No, I’m not talking about some weird variation of drive by shooting for malls or that European phenomena of pedestrianized city centres (or some poor joke about the events in Ferguson). But an approach to taking photos whilst on holiday with you family.

When holidaying with family the opportunity to work out the best location to get your shot, adjust you exposure, aperture and so on doesn’t exist – your other half doesn’t want to stand around for ages and you’re trying to keep track of your children.

But at the same time you don’t want to be reduced to taking ‘snaps’. Now, a lot of photography books would say you split your time go persue the photography whilst the rest of the family are chilling etc. Which is all well and good, but with a young family not so easy, and what about when you’ve spent an hour driving somewhere. Are you really going to drive back to where you’re staying, turn around and drive back?

So the approach I’ve taken to have a sense of the sort of pictures that you might want to take.  Look ahead to where you’re walking/travelling and try ‘steer’ things in the direction that would give you the best chances of an acceptable picture.  Have you camera prepared in terms of settings – that may mean relying on preconfigured modes or settings, or just quickly flicking between the different modes to get different depths of field etc.  Have a stab at setting the focus to be roughly what you’ll want as you approach your subject.  Don’t set the focus to be too tight – in the world of digital you can then crop and tweak any slight angle challenges (yes for the old  school – that is cheating, but cheat a little or no photo?).

When taking the picture – with a digital SLR you might was well have the camera on multi frame shutter and bracketing modes. At the end of the day you can bin the bad frames to free up storage on you memory stick.  Not to mention a multi-gig USB card these days is cheaper than a reasonable role of quality negative now, so be trigger happy with your young children etc you’re likely only get one crack at the photos.  All of this means you’ll probably got through 6 or 8 frames for every photo you’re going to consider passable.
    

Of course there is nothing wrong with snaps – a chance to pickup images that amuse, like this … Hopefully you might find some other images you like at http://photos.mp3monster.org