The great thing about traveling today is that you can document everything about your journey. Whether it’s a weekend getaway at the beach or a week-long holiday trip in another country, you can easily share all the things you have seen and experienced thanks to social media and blogging.
However, since sharing travel photos is now easier, it’s also harder to stand out if you have the same old pictures of the same old tourist spots. When your photos look the same as everybody else, then it wouldn’t make much of an impact. To avoid this, you should take your travel photos to the next level. Here are some ways to do that.
5 Ways to Make Your Travel Photos Extra Special
1. Include Locals
If you want to show how truly beautiful and unforgettable a place is, include its people. Try to capture their culture, their way of life, and try to tell their story. But we’re not talking about the people dressed in traditional clothing doing poses at famous tourist destinations. We mean locals who you just happen to see on the street, kids playing on the side of the road or a new friend you’ve made in town.
Before taking their portraits and photographs, just make sure to say hello and introduce yourself. Once they are more comfortable in your presence, you will get a higher chance to take better photographs. After, try to talk to them and ask them about their life and their experiences. These people have wonderful and inspiring stories, and you can help them share it with the world through your photos. See, people are always more interested when there’s a story behind a photo. It adds value and heart compared to, say, an overly filtered view of a landscape.
Aside from that, this will give you more personal and special photos. Because they will no longer be just beautiful images you’ve captured. Instead, they will be photos with a meaning behind them.
2. Go the Other Way
Sure, natural wonders and popular tourist spots make great travel photos. But that’s the obvious choice. Whenever people travel, guaranteed, these are the top places they would go to. So chances are, you’d be all sharing the same posts and pictures.
Thus, if you want yours to be extra special, consider going the other way. Avoid popular tourist areas and try to interact with the locals instead. Through them, you can discover and see new locations that haven’t been photographed yet. Think of small alleys where locals are selling goods, a local fishing spot, little temple where locals pray, or a quiet beach on the other side of town.
See, these places can make your travel photos as well as your experience extra special. You can post them on your social media accounts, blog about them, and even add it to your home movies and it’ll always make an interesting story. And the best part is, since these aren’t your famous landmarks, chances are that you don’t have to worry about tourists in your shots.
Of course, you can still take photos of popular landmarks. Just don’t focus your trip on those spots alone.
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Angles
Have you ever seen photographers crouching down or bending in some weird way just to take a shot? Do you see those who are already lying down on the ground, pointing their cameras from a distance? Well, maybe they are seeing something you are not.
By trying out new angles, your photos will look unique and different even if you are shooting the same view with other tourists. Don’t be afraid to look crazy and funny if those poses can result in extra special travel photos. Besides, you are freer to act as you want since you probably don’t know anybody from there.
4. Be Ready
When traveling and looking for the best photos to take, you need to be always ready. You have to keep an eye out for anything interesting to come your way. Whether it’s something colorful, unusual, quirky, funny, or basically anything that can be visually appealing. To give you an idea, the streets is one of the best places where you’ll see interesting scenes and people.
See, when you are out there, you’re highly likely to see something that interests you every day. Thus, you must have your camera with you, or even your phone, and you’re ready to shoot at all times. These day-to-day pictures will make your travel photos extra special since they show what a country is all about.
5. See the City at Night
People often avoid shooting at night because these photos result in more noise than they’d like. And when they do, they always take their tripod with them to avoid blurry shots. However, this results in basically just the same photos every time. Thus, if you want to be unique, don’t be afraid to leave your tripod and just start shooting what you can at night. You’d be surprised at how beautiful a city is during these hours.
So as you can see, the best way to make your travel photos extra special is to be different. Like other things in photography, you can divert from tradition. For example, instead of a simple photo booth for your event, you may try a Flip Book. Instead of shooting straight, you can take it from the ground, sky, or even in the water.
Always remember, you don’t have to go to where tourists usually go. You don’t have to take photos like how others do it. You just have to capture how things are, the way you see them.
