How to Capture Great Photos Where You LiveDoug Sahlin scopes out images around town with the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD, 28-300mm VC, and SP 70-300mm VC lenses. |
Article by Jenn Gidman Images by Doug Sahlin |
Florida nature and wildlife photographer Doug Sahlin likes to discover unique places to take pictures - and he doesn't even have to leave his neighborhood to find them. "My wife and partner, Roxanne, and I like to walk around downtown Sarasota and find interesting things and places to photograph," he says. "The people-gazing is fun, too. As photographer Jay Maisel once said: 'Find the stage and the actors will come.'" |
For his trips around town, Doug uses his Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD, 28-300mm VC, and SP 70-300mm VC lenses, as well as his SP 90mm and SP 180mm Macro lenses on occasion. "When you putter around town, it's best to travel light," he says. "The longer Tamron lenses are all incredibly lightweight. Plus, even though these lenses look like professional photographer lenses, if you want to be more clandestine during your street photography, you can be - they're nice and compact. The Vibration Compensation helps get rid of camera shake if you find yourself still wandering around in low light at the end of the day." |
Read on for Doug's tips on capturing eye-catching images in your own neck of the woods. |
Don't ever leave home without some kind of camera. |
Scout for nearby locations and events that would offer good photo ops. |
Roxanne and I often shoot, for example, at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. Or we'll look for places that most people might not think would make for good photos. When we first started going out, we went out to the local landfill together. People joked, "It must be getting serious if she took him out there!" But there are all sorts of birds and eagles out there in the landfill to photograph - that's where I got one of my best eagle images. |
Also keep your eye on the newspaper or on signs posted around town for local events that could offer things you normally wouldn't have the chance to photograph. There could be an antique car show being held in the parking lot of your library or Dairy Queen where you could practice zooming in for those unique details on the old cars, or maybe a local sporting event, like a football game or marathon. Recently there was a sailboat race for disabled persons in our town. I was able to get some photos of these really neat boats from all different angles. Seek out events that pique your curiosity. |
Learn to look at places and things you've seen before from different perspectives. |
Teach yourself to look at the things you see all the time through different eyes. It's an exercise in observation. If you've shot a certain scene or subject many times with a wide-angle focal length, maybe put a telephoto look on it instead, or switch to a larger aperture to blur out the background and focus on the details. Look for patterns, a splash of color in a landscape, a different sign in a shop window, a tourist to your area wearing different clothes than the locals. |
Also look at your subjects from different angles. Instead of looking straight ahead, look up or down, as I did of the curly-Q leaf stem in the sand. Or drop down to a snail's-eye view. For one shot I took on the street, I actually went down on my belly (there was no traffic!) with a real wide-angle focal length and captured the two yellow stripes in the middle of the road. They almost filled the frame from side to side and vanished off into the distance. Sometimes people will see me in a certain position when I'm trying to get a shot, and you can see the quizzical looks on their faces because they don't know what I'm even photographing. |
Team up with other photographers. |
I call Roxanne "Eagle Eyes" for this reason. We had just come out of the hothouse at the Selby Botanical Gardens after photographing some orchids and were walking around when Roxanne spotted a snail on the side of a terra cotta pot holding some bamboo. I would've walked right by it, but instead I whipped out my 180mm Macro lens and took the shot once she pointed it out. It's a cool shot, because you can see the details of the snail set against the texture of the pot. |
Seek out the shadows. |
A similar thing happened when I was walking around a local shopping center. There were all of these crazy patterns thanks to the shadows, and then in the midst of all that I spotted a perfect cross in a shop window. I backed up and lined up the diagonals as best I could to make a criss-cross pattern that leads the viewer's eye right to the cross in the window. |
Don't call your planned photo day a wash if Mother Nature doesn't cooperate. |
Most important: Enjoy your local photo foray. |
To see more of Doug Sahlin's work with his wife and partner Roxanne Sahlin, go to www.dougplusrox.com or to their Facebook page. Check out Doug's recent books, "Mastering the Lensbaby" and "Creating Better Images," on Amazon. |