You get home from a great trip, unload your memory cards, and start scrolling through hundreds—or maybe thousands—of photos. You captured the famous landmark, the sweeping landscape, the hotel, the beach, the skyline and all the places you planned to photograph.
But as you look through everything, something feels strangely missing. You photographed the places you visited, but you didn’t really photograph the trip.
Unfortunately, this is one of those photography mistakes that’s much easier to recognize after you get home.
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End of Summer Sale
Photo captured by Romain Terpreau
A Collection of Landmarks Isn’t a Story
When we’re traveling, it’s natural to concentrate on the obvious subjects. If you’re standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, you photograph the Eiffel Tower. If you’re visiting Yosemite, you photograph Half Dome. If you’re walking through Rome, you photograph the Colosseum.
There’s nothing wrong with those photographs. The problem comes when they’re all you photograph.
Years later, the images that mean the most may not be the perfect postcard shots. They’re often the little moments surrounding them: the coffee shop where you started the morning, your family walking down an unfamiliar street, the ridiculous rental car, the view through the train window, a handwritten menu, your luggage beside the hotel door, or rain falling outside a café.
These photographs can seem insignificant while you’re taking them, but later they may be the images that bring the entire trip back to life.
Think Like You’re Photographing a Story
One easy way to avoid this mistake is to imagine that you’re creating a small photo essay about your trip. Instead of asking, “What’s worth photographing here?” try asking, “What would I need to photograph to show someone what today felt like?”
That small change can completely alter what you notice. Suddenly you’re photographing more than destinations. You’re photographing transitions, details, people, weather, food, transportation and all the unexpected moments between the major attractions.
Some of the best storytelling photographs happen when you’re technically not “doing” anything. Waiting for the train, walking back to the hotel, stopping for lunch, watching everyone pile into the car or getting caught in the rain can all produce photographs that become surprisingly meaningful later.
These are exactly the moments when many photographers put their cameras away. Instead, when it feels like there’s nothing important to photograph, look a little harder.
30mm, f/2.8, 1/500s, ISO 400, Photo captured by Julian Dik
A Simple Travel Shot List
On your next trip, try capturing at least one photograph of the big scene, the people you’re traveling with, an interesting detail, the journey between locations, the environment around you, something unexpected and one quiet everyday moment.
You don’t need hundreds of photographs in each category. Sometimes a single image is enough to complete the story.
For example, imagine photographing a day in Paris. You might have a beautiful wide shot of the Eiffel Tower, but also photograph your morning croissant, the Metro entrance, your family studying a map, bicycles along the street, a waiter carrying coffee, rain on the café window and everyone exhausted on the train ride back to the hotel.
Put those photographs together and suddenly you don’t just have pictures of Paris. You have photographs of your day in Paris.
Don’t Forget the People You’re Traveling With
This may be the most important part. Photographers have a habit of returning from incredible trips with beautiful photographs—and almost no evidence that they were actually there.
Make sure the people you’re traveling with appear in the story. Photograph them walking through the scene, looking at something interesting, eating, laughing, waiting, exploring and simply experiencing the destination.
And occasionally, hand someone else the camera and get in the photograph yourself. Twenty years from now, that imperfect picture of everyone laughing at dinner may matter far more than your technically flawless photograph of the sunset.
27mm, f/3.2, 1/125s, ISO 200, Photo captured by “refocus”
Photograph Something That Seems Unimportant
Here’s one simple habit to try on your next trip: at least once each day, deliberately photograph something that seems too ordinary to photograph.
It could be your breakfast, your shoes covered in dust, the view from your hotel window, someone studying a map, your camera sitting on the table or the pile of bags you’ve been dragging around all day.
You may delete some of these photographs later. But every once in a while, you’ll capture an image that seems completely unimportant today and becomes priceless years from now.
That’s because great travel photography isn’t only about showing where you went. It’s about remembering what it felt like to be there.
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