One of the most important aspects of travel photography is maximizing your shooting time, especially if you’re only there for a short time and it’s a speculative trip rather than an assignment. It all comes down to planning and on this last trip to Malta I had one, sketchy in places, but a plan nonetheless. Fortuitously mine was the first bag to appear on the luggage carousel at the airport so by the time the last bag was appearing from the hidden depths of the baggage handling monster,  I was on my way out the airport heading straight to my lodgings for the next 3 nights and prepping my gear as we traveled. 

On arrival, I unpacked my Think Tank Airport International, loaded up my LowePro S&F gear, and headed straight out to shoot number 1 on the list, which was the nearby town of Zejtun. I knew from experience that around early afternoon the streets would be fairly quiet. I knew the light wouldn't be great (far from it), but the other option was to take a load off, knock back a Cisk or two and chill out for a couple of hours, but what would be the point of that? I was there to shoot, not to holiday! I figured in advance that the light was going to be harsh with a capital H, and that my best chance of getting anything close to usable imagery was to shoot HDR. Also being that it was just so damn bright, I could easily bracket without a tripod. So that's what I did.

So here are a few more samples created using Photomatix -the alignment algorithms are now so good pretty much all the HDR sequences I shot handheld have sequenced beautifully.

More to come.....