Travel Photography Made Easy: Tips for Unforgettable Vacation Pictures

Do you also love pulling out your smartphone to snap vacation pictures during your travels? Or do you prefer to travel with a compact camera to capture wonderful photos?

No matter what type of travel photographer you are: With our travel photography guide, you'll definitely take great pictures on your next vacation. Enjoy our photography tips for perfect vacation pictures.

Different countries, different customs. Research your destination before your planned trip. Are there areas where it's better to avoid using an expensive camera equipment as a tourist? How do people react to tourists with a camera ready? These are all important aspects of travel photography.

Even if you are usually greeted with a smile: Not everywhere is it appreciated when strangers take photos. We mention this point explicitly at the beginning because we've experienced uncomfortable situations while photographing during our travels.

By the way: With a good smartphone, you can capture great photos or even videos - for Instagram, for instance - in many situations. The advantage: Compared to a camera with interchangeable lenses (mirrorless or DSLR), a smartphone is quite unobtrusive.

If you photograph people, ask for permission first. Often, a brief eye contact with a corresponding gesture while holding the camera is enough.

Of course, you should also respect photo and filming bans in foreign lands, such as in churches, temples, mosques, or museums, and ask politely before photographing in unclear situations.

It's not the camera that takes the photos, but the photographer - that's you. The camera is just a tool, a means to an end. You don't necessarily have to bring an incredibly expensive camera setup on your travels to get beautiful vacation photos.

Even with a cheap beginner camera, whether it's a mirrorless system camera or a DSLR, you can take great photos. You can also capture breathtaking images with your smartphone. In some situations, the smartphone competes well against DSLMs or bulky DSLRs.

As mentioned above, you can remain unobtrusive with a smartphone. If your smartphone has two or even three camera lenses, you can experiment with different perspectives.

Many modern smartphones feature a portrait mode that skillfully highlights people and blurs the background - almost like an expensive professional camera with a portrait lens.

You also have an advantage during heavy rain or mist in the air (for example, at a waterfall): The small lenses of your smartphone (which ideally has water splash protection) won't get wet as quickly as the glass of a large camera lens.

In difficult lighting conditions (in the morning and evening or in a dark cave), a tripod is a great help. You should ensure that you acquire a robust but lightweight travel tripod made of carbon, ideally no heavier than 3.3 pounds, which fits nicely in your camera backpack.

One of the biggest annoyances while traveling is blurry pictures. To avoid this, you should always check your photos for sharpness on site - it's too late to do it when you're back home.

There are numerous reasons why your photos may appear blurry. Here are the most important tips to avoid blurry images.

Often, a photo is not blurry at all - it just captures the wrong area of the image in focus (like a branch sticking into the lens). You should always pay attention to focusing on the main subject and setting the right aperture.

The more closed your aperture is (higher f-stop number), the greater the depth of field, meaning the area that will appear sharp. By the way, a too-closed aperture can lead to diffraction blur. Diffraction blur occurs differently depending on the camera model and sensor, but aperture values of 18 and above are hardly recommended, as your photos will noticeably lose sharpness.

Another reason for blurry photos can often be too long exposure times when shooting handheld. This won't be an issue with a tripod, but in this case, you should deactivate the image stabilizer of your lens or camera.

As a rough rule of thumb: The maximum exposure time should ideally be the reciprocal of the set focal length on the lens. For a focal length of 100 mm, the exposure time should not exceed 1/100 of a second.

Tip: You should avoid using the built-in flash on your smartphone or camera. Usually, pictures taken with flash are not usable unless you know exactly how to use flash technique.

In photography - this also especially applies to travel photography - there are some fundamental rules that you should try to apply whenever possible. It doesn't matter if you're photographing landscapes, cities, people, or animals.

One of the most important fundamentals of (travel) photography is the rule of thirds for the horizon. Avoid placing the horizon in the middle of the frame. Often, it is better to place the horizon in the lower or upper third of the photo. However, there are also photo subjects where a centered horizon works. You need to experiment a bit here.

You should definitely consider the golden ratio (often referred to as the rule of thirds in photography), an ancient principle of composition.

In simple terms, you should not position your main subject in the center of the image. Instead, you divide your photo into nine equal squares (this '3x3 grid' can usually be activated on any smartphone or modern camera).

You now place your main subject at one of the four intersection points. Of course, you can break this rule anytime - but you should be aware of why you're doing so.

In landscape photography, which is often the focus on many trips, you can achieve excellent results with an ultra-wide-angle lens. For breathtaking landscape photos, ideally, you want to find a great foreground and an impressive main subject.

The foreground could be a rock, a pattern in the ground, or the colorful blooms of a flower. The main subject could be a vast landscape, an imposing rock coastline, or a prominent mountain peak. If you want to dive deeper into landscape photography, you can find more tips on this subject.

If you've decided to only photograph with your smartphone while traveling, there are a few things to keep in mind:

If you primarily photograph landscapes or animals during your travels - like on a safari in Africa - you should ideally pack a camera with appropriate lenses (like an ultra-wide-angle lens for impressive landscape photos and a strong telephoto lens for stunning wildlife pictures) in your camera backpack.

You have been traveling in a distant land for weeks and have taken thousands of vacation photos. But what happens if your camera goes missing at the end of the trip or the memory card becomes unreadable at home?

A very important aspect of travel photography is data backup while on the go. You should upload the photos taken with your smartphone to the cloud daily. If your phone goes missing or breaks, at least your travel photos are saved.

Expensive professional cameras are equipped with dual card slots. To ensure the safety of your photos and videos against technical defects, you should always write data to both memory cards in the camera simultaneously. Cheaper cameras unfortunately only have one card slot.

The two card slots won't help if the camera sinks in the sea or is stolen in a crowd. Therefore, you should back up your images daily, either on a laptop (or an external SSD). Also, always keep your laptop or hard drive separate from your camera, and regularly back up the images to the cloud (though this can be quite challenging due to large data sizes).

An alternative or additional method for backing up your travel photos on a laptop is a portable SSD with an integrated card reader, such as the WD My Passport Wireless SSD. One of the most convenient (and unfortunately also the priciest) solutions comes from the storage specialist LaCie and is called Rugged BOSS. On these robust drives, you can back up all your travel photos and videos - all without a laptop, right after the shoot.

After hopefully an unforgettable trip during which you've captured countless amazing pictures, it's time for the final step at home: editing or developing your photos. There are several options available, such as free programs like Darktable and Raw Therapee or paid photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom, Capture One Pro, or Skylum Luminar.

To make the most of your camera, you should save your photos in both the compressed JPG format and RAW format upon capture. You can set this on any camera with interchangeable lenses. This feature is also available on a range of top smartphones.

Photos taken in RAW format offer much more flexibility in post-processing. You can usually brighten dark areas of an image, reduce highlights, or adjust the white balance with ease. Photos captured only in JPG format offer significantly fewer post-processing options. The best possible image quality is also important if you plan to sell your travel photos.

Another aspect that is becoming increasingly important in travel photography is drone footage. With a drone, you can effortlessly take impressive photos from a completely new perspective.

Please be sure to respect the local rules and regulations while flying your drone. In particular, flying in nature reserves and national parks is forbidden. Additionally, you must acquire drone liability insurance.

With these simple tips for travel photography, you'll surely take fantastic pictures on your next vacation. Then, back home, select the best photos, edit them, and have the prints delivered on canvas (or other materials) - that way, you can hold onto your travel memories for a long time.

Finally, I want to leave you with one important rule: be creative. Change your perspective as often as possible, squat down, and photograph from below. Use various objects as the foreground for your photos. Just try things out; after all, practice makes perfect.