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Professional travel photographer Alfonso Calero recently found himself on a five-day, fifteen-location winery shoot for a Japanese lifestyle magazine. He uses the experience to share five tips on how to shoot effective photo essays.
01 CHOOSE A TOPIC
The first step in creating a photo essay is to choose a subject. Find something you're interested in, research it and commit to covering it carefully and with enthusiasm. It might be a short event like a birthday party or a record of a person's life over several weeks, months or even years. Pick a subject, define what you want to achieve and go and do it.
02 MAKE A SHOT LIST
Make a shot list. This is simply a list of the images you want to capture, with some consideration of how you are going to get the shots and how you are going to manage your time and resources to make everything work. I'd advise using a shot list whether you're shooting professionally or just for fun. Having a plan will help you make the most of the location and get you thinking about the images you want to make before you press the shutter – and that usually results in better pictures. On a recent five-day, 15-location wine shoot for a Japanese magazine, I found it a challenge to make sure I covered all images on my shot list. With minutes to spare in some locations and some pretty poor weather I needed the list to keep me on track. 
03 BE FLEXIBLE
While it's great to have a shot list, you also need to be adaptable and take advantage of unplanned opportunities when they arise. The weather was mostly terrible for the five days of my winery shoot but I was lucky enough to get a few minutes of glorious weather when the clouds parted and the sun appeared. When that happened I dropped everything to get the landscapes I wanted. There were some locations that had dark grey clouds, which contrasted nicely with the yellow autumn leaves from the vineyards.
I also found the gradient tool in Lightroom very handy to bring out the clouds and add mood to a brewing storm. Technically, for most of my landscapes I was shooting with f8 at ISO 100 using a tripod and cable release. Sometimes I also used my ND 10 variable filter to create longer or slower exposures to create movement in the clouds.
04 SHOOTING PORTRAITS
Portraits – candid and posed – are usually an important part of any photo essay. Talk to your subjects and try to keep things relaxed and friendly. Most people don't like to have their photo taken and it's your job to make the experience as painless as possible. For the photo below, taken at Port Phillip Estate, the winemaker only had five minutes to spare. Before asking him to sit I had previously already done a test shot to check the light and look of the shot. Once he was seated it was a matter of simply chatting with him while I was shooting with the continuous shutter on. Technically, I made sure I had a minimum shutter speed of around 1/125s, anticipating some movement from the people involved.
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05 LOOK FOR THE DETAILS
Depending on what your photo essay is about, it may help to capture the details that make the subject different or interesting. For a photo essay about wineries, wine and food obviously play an important role. I negotiated with restaurants to use a spare table with natural light to photograph food, bottles and glasses of wine. A tripod, cable release and a test shot before hand were also important to see if I needed to move away from any harsh overhead lights that leave ugly hotspots on the food. Using live view on the back screen to focus manually at 100% was also critical when dealing with close up images. The placement of the plate, glass and food at the correct tripod height and angle helped create a sense of balance. For this project it was important to make sure that the bottles of wine I was photographing were available for sale in Japan.
06 DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR PHOTOS
While there's nothing wrong with "shooting for the sake of it" I find it helps my photography if I know how my photos will be used. What do you want to do with your photo essay? An exhibition? What about a photo book or a website? Is there a magazine or newspaper that would be interested in publishing the images? Knowing how your images will be used can motivate you and guide your approach to the subject.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Alfonso Calero moved to Australia at the age of 15. He graduated from the Sydney Institute of Technology with an Associate Diploma in Photography in 2001 and has been professionally photographing food, portraits, landscapes and travel subjects ever since. He started a travel education and tours company five years ago delivering workshops every Saturday morning in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Fremantle. He also takes photo tours of four people to Japan, Philippines, Spain and Tasmania once a year.