7 Tips for Photographing Monuments

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The great thing about visiting monuments is that they offer so much scope for taking exceptional photographs. They don’t wiggle about like children or freeze into grotesque ‘camera smiles’ like those of your friends and family – and they certainly don’t complain that you’re taking too long over your shot!

Monuments are timeless. And they make superb subjects for your camera if you take care of some of the basics. What follows are a few practical monument-photography tips based on our experience taking thousands of photographs at heritage sites in India and the world.

1. Visit early in the morning or late afternoon or any time on a cloudy day. Diffused light is the camera’s best friend. And, as an added bonus, the timing will help you the mid-morning crowds at the more popular sites
2. Take your time. Before you start taking photos, enjoy the monument and appreciate its beauty. It will help you better compose your shot
3. Don’t just take wide-angle shots of the monument, trying to capture the entire structure in every photograph. Experiment with zoom and you may end up with a surprisingly attractive close-up. This is especially true with Hindu structures with their profuse and detailed ornamentation
4. Try taking panoramas to capture the entire scene. Some cameras come with built-in panorama functions that guide you through the shot. If you don’t have the feature, you can do it manually. Stand so you are roughly in line with the centre of the scene you want to shoot. Keep your legs apart to balance your body. Rotate from the hip to shoot the extreme left of the scene. Then rotate towards the right in a series of measured steps (kind of like how a robot might do), taking shots at each step. Make sure the shots overlap about 20-30% with each other. At home use a photo-stitching utility to splice the shots together into a lovely panorama! The same would work with an overly-tall monument as well. Just take the series of shots from top to bottom rather than left-to-right.
5. If you are taking photographs on a bright day, you may find that harsh shadows are ruining the intricate details of the lovely sculpture and ornamentation. If they are close enough to the camera, try using ‘fill-flash’. This involves manually changing the flash setting from ‘auto’ or ‘off’ to ‘on’. Thus, when you take a photo, the flash will fire as well, somewhat reducing the harshness of the shadows. You may need to try this a few times from different distances to get it right. Too close and the photo will be over-blown, too far and the flash will not have the desired impact. A distance of 10-15 feet may work well.
6. The interiors of monuments often have a lot of decorative detail that comes across very well in photographs. Unfortunately, it also tends to be dark inside, which poses a major problem because the use of flash is not an option why?» . This is because the camera compensates for low light by reducing shutter speed to allow more light to come through. Unfortunately, this also magnifies the slight tremors and shakes of your hands, causing the photograph to come out blurred. Since a tripod is cumbersome, the best option is to invest in a camera with good low-light capability (ie ability to take non-grainy shots at ISO levels of 800 and above). Use your camera’s manual settings to select an ISO of 800 or 1600 before taking the shot. As a rule of thumb, if the shutter speed shows up as higher than 100 (ie 160, 200 etc) your photo will probably not be blurred
7. Finally, have patience. If there are people cluttering up your shot, position yourself, look through the viewfinder and wait. Keeping your other eye open will give you a sense of when people may be dispersing. As soon as you find the coast clear – shoot!

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