Travel photography, is it about the travel or the photography?

I love travel photography. Not only do you get to travel and see interesting places and the people who live there, but you get to photograph those people and places while you are there.

Every city in the world has some sort of iconic location where you will always find photographers and see postcard images from, the trick is to figure out what those iconic locations are, and be there at just the right time of day to make beautiful images.

See more beautiful images from San Francisco by clicking on the more link below:

You can’t always count on mother nature to cooperate with your photographic expectations. You are also at the mercy of logistics with travel time to locations and limited time at each location. Sometimes you just have to wing-it and do the best you can given the conditions in front of you.

I spent a great deal of time during my younger days living very close to San Francisco but never took the time to visit some of the very well-known locations for photography. I think it was because in the back of my mind, I always knew I could just drive up there and see these things. Turns out after moving away I really missed not having visited some of these locations with my camera, so back to Cali I went.

In the years since I have moved away, many things have changed while some things have stayed the same. There are some new sights to see and some old favorites to visit once again with memories from my younger days.

Night photography and the dynamic range limitations of digital cameras today make me want to learn more about HDR or High Dynamic Range photography so that I can get night shots with good depth and detail in both the shadows and highlights.

What would travel photography be without at least one shot of a plate of food?

In some cases when the lighting is harsh outside from the mid-day sun and your opportunities to make nice images outside is more limited, you can always visit a museum and practice your indoor photography.

Poking around in San Francisco’s iconic City Hall and stumbling upon a wedding photographer’s session helped me create this image.

Dabbling in street photography can be a real challenge when you are shooting with a dSLR with a battery grip and a large mid-range zoom. Most would say that street photography is best left to smaller, more discreet setups, but I had to give it a try.

Maybe working the museum visit into your street photography is a good way to practice.

There are so many different aspects to each city it is often hard to pinpoint what part of the city you want to be in and at what time of day.

Street photography can be from far away or right up close where you engage your subjects and talk with them.

There are so many things just around the next corner to see and make nice images of it can be overwhelming to some people.

The challenge of trying to tell the story of all the people visiting the aquarium with the large tanks took me a little while to work through. What do you think of this shot?

Maybe some abstract stuff of the bridges will work for me?

San Francisco City Hall is a very high-tech building with all the earthquake retrofit and restoration work that went into it, still the outside is just not as cool as the inside.

The inside of City Hall makes you feel like your are in some old-world european city.

A shot like this abstract detail from the Japanese Tea Garden could have been taken anywhere, so while it is a nice shot I can’t say it tells me where I was when I took it.

I’m not sure how I feel about this shot of the Palace of Fine Arts taken during the day. I’m sure that if I was able to spend several hours waiting for just the right afternoon lighting this would look much better, but as I said sometimes you are at the mercy of logistics.

More Palace of Fine Arts, but the sky is all blown out from mid-day harsh light. This is just not the best time of day to make photos here.

Being caught at the famous Fog City Dinner without a tripod or a shutter release means you have to use a tree as a tripod and the self-timer to trigger the shutter and even then you are at the mercy of the dynamic range of your digital sensor.

Flowers. The flowers could be anywhere, but they are in Golden Gate Park, but I can’t tell from this image, so it’s a cool images but not my favorite.

Another one of those, could be from anywhere shots. This time the bamboo forest from the Japanese Tea Gardens.

This butterfly was massive, as big as your fist, but it could be anywhere so it doesn’t tell the story of the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.

I have a ton more images to process, some better than others. I really like travel photography, it has challenges that are different from other types of photography and always keeps you on your toes and pushing your skills as a photographer.