Matthew Botos

Three weeks in southeast Asia exploring new places with camera in hand made for some great photos. In this post, I’ll elaborate on the gear, shooting, and processing of travel photos from halfway around the world.

Gear

While photography was a focus of the trip, traveling in developing countries with a small tour group meant making some compromises in order to travel light on buses, trains, and boats. I took the Canon 50D camera and Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 Image Stabilized USM and the Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM, though the  50mm got little use and could’ve been left home. The Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash provided lighting, along with CTO (warming) gels and a StoFen diffuser.

Instead of a tripod, I took a smaller Gorillapod SLR Zoom with a mini ball head. And instead of the MacBook Pro, I bought a 120 GB HyperDrive Space to offload memory cards. All this went into a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home bag, which is very discreet for a camera bag and also offered room for the essential water bottle, guide book, sunscreen, and anti-bacterial gel.

Shooting

Like packing, shooting was a compromise between having alone time to compose and experiment and touring with limited time to perfect photos. In the harsh heat and light of mid-day, shooting became a basic exercise of finding decent light and composition, maybe adding some fill or bounce flash, and moving on. A nice complement to this was high-speed, handheld HDR. Using the 50D’s 6.3 frames per second and auto-exposure bracketing, I was able to capture 3 daylight frames for high-dynamic range images without a tripod.

The Gorillapod was useful for night and sunrise; being in mostly urban and developed areas, there was generally something to rest it on to get more height. While the mini ball head was easier to adjust than the Gorillapod’s legs, it was a little shaky for the camera’s weight.

Using many kinds of transportation made for good motion shots from boats, tuk tuks, and cyclos. Like any motion blur shots, repetition was key to getting good frames, and flash at dusk helped freeze passengers as subjects.

Though I wasn’t changing lenses much, some dust did still accumulate on the sensor. Most of it cleared with a good blowing, though without being able to periodically check photos on a computer, a regular test shot would’ve been a good idea. (A high f-number shot of a white bedsheet examined at high zoom on the camera worked well enough.)

Security

Keeping camera and images safe was a natural concern in big cities and developing countries. It was nice to have a discreet shoulder bag that could be swung around to the front in market crowds, though that much weight on one shoulder took some adjustment.

I also swapped out the obvious steal-me “Canon 50D” strap for a plainer and more comfortable OP/TECH Pro Loop Strap. That and the bag strap were generally slung across my chest, making me feel much more secure than the people I saw with SLRs dangling in hand. The final touch was a Opteka Wrist Strap, which I tried to slide into before even taking the camera out of the bag and also provided some support gripping the camera all day.

Backups

I copied images to the Hyperdrive each night using its built-in verification process to randomly check a selection of images. The best images were write-protected on the card before erasing it, providing a second copy of about 500 photos over the course of the trip. The Hyperdrive always copies the complete card, and with that duplication, the 2200 photos took up 98 GB of the 120 GB.

As the cards filled up, they went into my money belt with my passport, and the Hyperdrive was generally locked in the hotel’s safe. The Hyperdrive had gotten mixed reviews, so I made sure to test drive it for a while before the trip. But I was still surprised when it became slow and started garbling screens; fortunately, it continued to copy cards.

Processing

Of the 3026 images, 2216 survived in-camera deletion and returned home on the Hyperdrive. From there, I copied them onto a Western Digital 2TB My Book Studio II Drive with RAID 1 Mirroring, essentially creating two more copies. The Hyperdrive then went into the fire safe as backup.

Each card copied into its own directory, so this was a convenient way to import and process a day’s worth of images at a time. The 17-85 lens has some noticeable pincushion distortion at the wide end, which was corrected in Canon’s Digital Picture Professional software.

HDR frames were processed in Photomatix Pro. Though I’ve been striving for more natural HDRs, some of the scenes lent themselves to a little more color and a softer, more surreal final product. Most images got a boost in saturation, contrast, and sharpness, along with a slight s-curve when I needed a little more pop. My use of monochrome was pretty sparing; most of the scenes in Asia are too colorful to desaturate.

Another common issue was bringing some definition back into blown-out, hazy white skies, which was generally possible with recovery and highlights adjustments. Bright skies also made it clear where the dust spots were and how many days since I had cleaned the sensor!

Final Numbers and Thoughts

The final tally of 657 images surprised me a bit, though I was glad to keep that many given the photographic compromises of the trip. About 30% were wide (< 24 mm on a crop sensor), which met my goal to expand my perspective a bit.

The gear I took felt appropriate, though after carrying around nearly continuously for 3 weeks, it would be nice to shave some weight from it. Processing and publishing in small batches worked well and took about 2 weeks in total.

Overall, it was a successful and productive trip as a photographer; my skills and practice served me well, and southeast Asia provided a wealth of interesting subjects!

See the Asia photos