I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. When I was visiting Angkor Wat in 2008 I arrived with a mate who had a dSLR. The travel photos he took were breathtaking and when I compared them to the horribly muted ones I had from my tiny little Casio point and shoot camera I was thorough disappointed. What I noticed most about my friend’s photos were the vibrant colours he captured during sunrise. I think to this day it was the single greatest motivator I had for improving my own photography.
In this post I will provide you will some travel photography tips on how to get ‘eye popping’ colours with shots from either your point and shoot or dSLR camera.
Digital cameras are manufactured by engineering geeks who use colour charts & a whole other assortment of data in labs to calibrate the default modes in your camera. Although the colors rendered on automatic may be ‘technically’ correct they lack the vibrancy & are muted enough to not provide any exclamation point to your photos.
To add saturation & richness to the colors of your photos considering going into your main menu and selecting the ‘vibrant’ or ‘rich’ color mode and boosting the saturation setting number. This is not recommended when taking shots of people, but it certainly comes in useful for architecture or landscape types of shots.
Many cameras overexpose (too light or washed out) on default settings. Thus, by changing your exposure compensation (+/- button) a notch or two to the left (darken) will definitely improve the saturation of the colors in your photos under ideal lighting conditions. This is something you’ll have to play around with as every camera is different. Try changing the settings in intervals of 1/3 rather than full 1.0 stops.
Finally, consider buying a polarizing filter for further saturation. A polarizing filter is the most important lens that I carry with my kit. It’s what will allow you to take breathtaking landscape shots.
