5 Tips to step up your travel photography game
Travel tripod
Maybe the most useful photo accessory you can own. A tripod will help you to achieve super crisp landscape photos during daytime and night. We use the Coolway 11.5”; another great tripod is the Joby Gp3 Gorillapod. If you consider starting vlogging, a tripod will help you immensely. Another excellent way to use your tripod is for time-lapse videos and milky way shots.
Neutral Density (ND) filter
When we heard about Neutral Density filters for the first time, we thought we wouldn’t need it and could do everything in Lightroom or Photoshop. But this is not the case.
ND filters are basically dark pieces of glass. You can stick or screw them in front of your camera, which allows you to shoot with a longer exposure than usual. Thus creating a beautiful effect, while adding a whole new atmosphere to your image. Water will become super smooth, and fast-moving clouds will create an incredible dynamic in your photos.
Another benefit is that you can make people disappear in your images; anyone who is wandering in and out of your frame will not be visible during long exposures. So you don’t have to be the first in front of the Colosseum in Rome to have a photo without tourists.
We use the ND 9 Filter and the ND 1000 Filter
Hard drive with SD-Card slot
The most significant issue when it comes to camping and hiking is weight reduction. Carrying a laptop would be nice, but there is no room on a trek for it. SD cards are expensive, and you can quickly lose track of what is where. We are using a drone, a camera, and a GoPro, so we produce a lot of files every day. The Memory2Move Pro WiFi 1TB 2,5 is perfect. You don’t need to carry around a Laptop, just take your SD card out of your camera, plug it into your hard drive and double click on the only bottom of the device. All of your data will transfer onto your hard disk. For extra safety, you can double-check the results with the app on your phone.
The hard drive has an internal battery which you can charge with a power bank – or as we do with a solar panel. Make sure to format all your SD cards the right way. The Memory2move is only reading fat32 formatted SD cards. (it does not support NFSE and exFat)
The hard drive has an internal battery which you can charge with a power bank – or as we do with a solar panel. Make sure to format all your SD cards the right way. The Memory2move is only reading fat32 formatted SD cards. (it does not support NFSE and exFat)
Solar panel
If you are planning to go on a longer hike, a solar panel will help you immensely. We love camping, and sometimes the huts are still closed, or the location we are exploring is so remote that we will not find a charging place in a couple of days. As soon as the sun comes out, we have the solar panel attached to our backpack. The RAVPower 16W has two USB slots, and one is charging a power bank at all times. So even if all of our devices are full, we still use the panel.
One thing you don’t want to risk is a dead camera battery. During our trip to Nepal charging was expensive and due to the cold temperatures, the batteries were empty all of the time. We met a few people with empty cameras and phones, and everybody was envious at our solar panel. (Of course, we shared)
Pol-filter
Another notable effect you can’t reproduce in post with Photoshop or Lightroom: this filter will help to block out light waves and avoid reflections you don’t want to have in your image. We are using circular pol filters which you can turn around and manual control the light waves you want to block. If you take an image from crystal clear water during the day and you look at the picture later, you will see a lot of white spots (reflections) on the water. You can avoid these by using a pol filter. The saturation will increase a bit as well. Green leaves will look much greener than before (no reflections anymore).
We use a Pol filter on our Camera (Canon 80D) and on our drone (Phantom 4)
