Photography: plan the shoot, shoot the plan

Posted by Cameron Ewart-Smith on 1 March 2013

I learnt to scuba-dive many years ago, before the arrival of dive computers. In those days, we followed an adage to ensure we didn’t run into decompression time and end up killing ourselves: plan the dive, dive the plan.

I can’t help but think this theory works just as well in photography. Plan the shoot, shoot the plan. This thought occurred to me during a talk by award-winning photojournalist Sam Owen at last year’s Wild Shots Wildlife Photography Symposium in Cape Town.

Sam was talking about her photo of penguins being released after having been cleaned following an oil spill. She described her preparations, which ranged from practising on a toy penguin to sketching the shot she wanted, and then told how she had jumped into the water and captured what she’d had in mind.

Of course, this is vastly different from your average holiday snap, but some measure of planning can go a long way to improving your travel photography.

Do these five things before leaving on your next travel assignment, I mean holiday.

  • Find out what time the sun rises and sets.
  • Look up the dates of local events and festivals.
  • Search Google for images of your destination to see what pictures have been shot before.
  • Contact local photographers or journalists through Twitter.
  • Compile a list of what you want to shoot.

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