Festivals, parades, and other ceremonies can add a splash of colour and excitement; it is worth making a special effort to capture them.	TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY.
	Here are some hints. Plan your time,and perhaps put your camera away when the sun is high in the sky and the light is less harsh. You can use the time to be be sociable.

The best shots will be in the "golden hours" before sunset or after sunrise when there is a warm glow.

When you arrive in a new destination take a look at the postcards in the shops.
Regard them as basic research, someone has gone to the trouble of seeking out the best spots, these cards can save you time . It is up to you to work your magic and improve on them by stamping your style upon the views

Try to be aware of what is happening. Pick up a newspaper, or listen to local radio, find out about activities. Parades and can be colourful if there are floats involved try to get a high viewpoint, a zoom lens can be useful. Be mindful of the lighting conditions and at night use either a fast film or high ISO setting on your digital camera.

Festivals can be fun and often lively pictures can be had by getting close to the participants and using a wide angle lens. In a Spanish one where wine tomatoes and flour were being thrown about I got more than just pictures. Let's say that the coverage was on me. Festivals, parades, and other ceremonies can add a splash of color and excitement; they're worth making a special effort to take in. People tend to be less inhibited, so your pictures of strangers can seem friendly and intimate.

Markets can also be colourful and provide an opportunity for candid shots that can add depth to your travel album.

Now that the computer manipulation can come into the picture making process you can take liberties with reality.

Should your girl be eyeing up a hunk on the beach there is little to stop you being creative and pasting his image onto her sun glasses! (If that is what is really happening, I don’t regard that as cheating! Likewise removing removing intrusive items telegraph poles from images seems OK.)

Always be on the look out for fun pictures, signs can be worth recording.

In Holland I found that a warning sign "Wildrooster" was not to make you aware of aggressive poultry, it was just Dutch for "Cattle grid." A French village visited in the rain on a boating holiday was aptly named Misery.

Disposable cameras can be useful in risky situations like rafting or mountain biking, where you might hesitate to take expensive equipment.

I always pack a few plastic bags in the camera case they are very handy for protecting expensive equipment on the beach.

The subject of a picture can be improved by framing it, perhaps within an arch or under the bow of a tree or even a flag.

People can make pictures. With views, if you include people it can give an idea of scale and while beaches can be wonderful they are greatly enhanced with the inclusion people.

If there is one wish I would ask the tooth fairy for, it would be to be able to explore the beaches of the world with a posse of beautiful models. Perhaps it might just happen while I still have my own teeth to offer!

Cameras have grown on us! Almost without noticing they have moved from cumbersome objects to devices that are almost everywhere.

Think mobile phones! many of the latest, include a camera (not to mention music and even GPS, ebook or web pages,) and the picture resolution can be better than what was found on the semi pro SLR cameras of a couple of years ago.

All this and the ability to capture images on digital cards that can be used again and again.

But does it improve our pictures? perhaps in the days when you paid for film and processing the economy of the affair helped ensure that worth while pictures happened most times you clicked the shutter.
That can still be the case but now you can afford to take extra shots and experiment and be creative.

Article and pictures
by Allan Rogers

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