How to take better travel photos
How to take better travel photos
Capturing the special memories you are making is an important part of the trip. Travel photography follows many of the same concepts as general photography, but there are some key differences. Here are 4 things you can do to help you take better travel photos on your next trip.
Pay attention to composition
Think about your photos the way an artist thinks about a canvas. Everything a painter paints into their work is intentional. Your travel photos should be too. This means composing your shots in an intentional way.
Consider a photo of your family in front of the ocean. What do you care about in the photo? Should you take a wide shot and get as much of the ocean into the photo? Or by getting the entire ocean into the shot, is your family tiny and unrecognizable? Is that what you want? Perhaps not. Taking better travel photos means capturing the emotions of the moment. Maybe your family’s smiling faces are the point of the photo, and the ocean is still the ocean, even if your photo doesn’t capture the whole thing in one photo.
Getting back to our painter analogy, if you asked a portrait artist to paint a photo of your family standing at the ocean, a small far-off group standing far enough away that they are unrecognizable would not cut it. Your travel photography should keep this in mind too.
Use light better
Paying attention to the available light and adjusting your photography accordingly will make a big difference in your photos. In general, even, mid-day light produces bright, but flat, dull imagery. Try to find directional light. This means that the light is coming from one direction and creates shadows and thus, depth in the photo. Try taking photos in the morning or evening, when the sun is lower on the horizon. This creates directionality and more dynamic photos. If you are shooting indoors, use windows to cast light from one direction onto your subject.
If you are taking photos in the midday sun (you are travelling after all) and you want your subjects’ faces in the shot, put them in the shade. This will do two things: first, they won’t be squinting from the sunlight in their eyes and second, their faces will be more evenly lit, with no distracting shadows under their eyes and noses.
Coach others through what you want
We’ve all had someone offer to take a photo of your entire group, so you can be in the shot. We’ve also probably had someone hand back the camera with 6 shots that weren’t quite what you had in mind.
Whenever I hand my camera to someone to take a photo for me, I compose the shot first, show them what I want, and then let them take the photo. Otherwise, without some coaching, they end up stepping 10 feet back and trying to get everything into frame, when all I wanted was my 4-person family smiling.
Delete the extras
We’ve all been there. You get home from a trip and look at your photo roll, and somehow you have taken 2000 photos. Now you’re faced with the daunting task of selecting the decent ones. You can save yourself this job (or at least part of it) by minimizing the extras in small batches. Taking a photo of the family? Immediately delete the one that was out of focus or the one where your kid momentarily looked away. You’ll still have lots of filtering to do at some point, but at least the junk has been eliminated.
If you’re going through your photos anyway, tag (and name*) the photos that stand out. When you get home and while it’s all fresh in your memory, make a photobook to memorialize the trip. Our travel photobooks help our little ones remember parts of our trips they otherwise may not have any recollection of.
*We usually include the initials of the family member and a one word description of the photo for easy searching. So a photo of Dad haggling at the market would be named D_market_price.jpg.
More travel tips
Getting your kids involved in the process, valuing their input and providing them some control will help them feel that they are part of the process rather than just an accessory
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