Chapter 24 — Exercises

Travel photography is learned by treating a place — any place, including your own town — as a story to be told in a sequence, and by going up to see the world from a new axis. Most of these exercises send you out to shoot; several need no travel budget at all, because the four recurring locations of this book are all the "place" you need. A phone is an ideal travel camera, so it is welcome everywhere here. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep what you shoot — your best sense-of-place or aerial frame feeds your Portfolio.

⚠️ Before any drone exercise: a drone is an aircraft. Do not fly for any exercise here until you have read §24.6, confirmed your craft's legal status, and run the full pre-flight check of Figure 24.8. Every aerial exercise has an equivalent you can do from a legal, accessible high vantage with no drone at all — use it if you have any doubt.

Part A — Building the sequence (Shoot This)

Exercise 24.1 ⭐ — The three ranges, one place. Pick any single location you can walk to — a market, a park, a busy block, your own street. In one session, make at least one strong frame in each of the three ranges from §24.1: an establishing shot (wide, "where are we?"), a scene (normal, the life of the place), and a detail (tight, "what does it feel like?"). Lay the three side by side. They should feel like one story, not three random pictures.

Exercise 24.2 ⭐⭐ — The detail hunt. Return to the same place and shoot only details — close-ups of the small, specific particulars that make it this place: a worn handle, a sign, a texture, a pile of one thing, a pair of hands. Make twenty. Keep the five strongest. Detail is the range travelers most neglect; this exercise builds the missing eye.

Exercise 24.3 ⭐⭐ — Remove the location test. Make one image you believe has a strong sense of place. Then show it to someone and ask: "where do you think this is, and what tells you?" If they cannot say anything specific, the image is "anywhere," not "somewhere." Re-shoot to add the particular — the sign, the light, the architecture — that pins it to one place.

Exercise 24.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — A twelve-frame photo essay of one block. Choose a single city block or one short street and build a complete twelve-image photo sequence of it: roughly two establishing, six scene, and four detail frames, ordered wide-to-tight to walk a viewer into the place. Sequence them deliberately. This is the whole chapter in one assignment.

Part B — People, permission, respect (Shoot This)

Exercise 24.5 ⭐ — Four phrases. Whatever language is around you (or the next place you'll travel), write down four phrases you would use to photograph a stranger respectfully: "hello," "thank you," "may I photograph you?", and one compliment. Practice saying them. No camera — this is the homework that makes the portrait possible.

Exercise 24.6 ⭐⭐ — Ask, don't steal. Find a person in your own city you'd normally shoot candidly from a distance — a vendor, a busker, a craftsperson. Instead, approach and ask: be a person first (buy something), gesture for permission, wait for a real yes. Make two frames — one environmental (them in their place), one tight portrait — and show them the screen. Keep both. Write one sentence on how asking changed the picture.

Exercise 24.7 ⭐⭐ — Past the first pose. Repeat a consented portrait, but this time make the obvious first frame, then keep the camera up and wait through at least four more frames — for the person to relax, return to their task, or laugh. Compare frame one to your favorite later frame. Note which you'd keep and why.

Exercise 24.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — The dignity audit. Find five travel or documentary portraits of people (in books, online, your own work) and judge each on the §24.2 / ♿ test: does it grant the subject agency and dignity (doing something, being someone, meeting the camera as an equal), or does it reduce them to a specimen / cliché (the "exotic," the "noble poor")? Write one sentence each. Then state the rule you'll carry into your own people pictures.

Part C — Light, time, and constraints (Shoot This & Eye Training)

Exercise 24.9 ⭐ — Dawn patrol. Set an alarm and photograph one familiar place near you at sunrise — a place you normally only see at midday. Make three frames. Then return at noon and shoot the same spot. Compare. The point is to feel, in your own town, the difference the edge of the day makes — the chapter's central time lesson.

Exercise 24.10 ⭐⭐ — Scout, then shoot. Find a location in bad light (flat midday). Do not shoot the final frame. Instead scout it: walk it, find the best vantage, decide the focal length and the foreground anchor (Chapter 16), and write your plan in a sentence. Return at golden hour and execute the plan. Compare what you pre-visualized to what you got.

Exercise 24.11 ⭐⭐ — The traveler's day, mapped. For one full day in your own city, work the §24.3 rhythm: shoot at dawn, scout and rest through midday, shoot at dusk. Log what you shot in each window. At day's end, note: did your keepers cluster at the edges of the day? They should.

Exercise 24.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fresh eyes on home. Spend two hours photographing your own neighborhood as if you had just arrived as a stranger. Hunt the things a resident has stopped seeing: the odd sign, the worn step, the daily ritual, the specific local light. Make a six-frame sequence that gives your ordinary home a sense of place. This proves you don't need a plane ticket to do travel photography.

Part D — The kit (Reflection & Settings Drill)

Exercise 24.13 ⭐ — Pack the one bag. Lay out everything you'd take on a week's trip, then ruthlessly cut it to one bag you can carry for eight hours, applying the §24.4 test to each item: "is this worth its weight, every day, for the pictures it uniquely makes?" List what made the cut and what got left, with a one-line reason each.

Exercise 24.14 ⭐⭐ — The 24-hour, one-bag drill. Carry only that one bag for a full day of shooting in your city. At the end, answer two questions in writing: which item did I not use once? (leave it home) and which picture did I miss for lack of something? (the only thing worth adding). Iterate your kit list.

Exercise 24.15 ⭐⭐ — Phone-only day. Shoot an entire day of "travel" with only your phone, driving it like a camera (Chapter 22): lock exposure and focus before the moment, use all its lenses, clean the lens, shoot RAW where you can. Make a full three-range sequence. Prove to yourself the phone is a real travel camera.

Exercise 24.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Settings drill: three travel scenarios. For each scenario below, write the starting exposure (mode, aperture, shutter, ISO), the focal length, and one sentence on the key trade-off: (a) a wide golden-hour establishing shot of a hilltop town from across a valley; (b) a consented portrait of a vendor under a market awning at mid-morning; (c) a dim interior of an old church with no flash allowed. Defend each choice.

Part E — The view from above (Shoot This)

Exercise 24.17 ⭐ — Find the high ground. Wherever you are, find the highest legal, accessible vantage — a rooftop bar, a parking-structure top floor, an observation deck, a hill. Make one wide establishing frame from it. No drone required: this is an aerial photograph, and hunting high ground is the habit that matters.

Exercise 24.18 ⭐⭐ — Line, pattern, break. From any high vantage (a window, a hill, a bridge, or a legal drone flight), make three frames, each built on a different §24.5 element: one organized by a strong line (a road, river, or path leading through), one by pattern/texture (repetition — roofs, cars, rows) with a single break in it, and one where a shadow is the subject. Shoot near golden hour for the third.

Exercise 24.19 ⭐⭐ — The nadir challenge. Get directly above something with a clear pattern or line — looking straight down from a high window, a bridge over a road or river, a balcony over a plaza (or a drone at altitude). Make a true top-down frame: no horizon, pure 2-D graphic design. It works only if a line, pattern, or single subject organizes it — keep trying until one does.

Exercise 24.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Golden-hour shadow study from height. At sunrise or sunset, shoot from a high vantage so that the long shadows of vertical things (trees, towers, people, poles) raking across the flat ground become the subject. Make five frames as the light drops and the shadows lengthen. Choose the one where the shadow, not the object, carries the picture.

Part F — Drone law, safety, ethics (Reflection — no flight required)

Exercise 24.21 ⭐ — Read your own sky. Open an official drone-airspace map or app for your location. Identify whether you are in or near a no-fly zone, and name every restricted feature near you (airport, military, park, prison, power plant, stadium). You don't have to own a drone to learn to read the airspace you live in.

Exercise 24.22 ⭐⭐ — Build your pre-flight checklist. From Figure 24.8 and the current rules of the civil aviation authority where you live, write your own pre-flight checklist as a numbered card you could run before every flight. Include the registration/ certification status of a drone in your country, the legal altitude ceiling, line-of-sight, the no-fly check, and the people/privacy/weather/battery items.

Exercise 24.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — The legal-but-wrong cases. Write three short scenarios in which a drone flight would be fully legal yet ethically wrong (§24.6), each illustrating a different harm: privacy, disturbance (wildlife/peace), and dignity/consent. For each, state what you would do instead. Connect your reasoning to Chapter 32.

Part G — Read the Frame & Fix the Photo

Exercise 24.24 ⭐⭐ — Read the establishing shot. Find a strong wide travel/cityscape image (yours or a photographer's you admire). Write a full Described Photograph of it using the book's six fields. Then name how it establishes place: the vantage, the light, and the one element that tells you where you are.

Exercise 24.25 ⭐⭐ — Fix the souvenir. Here is a described failed shot. Diagnose it against the chapter and prescribe the exact re-shoot:

A famous cathedral photographed dead-center from the plaza in front of it at 1 p.m. The sky is white and blown out, the stone is flat and grey, the bottom third is a crowd of tourists' heads and selfie sticks, and the spire is cut off at the top. It looks like every other photo of the cathedral.

Name at least four faults (time/light, crowd, framing, vantage, and the "landmark not particular" problem) and write the specific re-shoot that fixes each.

Exercise 24.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fix the dead aerial. Diagnose this described aerial and prescribe the fix:

A drone shot taken at noon from maximum altitude, looking straight down at a random patch of green farmland. It is evenly lit, perfectly flat, has no line, no clear pattern, no subject, and no shadows. The pilot thought "higher and straight down = dramatic." It reads as a meaningless green rectangle.

Using §24.5, name why it fails and exactly what you would change (altitude, time of day, finding a line/ pattern/break, and the role of shadow) to make it a photograph.

Part H — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 24.27 ⭐⭐ — Travel + the decisive moment. In a busy public place, combine §24.1's scene range with Chapter 10/17: stake out one spot where life happens, pre-focus (zone focus, Chapter 17), and wait for the decisive moment — the gesture, the glance, the alignment. Make the frame without raising the camera to your eye if you can. Keep the one where the moment landed.

Exercise 24.28 ⭐⭐ — Travel + golden hour + foreground anchor. Combine §24.3 with Chapter 5 and Chapter 16: at golden hour, make a wide establishing landscape of a place with a strong foreground anchor in the bottom of the frame (a rock, a boat, a flower, a bench) and the raking low light modeling the scene behind it. This is the postcard done right.

Exercise 24.29 ⭐⭐ — Travel + the environmental portrait. Combine §24.2 with Chapter 13: make a consented environmental portrait of someone in their place of work or daily life — a vendor at their stall, a craftsperson in their workshop — composed so the environment tells you who they are, lit by the soft available light you moved them into.

Exercise 24.30 ⭐⭐⭐ — The complete place, end to end. Produce a finished eight-image travel set of one place (your town counts) that demonstrates the whole chapter: at least one establishing/aerial frame (§24.1/24.5), one consented portrait (§24.2), several scene and detail frames, all shot at the edges of the day (§24.3) out of a one-bag kit (§24.4). Sequence them. Write a two-sentence caption for the set naming the place's sense of place. This is your travel portfolio piece.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 24.31 ⭐⭐⭐ — One place, one day, the entire craft. Give yourself a single day and a single place. Arrive before dawn and leave after dusk. Shoot the full rhythm of §24.3, build the complete sequence of §24.1, make at least one consented portrait (§24.2) and one view-from-above frame (§24.5, legal vantage or drone), all from one bag (§24.4). At the end, curate the fifteen-to-twenty keepers down to a tight ten-image essay that tells the story of that place. Then write a short paragraph: what does someone who has never been there now know and feel about it from your ten frames? That paragraph is the real measure of whether you photographed a place or just visited it.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each with a camera — or, for the law and ethics exercises, with the real rules of your own place — before reading them. In photography, the attempt is the lesson.