The majority of my photography takes place on vacation. I don’t usually have my fastest or beefiest lenses with me. I usually choose a “compromise” zoom lens, something that will get the job done, but not send me to bed with a bad back if I carry it on a full day of climbing around ruins or walking cobblestone streets. Increasingly, I rely on my versatile iPhone in place of a bag full of supplemental lenses. I find it particularly good at getting photos in low light museums and churches.
I produce a large format hardcover book from each of my overseas vacations. My books may not be National Geographic, but I am for that look and feel.
The print quality of the books I get from Blurb.com are shockingly good. But, they can only be as good as the source material. Unfortunately, however well composed my photos may be, they often suffer in three respects: noise, sharpness, and scalability because I’m not carrying a professional camera kit.
Theoretically, if I carried a bag full of prime F2.0 lenses with me I could get better low light shots. And, yes, in an ideal world I could invest in a larger format camera to get more pixels per shot. But, in this world neither my bad back, nor my budget allow for such extravagant solutions.
For all the improvements that have been made in Photoshop and Lightroom, they still offer incomplete solutions when you need to banish noise, or blow up the size of an image for large-scale printing.
This is why I say Topaz Photo AI is one of the most important pieces of “gear” that I “take” with me on every trip. It is a virtual camera and lens upgrade that weighs nothing. Just knowing that with a couple of clicks the limitations of my gear can be largely overcome when I get home changes the way I photograph – with less worry and more confidence.
For instance, on a recent trip to Japan I took a detail photo of a statue of the Buddha in a very underlit room.