The Photography Coach will give a lecture on board at the early part of the voyage covering some fundamentals. The best advice we can give in advance of the expedition is to pick up your camera, grab your camera manual, and do a little reading and practice ahead of time. Even just seeing some of the terminology in advance will help better understand it once we start using some technical jargon on the trip. Some of the features to be familiar with include:
Image Size - Read up about the Image Size and Image Quality options of your camera and make sure it is set to the largest file size and best quality setting at the start of the trip. We’ll talk about making adjustments to that early on.
Focusing - If your camera has a focus area control (usually a thumb pad) read up a little on how it works and practice with it a little ahead of time - try using it to focus on a pet or a child. In the heat of the moment with wildlife moving around it will help you get sharp images if you have practiced a little in advance with selecting the focus area.
Exposure Compensation +/- – This is our go-to control for quick adjustments to the brightness or darkness of an image. With constantly changing light and the contrast of whites and blacks it’s one of the easiest ways to get your pictures just right.
Flash - Learn how to turn your camera flash off. We won’t use flash anywhere around the wildlife so knowing how to turn that off is important. If you were contemplating bringing a flash unit maybe think twice, we’ll only be able to use those on board and rarely in the field. In general, the available natural light is abundant and beautiful.
Sound - Learn how to turn off any audio/sound effects/alarms on your camera (BEEPS!) or any other electronics you may bring onshore – again, this is to minimize our disturbance to the wildlife.