Summer Vacation Images

Photographer Kelly Clark explains how she approaches taking pictures when it's R&R time.

Article by Jenn Gidman

Images by Kelly Clark

Kelly's most recent vacation shots were taken with the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD lens. 'The best part of the 18-270 is that it's all-in-one," she says. "I might be taking pictures of my kids, where everything is moving quickly. I don't want to have to stop and change to a wide-angle lens when I want to get a shot of the Grand Canyon. The Vibration Compensation feature also helps keep everything so sharp - I usually just turn it on and leave it on all the time."

If you're visiting famous locales while vacationing, it can be a challenge to capture these places in a unique way. Kelly recommends incorporating a personal touch into your images and gleaning inspiration from other eye-catching images you've seen, then applying it to your own photography. "One of the places we visited recently was the Washington Monument," she says. "I knew I wanted to get the kids into some of the shots so it would create a more interesting composition and make the images mean something to us."

Kelly and her family happened to arrive at the monument as the day was winding down, and Kelly's husband remembered a shot he had seen in front of a different landmark in which the subjects were silhouetted with their backs to the camera. "We wanted to try a similar shot," she says. "Imitation is the best form of flattery! We told the kids to go up the hill, closer to the monument, and I just played around with the flash, photographing them from different angles while they put their hands up in the air, down at their sides, whatever they felt like doing. When you're on vacation, you have the luxury of being able to say, 'Stand there for five minutes while I figure out the angle for this.'"

For Kelly, the Washington Monument series also proved the ideal testing ground for the 18-270. "I was able to zoom in and get a lot of detail, but then I could also zoom all the way out if I wanted to get more of the environment, like the trees, in," she says. "This lens is really elevating my game."

Beautiful light can often guide your photo choices when you're on vacation. Kelly couldn't resist capturing rows of candles at the Chapel of the Holy Cross (a rustic landmark built right into the mesas of Sedona, Arizona) or Dale Chihuly's ceiling of stained-glass flowers at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. "The sculpture has a skylight above it, so all of this great light was shining through," she says. "The colors just jumped out at me."

Even though you want to take aesthetically pleasing images while you're on vacation, it's also important to remember to tell the story of your family. "My husband puts the hundreds of pictures we take into a slideshow that we view at the end of the year - kind of a 'year in review,'" Kelly says. "We'll often look for the more offbeat or funny ones that really stand out to include in the slideshow, because they show our connection as a family. The image of my son and husband at the Grand Canyon, for instance, is one of my favorites ever. My son is actually terrified of heights, and my husband was teasing him by going right up to the edge, yet the resulting picture tells a much funnier story. It was one of those instances where you don't know what you've got until you look back at the images. Plus you've got the Grand Canyon itself as the backdrop, which was pretty amazing - it almost looks fake, but I assure you, it's really the Grand Canyon!"

You don't even have to travel far from home to reap the benefits of family time together. "There was a charity event for fallen soldiers at our middle school last June," Kelly says. "Families bought 20 flags with a donation, which was then offered to a fallen-hero charity. You can't help but be moved by a scene like this - the colors, the look of the flags, the people putting the flags down. Being able to play with the perspective of this scene with the 18-270, in terms of what I had in focus and what I didn't, was wonderful. It really made a difference in the images I was able to get."

In the end, being on vacation allows Kelly to slow down and soak up her surroundings, especially when there's beautiful ambient light and a dramatic sky in the background. "Sedona has a real artisan population, for example, so you'll often find interesting things to photograph right along the side of the road," she says. "The sun was going down when we came across these bronze statues, with this amazing sky in the background. My kids and husband just played among the statues - in some pictures they're walking with them, in some they're dancing with them, in one my husband is taking ice cream from one of the figures. That's one of those moments when you realize you're on vacation and you have the time to take these fun pictures that you usually don't have time to take in everyday life."