Travel Photography for Beginners

You’ve booked a trip to a place you’ve always wanted to see, bought a decent camera, and took plenty of photos when you got there, but somewhere they didn’t come out as well as you’d hoped. Sound familiar? Landing great travel photos is a lot harder than it seems. But with a little patience, practice and know-how, you too can come home with photos you’re proud of—photos that capture a bit of the essence of what you experienced. Here are a few tips to help get the best out of your photography.

Basic Elements

The things you need to know to get started.

Get to Know Your Camera

Whether you’re shooting with a high-end mirrorless, a DSLR, a compact travel camera, or just your smartphone, learning how your camera works is a key step in getting better photographs. These days, most cameras have different modes—aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual being the most important. Take some time to learn what these are and when to use them. If you’re new to photography, try starting out with aperture priority first. It’s a very easy mode to learn. Learning how to do burst mode and bracketing are two other really helpful features to learn.

Make Photography a Priority

It doesn’t need to be your only priority, but you’re far more likely to great photos if you focus on your photography. (Pun intended.) Most tourists visit sites at the worst times for shooting (i.e. high noon). They also don’t tend to linger. If you want great shots, you’re going to need to linger, wander, get up early, stay out late, and chase the light (i.e. the golden and blue hour). It’s also important to always have your camera on you, so you don’t miss the serendipitous moments that come up.

Aligning your subject off-center on one of the “thirds” of your image will often produce a more pleasing result than centering them.

Learn Some Basic Composition Techniques

Learning to compose your shots well will go a long way to improving your shots. The rule of thirds is an especially helpful guideline, as is using leading lines, learning what elements have the most visual weight (and where to put them), framing, juxtaposition, and depth of field. Of course, you don’t need to always follow the rules of good composition—they’re just guidelines—but know why you’re choosing to follow them or not. That’s a part of the art of photography and the way you can put your individual stamp onto your photos.

Market captured during the blue hour

Chase the Light

Good photography is especially dependent on having good lighting. For outdoor shots, this means shooting during the golden hour (the hour right after sunrise or right before sunset), the blue hour (the hour right before sunrise and just after sunset), overcast days, or capturing the light right before, during, and after storms. The worst times to shoot are when the sun’s high in the sky and unfiltered. (Unfortunately, this is when most tourist activities happen.) Many serious photographers get up before dawn, take a nap in the midday, and then come back out a few hours before sunset. You don’t have to be quite that committed, of course, but it will make a difference to set some time aside to find that sweet spot of light.

The Culture Conundrum

The next step in upping your photography game is to learn what makes a great photo. The most impactful travel photos aren’t necessarily the ones that are the most technically correct. They’re the ones that capture something of the human spirit, reveal something of life inherent in the place you’re visiting. Here are a few tips on how to do that.

Find scenes that capture a sense of life and story

Learn to See the Story

Ever looked through a friend’s travel photography (or your own) and found yourself somewhat bored? On the other hand, ever see a photo that makes you came back to it over and over again? One that stirs something inside you? The difference between the two sometimes has to do with beauty alone, but more often it’s that there’s some sort of story implicit or explicit in the subject matter. The human mind is hard-wired to respond to stories, and even the most ordinary of situations can be transformed into something interesting if there’s an implied story in it.

Finding the story in a situation and/or composing your shot so that there’s a story implied isn’t automatic for everyone. And it especially can’t be done in a hurry. It takes practice, some degree of training your eye, and the willingness to sit and observe what’s happening around you. Of course, there will be moments when a story-filled shot will just drop in front of you (and have your camera ready when that happens), but to consistently capture the story in the life around you, you’ll need to cultivate an awareness of it.

Dive into the Culture

This might seem like a no brainer, but the more removed you stay from a culture and the people in particular, the less real (and the stereotypical) your photography is likely to be. Spend time with the locals, even if you don’t speak the same language. And remember, people are not tourist attractions—it’s important to always treat them with respect, ask for consent before taking photos/posting photos on social media, and learn the cultural faux pas. Also, the more time you spend with people, the more you’ll gain their trust and the easier it will be to get interesting shots of their life. If you tend to travel with a full itinerary, see if you can create a trip or two that has time to spend in different places—at least a couple of days in each spot.

What Out for Stereotypes

It’s easy to go to a foreign culture and see what our Western minds have been trained to see (and photograph that), but the more interesting stories (and the more real-to-life ones) will probably not be ones you came in expecting. If you’re looking for postcard shots of famous sites, go for it! But take the time to look at things that aren’t normally looked at by tourists. There’s a lot more complexity in a place and its culture than what we’ve learned to expect.

Learn How to Edit

Contrary to the belief of some, there’s no such thing as a “pure” photo. Your camera settings make editing choices for you before you even hit the shutter button. Learning to edit with editing software just makes sure that the choices your camera was set to were the ones you want. It also allows you to fix things like leveling the horizon (super important!), cropping, removing lens dust or other blemishes, or even removing the pesky tourist that jumped into your shot at the last minute. There are, of course, a thousand and one editing programs out there. The industry standard is Adobe Lightroom, but it comes with a steep learning curve and a monthly subscription. If you’re not already into the Adobe ecosystem, there are different photo editing software for any skill level and budget – even automatic photo enhancer for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time editing photos.If you’re not traveling with a laptop, but rely instead on your smartphone, Snapseed is the traveler’s app of choice. It’s super easy to use and does an amazing job. Whichever you choose, make sure you spend some time learning what basic things you might need to do to your photos and how your program goes about it.

In the end, the quality of photos you take home with you will depend on how much time you put into your photography. So practice, keep learning and remember to have fun. Your photography will be better for it.