Travel Photography — An eye for the “Decisive moment” Mike Langford GM HF LMNZIPP GM FAIPP
Is travel photography just a form of street photography, or is it actually much more than this? Wikipedia describes it thus: ‘Street photography is conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places.’ In many ways travel photography has a lot in common with street photography, in that they are both looking for that “decisive moment (as coined by Cartier-Bresson back in the 1930s) when form, content, vision and composition are merged into a transcendent whole." What travel photography adds to street photography is a sense of place or culture. A point when there is a decisive moment but you also have an understanding of where you are in terms of landscape or culture, something street photography isn’t all that concerned with.
Barkhor Square 1 Canon EOS 5D Mark III, EF 24-70mm f/4 IS USM Focal length 60 mm, f/8, 1/ 800 ISO 100 This slightly compressed viewpoint of 60 mm allows me to put the person in the context of the space in which she is in. By selecting an aperture of f/8, I make her the sharpest object in the frame but still allow enough detail in the background to allow visual context. By crouching down quite low, I have also made her look more dominant. The separation of the prayer wheel against the light juniper smoke in the background is the cultural key to the image.
Maybe in travel photography, it’s just that everything is turned around the other way ̶ where the purpose of the image is to communicate the where, what and who of a moment, that can then have added to it a “decisive moment” when everything is merged into a transcendent whole. To illustrate these thoughts, I will talk about a series of shots I took a couple of years ago while in Tibet, mostly in Lhasa.
By understanding what you want to say in an image, you can make all the necessary decisions at the time of shooting. Once you have identified the subject, you can then choose the appropriate lens, aperture, shutter speed and exposure. All of these things can change when you change your subject, as can be seen by comparing Barkhor street one and two.
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Barkhor Square 2 Canon EOS 5D Mark III, EF 24-70mm f/4 IS USM Focal length 70 mm f/8, 1/800 ISO 100 By physically moving in closer, zooming in with my lens to 70 mm and standing up straight, I have changed the whole dynamic of the image. Now she is no longer as dominant and more involved in the scene. The background now appears closer to her and is even more out of focus.
