in doing travel photography, if you are going to do this kind of shot, you cannot go far, unless you have all the time in your life, then go ahead do it as much as you want.

But in my case, I have only a very limited time in hand, and many places to be covered, so I could not afford to do much art shot, so a real street photo is what I need.

It is interesting to have a shallow DoF (Depth of Field) in your photo, but as mentioned earlier, u need everything to be in focus so that a single photo can say a story of where you are.




But in the contrary of what I have mentioned about doing art shot in your travel photo, it will also depends on what is the subject of your photo.

I can get away with this shot because, the subject itself can tell you where it was taken, although some will argue that anybody can just stick that sticker anywhere, well, it is up to you to decide, you can either follow the rules of photography, or you can just break the rule and make your own rule and see where it fits.

Happy "Photoing".

NOTE: I wanted to post about the Tokyo Trip, unfortunately I have a problem in converting my RAW to JPG, for those who are well verse, I have just downloaded the latest Canon DPP 3.4.1 and installed it, but everytime I wanted to Batch Process, it says "An Error Occured", tried re-installing it and restarting the machine etc, but to no avail. I have no such problem from all the previous updates, tried to search the net, found the same problem but from a french site! Tried to contact Canon but still no answer. So anyone of you, who knows how to rectify this problem, do please let me know, the previous version is not available on the net either, so can't turned back!

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