First define the shore, is it a beach with golden sands or a rocky shore? Each shore have different characteristics and you have to find them out.

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2. How can you best deliver it to the viewers?

After finding the personality of the shore, you should think about how to show it in your work? If it is a tropical beach with turquoise water, including palm trees or using them as frame could work. Or if you are in a rocky seacoast of Scotland you can include waves crashing to walls of a cliff to reflect the personality of the place better.

3. What time of the day, this scene looks better?

If you have time watch the scene in different times of the day. See where sun goes up and down. You’ll see the change in the place as sun changes its position. Consider if you want sun to directly hit your frame or not. Taking sun to your back shows the color of sky better.

4. What kind of weather is most appropriate for showing its character?

Stormy weather will work better in rocky shores and a clear blue sky with couple of white clouds will look better as a background of a tropical beach.

5. What season reflects its personality best?

This is actually same as the weather since seasons clearly change the weather conditions. But also seasons affect the plants surrounding the shore (if there are any plants nearby), so they will change the look of the scene. Spring is a good season to combine the blue with fresh green of the plants, to reflect the feeling of joy and freshness.

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Equipment

When packing up your bag or luggage, consider taking some photography equipment with you like tripod, shutter release cable, filters, extra batteries, lenses for different conditions or extra storage cards. It can be too late to say “i wish i brought … with me”. You may see a beautiful sunset or want to take pictures at night so a tripod will be useful in such conditions. Bring one tripod with you. You can buy a cheap, light and small tripod for vacations. Extra batteries and storage cards will help you being prepared for unexpected conditions. Your trip can be longer than expected and for sure you don’t want to see an empty battery when you need it. If you have different lenses, or filters bring them with you to the vacation, you need different lenses for different types of photography. You need a wide angle lens for photographing a valley, while you need a short tele lens for portraits of local people, your friends or your family. But my advice is having a wide range zoom lens, such as a 17 – 75 , 18 – 200 mm lens which fits almost every condition. If you are going to a vacation that includes sea, ocean, pool or lake having a polarizer filter may be helpful. Polarizer filters avoids the reflections on water surfaces.

Vacation Picture Tips

If you want to create impressive results which you certainly can, try to think outside of the box. Do not take classical vacation shots. First do not let people ruin a great scene by posing in front of it. Also don’t let people pose for the picture, try to capture their natural expressions and feelings. take the pictures when they are talking, laughing or having fun, it is even better if they don’t know their pictures are being taken.

Also it is important to stay away from cliches. Do not take the same sunset pictures that are already taken by different people thousands of times, add your creativity, place something interesting to the scene. Vacation gives us nice opportunities for landscape and water-scape photography, use these opportunities wisely. Don’t take pictures from the same height, same angle and with same compositions. Try to be creative but unfortunately there’s no miracle formula for this. But you can read composition techniques and get inspired from nice examples of these kinds of photography in order to increase the quality of your results.

If you are taking pictures at noon, exposure can be a problem. Direct sunlight reflecting from sand or any light colored surface, and too dark shadows. In this case washed out skies and too dark subjects can be a problem. You can read my post about “Preventing Washed Out Skies” for more information. Also in this conditions i advice you to switch your camera to the manual mode, if the results are not good enough for you, try different settings until you find the best one, also shifting the exposure level to -1 or -2 in extreme conditions can help you get rid of too bright areas in the picture. Some people advice using one spot metering, but i have doubts about that. Because one spot metering measures the amount of light only from one spot which can create huge differences between bright and dark areas. Lets say your subject is in the shade and your camera measures the amount of light form the subject and sets aperture or shutter according to this measurement, the sky or the background in light will be brighter than necessary.

On your trip keep your camera close, you never know what is waiting for you on the road. Also go to the places that other people don’t bother to go, go to the beach when other people is not there, early morning, late night. Photography is showing the world that people know, with the other sides and angles they don’t know.

Unfortunately i can not tell you a certain subject. It can be almost anything, the life of the local people, mountains, lakes, forests, kids playing in the pool, kids building sand castles, a surfer, crashing waves, a long beach… List goes on and on…