http://web.mac.com/francoism/iWeb/My%20own%20private%20Regina/Blog/D6FF4EB5-3981-45CC-8856-80CD897345C4.html

How many of you travel with a tripod? Not many I bet, which is a shame, because you can do so much which you cannot do hand held. Not true you say? Here are some examples :

1. Stand beside a building or place where there is a market or walkway or some other interesting public place. Set up your camera at hip height with a medium wide angle, say 35mm, put it in manual mode, aperture priority, at f/8, and pre-focus for the zone where people will walk into your shot.(I am assuming you are in a bright area, which will give you shutter speeds high enough to “freeze” the action). Use a remote control cable and DO NOT look through the camera. In fact, turn your head away from where your lens is pointed, but DO look out the corner of your eyes to see who and what is coming.

Press the shutter as colourfully clad people walk by or things happen. You will find that people will notice you first, rather than your camera. The poses as they walk or stroll along will be more natural, and you will achieve some unique images, never to be repeated!

Why hip height you ask? Because if you want a natural rendition without distortion, (bending of images, where buildings and people look like they are leaning backward or forward) this height will achieve the desired result. Also, if the camera is standing by your side on the tripod, it looks like it is not in use! This is where the remote control cable, fired from behind your back – works well!

2. Pick a scene where people are seated, say at a park, bus stop or some other busy place. Lower your ISO (if shooting digital) to the lowest setting (on most cams it’s 100), then turn your aperture to f22. Add a polarizer. The goal is to get your shutter speed down to 1/2 or 1 second. Once you get there, shoot the same way as outlined above. Now all the surrounding buildings will be tack sharp, and hopefully the people seated will not have moved. But anything else in the frame that is not static will be moving, giving you this interesting image of people watching the world go by.

3. Night shots! What more can be said.. when the sun goes down, and buildings, parks, and so on light up…this is the time to catch some unique images. Shoot in the rain, and catch reflections off of the wet pavement. Most night shots look best for definition and colour, 45 minutes after sunset, when there is a nice cobalt blue sky.

Hope this helps!
Cheers!
Frederic in Montréal
http://www.RemarkableImages.ca

Better still before you go – buy a Sony GPS CS1, I used one around my latest trip to Japan and it provided a full track of every place I visited, when I got home it was a simple matter to add geotags to all my photos by importing the logfile.