Creative tip 13: A vertical summer holiday | London Creative Photographer

It’s still the summer holidays here in the UK and I’ve been pushing myself to lug my heavy camera and lenses around with me along with my 3 little children to give me little excuse not to take photos.

Every year we visit family in Devon. Such a beautiful place with stunning views, fresh air, slowwww pace of life in comparison to London, and most importantly, sandy beaches. This summer however, the weather had not been particularly kind to us during our stay, which meant my camera was hardly out of the bag. But when the sun did come out, it was glorious.

I decided to do a personal project on our 3 attempts to spend the day at the beach. I took mainly portrait orientation {vertical} shots that can still tell the story of our holiday. I did take a few landscape shots which I’ve not included here – you know, the obligatory beach and horizon shots, snapshots and suchlike…. but the majority of my shots were vertical. On the beach with nothing but the sea in front of us and the rocky cliffs behind, I had to make myself LOOK HARD for interesting things and textures to photograph. The other personal challenge was to do very little editing to the images and get them spot on in camera. These photos were not cropped in any way and only had a little contrast added to them, the odd exposure adjustment to some of them, nothing else.

Without further ado, I present the sandy Teignmouth beach and the rockpools at The Ness in Devon.

So this creative tip is about limiting yourself to just one picture orientation as much as possible {landscape, portrait, or even diagonal if you so wish!}, whilst still being able to tell a complete story. All you need are your camera, your eyes, and more determination than usual to search for interesting things and textures to photograph. Happy summer! Happy shooting!

If you missed the previous creative tips, click here and follow the trail.