New Zealand's country roads become blocked by flocks of herded sheep. From Australia to Armenia, shearing season offers the photographer a chance to cover farm workers in their manic and distorted ballet of wool and sharp blades. Focusing on the efforts of a single worker and/or animal will often yield better results than trying to capture the whole scene, especially when the work takes place inside a dimly lit shed. It's easier to control light in a confined or tight environment than a vast one.

Lunch breaks photography

Come lunchtime, people pour out onto the streets. Smokers congregate in their exclusion zones, others seek solitude on the same end of the same bench in the same park eating the same sandwiches every day for 20 years. In the summer, parks in central London fill with ofiice workers seeking a quick tan. In Mumbai there's a thriving business of tiflin deliverers who pick up lunch boxes from the homes of doting wives, deliver them to the correct husband/ofiice and collect and return the emptied tins afterwards.

Factories and workshops photograhy

Afternoons can get a little hot and drab for street shooting, so seeking access into an oflice or work- space will expand your horizons. Artisans are people with a passion for their work, and photograph- ing people engrossed in their creative process inevitably makes your work more imaginative, too. Try shooting an artisan as you would do a portrait. It’s not so much a matter of fancy effects or distorted angles, but more a careful study of concentration and practised repetition. The good thing is that, be your subject a Bengali mud cup potter, a Cuban cigar maker or a coppersmith in Aleppo, the nature of much craftwork is repetitive, allowing you to perfect angles and lighting in a few test cycles before the final cut. A professional photographer will use photo editing services to enhance his or her work.

the Venetian glassblowers on Murano Island work their rainbow coloured creations over open flame, which adds warm tones and atmosphere to an otherwise cold setting. Light streaming through high windows in a dusty factory becomes angular sheets illuminating individual cigar rollers or coppersmiths; think in terms of size and scale. When photographing weavers at their loom — like in the cottage industries of northern Laos - try shooting through the parallel lines of thread, focusing beyond them on the artisan at work. Some off-camera flash, using a snoot extension tube to light just the worker, will leave the rest of the scene realistically dull but now imbued with an element of hidden mystery. Thankfully, not all workplaces are drab and underlit. The fantasy coflin makers of Ghana often make and display their creations on the street. These final resting containers are carved as elaborate fish or elephants. Some caskets honour the life and career of the deceased (a giant shoe for the cobbler), their aspirations (customised Benz limousines) or —- perhaps the reason why they made it into an early grave — the beer and liquor bottle designs. A shot of the artisan lying inside one of his creations, for example, may work well.

Every travel photographer knows that the world is a wonderful place, of mountains, deserts, forests and lands. The problem is how to picture them with the travellers eye. Landscape is one of the great classic themes of photography, and for the whole of its history it has been married to travel photography. Nineteenth century pioneers such as John Thompson and Timothy O’Sullivan set out to show those at home what distant and unknown places looked like.

Landscape photography still contains an element of discovery, but as often as not it is a personal discovery. It is a human invention, and is the visual artist’s way of interpreting geography as an image.

When the writer Virginia Woolf was in Italy attempting to convey a sense of place, she concluded, "What one really records is the state of one’s mind." In other words, when trying to capture a scene, keep it personal and try to show what appeals to you rather than slavishly follow the accepted “ideal” viewpoints and subjects. There is no such thing as a single, perfect view, only views that have, through laziness, simply become accepted as the obvious.

Wide-angle or telephoto

Most landscapes are broad views of a place, and for the camera they tend to group them- selves into one of two camps: wide-angle and tele-photo. These two treatments both feel different and call for different technique and vision. Wide-angle landscapes are excellent at showing the full sweep of a large view, including the sky (which therefore needs to have some interest in it for the image to work at its best).

They are also capable of expanding the sense of depth in a scene by including a strong foreground — what Ansel Adams referred to as a “near-far" approach. For this, finding the exact view- point is important, one that pitches a close element, such as sunflowers in a Tuscan field or pebbles on a beach, with a distant element that is also strong.

A charterd aircraft, fixed-wing or (even better) a helicopter, comes close to photographer heaven. It is expensive, but the cost varies from country to country, and also depends on the location. The United States, for example, has a higher percentage of private aircraft than anywhere else, and close to National Parks there are likely to be aircraft with pilots used to doing short pleasure rides. The very first thing, which may decide your choice of aircraft and even if it is worth flying at all, is that you must be able to heave either your passenger window open or have the door taken off pre- flight. Photographing through plastic seriously reduces image quality. Not all pilots appreciate this, and not all are willing to open your side of the aircraft in flight, so check this point before anything else.

To make maximum use of expensive flying time, know in advance what subjects you are looking for and what kinds of image you will take; discuss these with the pilot, preferably over a map, as he or she will have to file a flight plan.

Instead of hiring helicopters, you may use drones for aerial photography, which gains popularity these days.

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