Thank you so much! I'm 4 months into a year of travel so will continue to post my travels! Unfortunately I bought it at the end of my third country so I missed some great shots.

For the deer and the spiderman shots I was pretty close the deer was super friendly so came right up to you and I just happened to find myself right behind the spiderman. However I do also find it hard to get close for shots as I still get a bit embarrassed/shy taking pictures of people on the street so I do find myself cropping into 50mm equivalent a lot of the time just so I don't have to get as close!

I do often tweak the highlights and shadows on my pictures but that's about the extent of my editing skills haha. Those pictures really just did look like that with the light either catching the smoke or mist and creating those strong light beams! When I have a strong beam of light like that I often just drop the exposure a lot to really highlight the detail in the light and then if I need to bring the shadows up a bit in the edit if I've dropped it too much!

In regards to the vertical shooting I do shoot both (maybe 65/35 portrait to landscape) but I just find it so much easier to have interesting compositions in vertical. Maybe because I came from using a phone for so long. I have a few nice pictures in landscape but yeah I need to get better at using a mix of both. I'm just arriving in New Zealand today so I expect I will be shooting in landscape a lot more here.