So I’m planning a trip to Switzerland soon to visit some friends, however, since the country has some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, I thought it would be the best place to explore an hobby I’d love to get into: Photography. I have a few goals for this trip, and I want to make sure I have the right mindset to achieve them.
Gearwise, since I’m only starting this out, I won’t take a lot of equipment with me since I’m yet to buy a few more lenses. However, I’ll be only taking my Canon EOS 250D camera with the default 18-55mm lens. A simple setup, but I think it will be enough for some experimenting.
Landscapes are what I actually want to get better at. Not just pointing the camera at a mountain and hoping the mountain does the work, but figuring out what makes a landscape shot worth looking at twice: where the light is, what’s in the foreground versus what’s just filling space, when to wait ten minutes for a cloud to move. The 18-55mm isn’t wide enough for everything I’ll want to shoot, and I already know that’s going to be frustrating at some point on this trip. I’m treating that as part of the exercise rather than a problem to solve before I leave. A wider lens is easy to buy later. Learning to see a composition is not.
The mindset part matters more to me than the gear part, honestly. It’s easy to come back from a trip like this with a memory card full of technically fine photos that don’t say anything, because I was more focused on checking a location off a list than actually looking at what was in front of me. So the goal isn’t a shot count. It’s fewer photos, taken slower, where I can point at each one afterward and explain why I took it.
I’ve also been looking at this Udemy course on Photography. I am not at all sponsored or anything, but from what I’ve seen so far, it covers a LOT of the basics and some more advanced topics like editing and post-processing. I think it will be a good way to get a better understanding of the technical side of photography, which is something I need to improve on as well.