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3 Amazing Techniques to Spice-up Your Travel Photography

Exploration Junkie Has Acquired 3exposure.com

Exploration Junkie has acquired 3exposure.com, a photography website offering lots of tips, tutorials, and gear reviews in various areas of photography, particularly in time-lapse, HDR (High Dynamic Range), and panoramic photography. This perfectly aligns with Exploration Junkie’s approach to photography and complements very well the content already available on this website. 

Indeed, panoramic photography is a key component of Exploration Junkie, and one of the things that set it apart from other travel websites. 360-degree panoramas and virtual tours are great ways to remotely visit a destination, and see exactly what to expect as you are preparing for your trip. Even if you are not planning to travel, they are a great way to fuel your wanderlust! 

HDR is another type of photography we are very much interested in at Exploration Junkie, and you can already find some tips and tutorials about HDR photography in our photography section. As a matter of fact, many of our virtual tours are processed in HDR! Once again, 3exposure.com perfectly fits our interests. 

If you ended on this page while trying to access 3exposure.com, rest assured that you will also find here all the photography content that you were looking for, and more! Take a look at Exploration Junkie’s Photography section now! 

History of The 3Exposure

The 3Exposure website was started back in 2011 by photographers Richard Harrington and Scott Bourne, who wanted to explore these three quite revolutionary forms of photography. They quickly became masters of time-lapse, panoramic and HDR photography – back then one of the newest photography styles – and shared their invaluable advice on the site.

And the advice covered a lot of areas – what gear to get and how to use it, what techniques to use to get the best end photos, and what software to use as well. Anything you needed to get started with these three forms of photography could be found on 3Exposure. 

Of course, many of their photos and time-lapses were regularly published, delighting and inspiring their audience. The site was also active on Twitter and Facebook, with its profiles available through buttons on the website. They were using social media to promote their best content and also some collaborations that they had with big names in the photography world, such as Photofocus. For several years, the two photographers maintained the blog but unfortunately, in mid-2016, the website was abandoned. 

Today, Exploration Junkie is bringing 3exposure.com back to life, by merging it with its main website, explorationjunkie.com

3 Amazing Techniques to Spice up Your Travel Photography

Let’s take a closer look at those three styles of photography we love so much here at Exploration Junkie.

Time-Lapse

Time-lapse is an amazing photography technique… resulting in a video. By doing some calculations based on the frame rate of the video, we can make things appear much faster than they happened in real life. If we consider that film is most of the time projected at 24 frames per second (fps), it means that every second of video is made of 24 images. If we were to take 1 photo every second and use them as the 24 frames of our video, then the result would appear 24 times faster than in real life.

This technique has gained a lot of popularity in recent years and is commonly used in various subjects, some of the most common ones being:

  • The night sky moving
  • The weather changing
  • The sun setting or rising (golden hour)
  • Plants growing, new leaves or flowers opening
  • The construction of new buildings

Thus, time-lapse photography enables condensing a long period of time into a short video.

To spice things up, even more, it is common to associate time-lapse with camera movement. In a nutshell, the camera is mounted on a rail that allows very stable and regular movement as the time-lapse photos are being shot. The result is very stylish, and travel of course offers countless opportunities to use this technique and go way beyond traditional travel pictures.

Panoramic Photography

360-degree panoramas have been around for some time, but the genre really took off in recent years, as technology making it happen drastically improved. Who hasn’t spent time having fun with Google Stree View? That’s probably the most famous application of panoramic photography.

Professionals such as real-estate agents, but also travelers are increasingly enjoying this style of photography, providing a unique feeling of immersion that is impossible to achieve with traditional travel photography. Here at Exploration Junkie, we are of course into travel virtual tours, that we use to bring sometimes very remote destinations to the comfort of your home, allowing you to see every detail of the place all around you.

We usually shoot our virtual tours using a professional DSLR camera with a fisheye or a wide-angle lens and a travel tripod with a panoramic head. Sometimes, for less difficult places (where elements are far from the photographer and not too complex), it is also OK to shoot panoramas without a tripod.

Basically, the idea is to shoot pictures covering the whole sphere around you, then assemble them using specialized software, and view them using specialized viewers. It is then possible to embed your panorama into a web page, for it to be viewed online. So you can imagine why we need a wide-angle lens for this. You could do it with a normal travel lens, but you would need to take a lot of pictures to cover the whole sphere!

We can take this even further by creating a whole series of panoramas and then linking them together from inside the panoramas: that’s a virtual tour. That’s essentially what Google Street View is, a giant virtual tour of the world. At exploration Junkie, we also have our own virtual tour portfolio, make sure to check it out!

HDR Photography

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. This type of photography was born because of the limitations of our camera equipment, compared to the capabilities of our eyes. Our eyes are pretty good at seeing very bright and very dark things at the same time, keeping quite a lot of detail for both. Cameras, on the other hand, struggle to do this.

Most of the time, if an area in the shade is exposed properly, then the bright sky would be overexposed – all white. If the sky is properly exposed, then the area in the shade would be underexposed – all black. HDR photography solves this by extending the usual Dynamic Range of the camera: the ability to capture both bright and dark details.

In order to do this, we need to take each photo 3 times or more:

  • one photo is overexposed, revealing lots of details in the dark, shaded areas
  • one photo is exposed for the mid-tones
  • one photo is underexposed, revealing lots of details in the bright areas, such as the sky

This process is called bracketing. The three pictures are then blended together with the help of specialized HDR software, to obtain the final HDR image.

Conclusion

We at Exploration Junkie feel very lucky and honored to have had the opportunity to acquire and give a second life to the high-quality photography blog that 3Exposure was. 3Exposure and Exploration Junkie are perfect matches when it comes to topics they cover, in what style and depth they cover them, and why they cover them: to introduce more people to the world of panoramic and HDR photography, and show them how to go about getting started. 

The best part is, that even those who already got their feet wet with these forms of photography will find some expert tips and nuggets of information that will take their skills even further. Sounds interesting? Take a look at our photography page!