Travel. Seeing the world, meeting new people and cultures or exploring interesting landscapes. This is the dream of so many people. Worldwide, millions of people travel every year. Whether you are an experienced wanderer or just heading out for your first time, you will, hopefully, spend a fair amount of time researching your trip before setting out. If one of your goals is to document your journey photographically, you should apply some serious research into that aspect as well. From my observations, it seems that a high percentage of all those people head out exploring the world don’t take the time to plan in advance the photographic aspects of their vacations…with predictable but disappointing results.

Planning for photographing a trip covers a lot of things; locations, scheduling and equipment to name a few, but for today, lets just talk about the general idea of planning for photographing your vacation and then we can cover specifics in future posts.

First, how do you actually plan for photography before leaving home? I start by thinking about why I am going to a destination or destinations. What is drawing me there? Am I interested in the cultural aspects? Historical? Landscape or scenic? From there, I can begin to work out exactly what photographs I want to capture that would serve as a visual story of the trip for years to come and that would help to relate my experience to family and friends.

In order to create a list of photos I want to take, I use resources like travel guides, tourist information from the places I will visit and internet resources such as Google Maps and in particular Google Street View. Let’s say I wanted to be sure I got some pictures of the Victoria Memorial in London, England. It’s easy enough to find photos of the memorial online but to really understand the scene, I could look at Google Maps and see that it is right in front the Buckingham Palace and is at the west end The Mall. I can then plan what else I can do in the area to make the best use of my time and even to plan when the best light would be for my photo taking.  Maybe I photograph the Palace  and Victoria Memorial in the morning when the light is nice and then walk down Birdcage Walk and take in Churchill’s War Rooms when the afternoon light is less than ideal. Using Google Street View lets me see what others have done and plan for how I might want to compose my own pictures.

Lighting and composition with be covered in future posts, but for now its enough to say that I prefer taking outdoor photos earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon to avoid harsh mid-day light and hopefully to avoid bigger crowds. I will take this into account while laying out my day-to-day travel plans. From a photographic perspective, bright daytime light is a great time to be inside a museum!

By the end of my planning process, I have created a list of the photos I want to be sure I take. This “shot list” helps ensure I bring home the photos that will best represent the places I’ve been to. At the same time though, I want to keep my mind open to the unexpected; An interesting scene or building or a view of something that did not come up in the planning process but I’d be sorry to have missed if I hadn’t been paying attention. Many times, these unexpected spontaneous photos are my favourites of an entire trip.

As with everything about successful travel, flexibility is crucial. You have to expect things to change on the fly. My wife and I are famous for showing up at a place just after they have covered it in ugly white shrouds to begin a restoration project. While these events are usually posted in advance online, it underscores the point that the unexpected will occur and you can’t let it ruin your trip. Always have alternatives in mind if your plans change. Same goes for travel photography. If the roses are late in blooming at the garden you hoped to visit, can you re-schedule for another day later in the trip? What will you do today instead? If poor weather causes a tour to cancel, can you swap that plan for an indoor activity already set for another day?

Another consideration is to avoid trying to cram too much into your schedule. Although this is not really a photographic point, it does relate for a few reasons. First, you will not leave yourself enough time to really explore a place and that leads to lousy photographs and no real memory of what you saw. As well, over-stretching yourself will lead inevitably to scheduling problems when you have to move from place to place too often. Eventually, your travel plans will run afoul of traffic jams, detours or whatever else. Finally, you’ll wear yourself out. I am a proponent of exploring as much as I can but if I don’t have enough opportunity to re-charge from time to time, I stop having fun.

With these considerations in mind, your research of photographic opportunities should mesh nicely with all the other planning you do for your trip. Plan ahead, know what you want to photograph, be flexible and be ready for the unexpected photo opportunities that will present themselves.

Check back for future posts regarding equipment, lighting, camera settings and more…