Techniques for Professional Travel Photos

Of course for effective photos you should read some articles on composition, exposure, shutter speed, and aperture. But there are also many other issues that I have realized are very important for travel photos. For pictures of landmarks or landscapes you should make sure that you have some kind of foreground and background so your viewers will have a good perspective of what it would be like to visit the site themselves. You should also make sure that you take plenty of photos from one scene with different combinations of exposure settings and angles. I usually only find about 1 photo out of 10 that I really like even though all ten photos are taken of the exact same place. And remember that you will probably want to make sure that you get at least one good photo of each spot since it is likely that you won’t return any time soon.

For people pictures it is important to get photos of the people that may be accompanying you on your trip as well as some photos of people native to the area that you are visiting. When people are looking at photos following a trip they like to see both photos of them visiting certain spots as well as close ups of them enjoying themselves or focused mainly on their facial features. On the occasions that I have been hired to accompany a tour and prepare a slide show I found that the photos that the people enjoyed the most were of them enjoying a funny moment or of someone doing something silly that makes them look like an ignorant tourist. But they also enjoyed seeing photos of some of the interesting kinds of people that they met in the foreign environments. One example of this is on my recent visit to Germany I took many pictures of the crazy soccer fans who were cheering in the streets and waving flags.

There is a seemingly endless supply of things you can learn about travel photography, but I would say that the most effective technique is just to take a lot of photos and a wide variety of photos.