A very common piece of photographic advice is, “Watch out for your backgrounds.” It’s really good advice, and not just so you don’t wind up with a tree growing out of someone’s head.  

Travel photographs will often be of a subject within a certain environmental context. While we want to watch backgrounds to avoid litter and other distractions, we also watch them to find details, tones, colors, patterns that may strengthen the image. The scene we photograph has a foreground and background; the flattened image has a figure (the subject) and ground (everything else). Managing the figure/ground relationship is how we manage space in the photograph and that determines how effective the photograph is both compositionally, and in conveying information about the scene.

In the Viet Nam rice paddy getting fairly close physically to the subject allowed me see details of the worker and make her more prominent, and by keeping the framing low enough to avoid any sky I kept the image constrained, and more about a specific moment. In the next image, the wider framing and distant subjects, plus the smaller figures of workers, is a more expansive view of the same scene. The differences here were done by changing the camera position and framing choices; both shots were done with almost the same lens—66mm for Image 1 and 70mm for Image 2.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

We can also use lenses to change how narrow (telephoto) or wide (wide angle) a section of the scene we capture.

Another common piece of photographic lore is that telephoto lenses compress space. NOT TRUE. The compression that we generally associate with a telephoto lens (127.5mm lens equivalent in the photo below), where the subjects seem stacked up on top of each other, is coming from the camera position. Everything can look flattened because it’s all at some distance from the camera, which is most of the reason someone choses to use a telephoto to take that shot. The contribution from the telephoto lens is just to narrow the angle of view that is recorded.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

Shooting a similar scene with a wide angle lens (below with a 24mm lens) allows me to get really close to the subject, making it very prominent, but also to take in a lot of background information for context such as Buckingham Palace here.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

The combination of lens choice AND camera position, relative to subject and background, is our primary tool for managing this photographic space. 

A Travel Photography Cliché—“Honey, go over and stand next to Notre Dame so I can get your picture with it.” So of course he/she gets lost in the crowd. Manage the space by framing up the large subject and then having your “honey” walk as close as possible to the camera to balance the size disparity between the two subjects.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

In addition to managing photographic space, we need to manage our working space.

How do we find interesting scenes or subjects in a place we don’t know? The closer you can get to the ground the better. Cars are OK if you need to cover a lot of ground, bikes would be better, walking best, but the tradeoff is limited range.  That can also be a benefit, though, because it slows us down and gets us to pay attention to wayside alleys we can wander into and discover a place ourselves.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

I was walking along a random street in Saigon and this guy below, having coffee out on the sidewalk, spoke. I turned around and said hello which led to about an hour’s worth of sitting and chatting. He had been a South Vietnamese soldier during our war there and worked with the American forces. We talked about what he did to survive after the war, how life had been and how it is now for him. It was so interesting to make that connection, brief as it was, and that’s one of the things I love about traveling—discovery.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

For most people, Travel Photography will be something they do on vacation. That often means managing personal space to have time for photography and time with family or other traveling companions. On a trip to Venice (Italy) several years ago, my wife was quick to point out that while I might consider this an opportunity to do some work (photographing), she was on vacation and would not be getting up for sunrise. “Yes, dear.” (To myself—PERFECT!!)  I got up before dawn and walked the empty streets of the city through sunrise, for about 3 hours, as the streets gradually filled. I had a great time, made several photos I still like, and got back to the hotel just in time to meet my wife for breakfast.

Bill Durrence, Copyright 2011

Bill Durrence is a photographer, teacher, and consultant who leads a variety of domestic and international photography classes and workshops. Listings of his upcoming programs and contact information are at www.billdurrence.com.