Travel photography tips to improve your photos

Whether you’re about to go on a trip, planning a world tour, or have just come back from somewhere, you’re probably looking for travel photography tips to improve your photos. Let’s be honest: we all look back at our travel pictures at some point and think, “I could have done better. This photo isn’t that great.”

In the end, we often wonder how we could improve our travel photos. In this article, I’m sharing a few simple tips and pieces of advice to help you do just that.

Before we begin, keep in mind that these principles are not meant to be applied separately. The more you combine them, the better your photos will usually be.

What do you mean, now we have to think before taking pictures? Well… yes, at least a little! More seriously, I’d say this is one of the most important tips for improving your travel photos. Whether you’re a beginner or already more experienced, it helps to know a few basic principles of composition and framing.

Beautiful travel photos rarely happen by accident. You need at least a minimum understanding of photography to make the right choices, or at least choices that will work for a more trained eye.

When I talk about basic composition, I’m mainly referring to the rule of thirds, which consists of placing your main subject along one of the lines that divide the image into thirds, or at one of their intersections. A small image will explain it better than words!

Photographers, painters, and many other artists have used this rule, along with other composition principles, for centuries.

There are plenty of composition techniques you can use to highlight your subject. These include playing with colors, light, subject sharpness (depth of field), leading lines, contrast, and more.

A few years ago, I was given three excellent books that I would recommend to anyone interested in learning composition and improving their landscape photography.

Yes, I know, it sounds like obvious advice, but believe me, when I look at some friends’ holiday photos, I sometimes wonder what they actually wanted to capture! Yet this is another very important photography tip.

So take a few seconds, or even a few minutes, to think about what you want to photograph. Is it the landscape? The general atmosphere of the scene? A specific object?

In this picture, I tried to capture the vastness of the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania. If you want to photograph a landscape, which often happens when you travel, ask yourself what you want to highlight in that landscape. To help you, try describing the scene with one adjective, and then make that adjective the focus of your image.

So, what is your landscape like? Is it bright? Green? Does it stretch as far as the eye can see?

Yes, this is also one of the most important travel photography tips to keep in mind. Have you ever noticed that some of your photos look washed out, lack contrast, or have a “burnt-out” sky, as we often say (completely white)? In many cases, that simply comes down to shooting at the wrong time of day (or sometimes on the wrong day too… but that’s another story).

Keep this simple idea in mind: some times of day are much better suited to travel photography. These are known as the “golden hours”.

These are simply the hours just after sunrise and just before sunset. At these times, the light is softer, more diffused, and colors, shadows, and shapes are enhanced.

They are ideal for travel photography, and for everyday photography in general.

Based on my own travel experience, I’d say you can often take beautiful photos within roughly two hours before and after sunrise or sunset. The further you move away from those moments, the harsher the light usually becomes.

So yes, I know it’s not always easy to be in the right place at the right time, but if you want beautiful light in your photos, this is the time slot to aim for.

And yes, when you travel, you often discover beautiful new landscapes. Who would want to miss a photo of the temples of Bagan in Burma, or the Grand Canyon in the United States? No one!

So my advice is to make sure you understand how to take the best landscape photos. Of course, landscape photos are not the only images you’ll take when traveling, but they are often a big part of the story.

I have also written a full article to help you improve your landscape photos.

Think about highlighting your landscapes through colors, textures, and especially leading or diagonal lines. You can also try long exposures for waterfalls and other moving elements.

There’s nothing worse than dull, colorless photos, don’t you think?

Try to highlight your subject with contrast and play with color. Focus on what stands out to you, whether you’re in a market, a town, or somewhere else entirely. It could even be a tiny colorful detail. The idea is to make it stand out while keeping the previous guidelines in mind: composition, framing, and shooting at the right time of day.

Whether you’re using a compact, mirrorless, or DSLR camera, one of the best ways to improve your travel photos is to move away from automatic mode. Yes, some people will tell me they can take great photos in auto mode with a DSLR. To be honest, I’m not really convinced anymore.

As you become more comfortable with your camera, especially a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you’ll understand much better what you want to do once you move away from auto mode. It takes a little time to learn concepts such as exposure, focal length, depth of field, ISO, and so on, but once you understand them, you regain control over your camera.

Remember: in automatic mode, the camera decides what it wants to do. Which brings us to the next point.

For those unfamiliar with the RAW format, think of it as a “digital negative.” It is an unprocessed image file that needs to be edited.

So why shoot in RAW? That will probably be the subject of a full article one day, explaining the benefits of RAW from start to finish.

To keep things simple, since RAW is not the main topic of this article, when you shoot in JPEG, the camera automatically applies its own settings and compression to the photo. The final image is often good enough, but a lot of useful information is lost during that compression and automatic processing.

With RAW, you get an unprocessed photo, which may look dull at first glance. The camera has applied no major adjustments or compression. You stay fully in control of what you want to do with the image, and all the information captured at the time of shooting is still available.

Of course, this means learning how to use RAW editing software. Personally, I used Adobe Lightroom for more than five years, and it remains excellent. I now also use DXO.

As this blog evolves, I think I’ll gradually start creating photography tutorials to help you learn how to use this kind of software properly and take better travel photos in RAW.

This may sound like obvious advice, but even if you don’t feel like an artist at first, try to see things differently from the way you normally would.

Try to look at a scene from another angle, in a way that most people might not see it. Because bringing back the exact same waterfall photo that everyone takes on a trip to Iceland is not that exciting in the end, is it?

Instead, ask yourself how you could highlight that waterfall and show it differently. It takes a little more creativity and imagination.

You might be able to move around a little, climb to the opposite hill, or include another element in the foreground when photographing that waterfall.

Yes, it’s a waterfall, we can see that. But try to give it a different perspective.

My final piece of advice for improving your travel photos is to vary both the type of shots you take and the depth of field.

Don’t worry, this is not too complicated. When I talk about varying your shots, I mainly mean switching between portrait and landscape formats. I know I personally tend to take far more photos in landscape format, although Pinterest has pushed me to change that a little, and I’m trying to improve.

Force yourself, even if you’re not used to it, to shoot in the format you feel least comfortable with. Even landscape scenes can look great in portrait format if they are well composed.

The second point is depth of field. Simply put, if you haven’t heard of it yet, it refers to the area of your photo that appears more or less sharp. One common way to highlight a subject is to use a shallow depth of field. Your subject is then isolated from the rest of the image.

Sometimes it makes more sense to play with depth of field rather than keeping the entire photo 100% sharp. This is especially useful for highlighting details in busy places, such as cities or markets, but you can also use it in landscape photography.

These are my 10 tips to improve your travel photos. I hope you’ll find them useful, whether you’re preparing for a trip or already on the road. There are many other ways to improve your travel photography, but these are already solid basics. If you apply them, you’ll already have a much better chance of coming home with stronger photos.

If you have any questions or thoughts on the subject, don’t hesitate to leave me a comment at the bottom of the article.

See you soon with a new article.

Written by Sylvain PONS

I've been passionate about photography since 2010, learning as I went along. Today, I dedicate myself to guiding others in their choice of camera gear and sharing a variety of tips to improve their photography skills.

Despite our care, a mistake may have slipped into this article. If you find any, please don't hesitate to let us know so we can correct it as soon as possible and keep our information up-to-date!