Seeing things differently

Today a small/big travel photography tip about “landmarks”

We all visit those places where we think “I really have to see this one”, however the biggest problem is often that the landmark has been photographed so many times that it’s almost impossible to shoot something that is different, and although in some cases it’s indeed impossible, I do hope to give you some tips in this blogpost to spice up your own travel photography shots next time.

I’m a huge Queen fan, so when visiting Montreux last week there was of course only one spot I wanted to go first, the Freddie Mercury statue, now this statue is placed in a rather busy boulevard and to be honest I hoped/expected it to be rather quiet, the weather was not so nice and it was not a real holiday period, but…. as usual with these kind of things it was rather busy. But I wanted to make the most of it (I was looking forward to this for a long time). Now most people will shoot the statue like this :

And yeah well…. this is actually how it is in real life. This was by the way the only shot I could take without any people around the statue, we have been there for about half an hour and this was the only time there were not at least 5-10 people around the statue and then I only got this shot pffff. Well anyway let’s look at the statue a different way.

Looks a bit better already, and it’s indeed cropping out the people standing before the statue, but it’s not really giving me the power I want.

Now we’re getting there, by slightly changing the angle and giving a bit more contrast in the retouching the image gets a totally different look. But especially look at the very slight chance in angle/perspective and the impact it can make.

As with models you can of course also walk around the statue and shoot from a different angle.

On all these images I’m shooting from a really low angle, cropping away the people standing in front of it, and of course waiting for the right moment, someone bending down, someone just moving out of the frame etc.

For the final image of the statue I decided to go for the 12-24 Sigma lens, sit on the floor, look through the viewfinder and just wait till everything was clear, the end result was exactly what I hoped for.

Now we could say “done, let’s go”
However as you can see there is a lot going on around the statue, so always also take some detail shots to make everything complete.

As you can see there are many ways to shoot a statue/landmark from different perspectives, angles etc. to totally chance the look. As you can see the weather was also not sunny, but somehow I never mind, in fact I always like the more moody weather types, but I know most people will shy away from rain, clouds etc. My advise…. when you’re there make the best out of it.

Hope you guys can use these tips.