I love taking photos when I travel. Being able to share my pictures with family and friends back home helps me take them along for the adventure. And having the pictures to look back over is a wonderful way of re-living it all over again. Living in a social media obsessed society, it can be difficult not to compare your travel photos to the ones you see online, and sometimes it can be disheartening when pictures don’t turn out quite how you imagined. If you want to improve your travel photography, I’ve put together five tips to help you take more pictures that you’ll be proud to share.
5 Quick Tips To Improve Your Travel Photography
Sometimes it only takes some small adjustments to turn a good photograph in to a great one, no matter what camera you are using. When you start applying the following five tips, you will start to improve your travel photography skills and learn to take better pictures.
1. Change Your Perspective
Most people take photos whilst standing up with the camera held at eye level. Think about changing your perspective and shooting from a different viewpoint. This can help make the picture more interesting to look at, as it shows the viewer a perspective they are not used to seeing.
2. Tell A Story
Epic landscapes are nice, but sometimes the pictures that we connect with the most are the ones that tell a story. These are the pictures that try and capture the moments we experienced and and the feelings we felt. Next time you are travelling, instead of just taking a picture when you reach your destination, try to challenge yourself to take at least 5 photos before you arrive and 5 photos after you leave that help tell the whole story of your adventure.
3. Get In Close
The go-to lens for most people getting in to travel photography is a wide lens, like a 16-35mm or similar. Wide lenses are great for showing as much of the scene as possible. Just like in my first tip, I mentioned about changing your perspective, changing between wide and close-up shots with give your pictures more variety.
4. Show Scale
I love putting people (usually my husband) in my pictures. Having something in your picture that can show the scale of the landscape and give it perspective makes it instantly more interesting in my opinion.
5. Look Beyond The Iconic Shots
There’s a fun account on Instagram that shows many of the almost-identical versions of the same image called @insta_repeat which highlights how many almost identical shots are taken by travellers. I’ve even met people whilst travelling who admitted to visiting a location just to recreate a picture they saw online. Whilst I don’t have anything against re-creating a classic shot (I’ve done it myself many times), after you’ve taken that shot, challenge yourself to look for something different. Something that is a different take on a location that has been photographed thousands of times.
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