> 6 minute read

Preparing for Your Trip

Whether you’re planning a photographic tour or just taking your camera with you on a day trip, it’s important to ensure you’re prepared for your time away.

Good travel photography begins long before you arrive at your destination. Research, planning, and packing is just as important as walking the streets and making pictures. Let’s have a look at a few ways that you can be as prepared as possible for your time away from home.

Researching Locations

Knowing about a location in advance is invaluable for the serious travel photographer. When you don’t have long in one place, you need to be efficient and organised if you’re going to live up to your own expectations. Guide books are a good start, as are travel blogs and Google image searches, which can all give you a broad list of locations and ideas.

From there, plan the times of day you need to be in each location. This might be to get the light, or to coincide with market days or festivals. Soon you’ll have an itinerary for your trip that you can refer to at the start of every day. Do remember to build in some relaxation time, though!

Power Strategies

Running out of power midway through a session is frustrating enough when you’re at home, but when you’re travelling, this can mean missing once-in-a-lifetime chances. If you’re away from electrical outlets – on a safari, for instance – then you can’t simply whip out your charger and plug in.

Of course, the solution is to take plenty of spare batteries, and maybe consider a vertical battery grip, if one is available for your camera. Since this holds extra batteries, you won’t have to stop to change over as often, which potentially means fewer missed opportunities.

When it comes to charging on the move, many X Series cameras support USB charging of batteries in the camera body. This means you can use phone chargers, power banks, in-car power sockets, and all kinds of other energy sources to get a top-up when you’re on the move.

Storage and Backup

SD memory cards are not expensive, so there is no excuse for running out of storage space these days. That said, we would advise going for a number of mid-capacity cards rather than a single high-capacity card. Although SD cards are available in sizes beyond 1TB, if you were to lose this card or experience a technical problem with it, you’d lose all of the pictures you’d made so far. It’s a better strategy to have a series of 16GB cards that you can change when they get full and keep safe in your hotel room, in case the worst happens.

It’s also worth thinking about backup strategies, which could include:

• Backing up your images to a cloud storage service, if you have the right hardware with you and access to the internet.
• Using two memory cards, if your camera supports this, so you have a duplicate. Keep the backup card somewhere different to the main card.
• A portable hard drive is useful if you have a laptop with you. Some travel-specific portable drives have an SD card slot and can back up pictures without the need for a computer.

You probably won’t need to use the backup, but having it will give you peace of mind in case you do.

Smartphone Connections and Geotagging

A smart device can be a great accessory while travelling, whether it’s a phone or a tablet. You can link it to your FUJIFILM X Series camera, too, and use it to edit and share photos on the move. Get some image editing software and you can even make a start on post-production from your hotel room – great for anyone who blogs or posts about their trips.

© Daniel Malikyar

© Daniel Malikyar

Your phone can even geotag pictures with location information, so you can retrace your steps and write accurate captions to accompany your images when you get back home. To set up geotagging:

• Press MENU OK and navigate to the SET UP menu.
• Choose CONNECTION SETTING > Bluetooth SETTINGS > SMARTPHONE SYNC. SETTING > LOCATION & TIME.

Your smartphone will keep your camera up-to-date with where you are, with your current GPS coordinates embedded into every picture you create.

Lens Choice

Deciding which lenses to take with you can be a tricky choice. For a regular vacation with the family, we’d recommend zoom lenses, since they cover multiple focal lengths without taking up too much space – a pair like the FUJINON XF16-55mmF2.8 R LM WR and XF50-140mmF2.8 R LM OIS WR is a classic combination, giving you a wide range of viewing angles and superb image quality.

That said, if you’re going on a trip that will take you somewhere special, you may well have to take a special optic with you, too. For instance, if you’re heading to New York for some street photography, a fast aperture prime lens might be a good idea. Likewise, on safari a super telephoto is essential.

Keeping it Clean

When sorting out your kit, take the chance to give it a really good clean. The exterior of cameras and lenses can be cleaned with a clean microfibre cloth, while optical surfaces are best wiped with a dedicated lens cloth. If you’re comfortable with cleaning your camera’s sensor yourself, do this with a dedicated sensor cleaning kit – if you’re not, then your local camera store can do this for you.

Keeping your camera clean on the move is difficult, but essential. Depending on where you are photographing, you might be picking up dust and dirt more easily that you do at home. Take a blower brush and some lens wipes with you, as well as your sensor cleaning kit in case you start to see telltale black marks on your images.

Gadgets and Accessories

As well as the obvious items, like a tripod, there are all kinds of small accessories that are perfect for trips away with your camera, from dedicated photographic gadgets to devices from your local hardware store. Have a think about:

• Remote releases
• A flashlight or headlamp for nighttime shooting
• Small screwdrivers and scissors for running repairs
• A plastic bag for sitting/kneeling on
• Notebook and pen
• USB cables for charging and image transfer (micro USB or USB-C depending on your camera model)

Your Next Steps

• CHALLENGE Do you have a favourite gadget that you like to travel with? It can be something photographic or everyday. Tell us about it on social media using the hashtag #learnwithfujifilm. You can also submit your work here for a chance to be featured on our social media.