Five Tips for Taking Better Vacation Photos

21 May Five Tips for Taking Better Vacation Photos

It happens to the best of us. We go on a long-awaited bucket list trip, point our expensive new cameras at the incredible scenery all around us, and are rewarded for our efforts with photos that are distinctly… below average.

I’ll be the first to admit that great photography is art. Great amateur photography, however, is mostly curation and common sense. Want to take better vacation photos without taking a single class or reading a book? Follow these simple tips.

1. Be picky

© Jamie Pearson

There’s no kind way to say this: you’re taking way too many pictures. One of the advantages of film photography was that the expense of it made us discriminating. These days? Not so much. Your goal should not be to document every moment of your trip, but to capture some images that are representative of your experience.

2. Get much, much closer

© Brian Rubin

If you’re putting people in your pictures, get close enough to see their smiles, their expressions, and even the whites of their eyes. Most vacation photos of people feature way too much sky, grass, water, and sand. Sure, you can crop that stuff out in post-production, but why not just zoom in and save yourself the trouble.

3. Check the background

© Ben Bressler

I can count on one hand the number of family vacation photos I have in which all four of us are dressed nicely and smiling. One such picture was taken in Kauai a few years ago. It was a gem! It would have been our Christmas card photo that year, if not for a palm tree trunk sprouting inconveniently out of my head. A lot of things can be fixed with good photo editing software, but 40-foot palm trees are not one of them.

4. Stalk your family and friends

© Jamie Pearson

If there’s one thing my friends and family hate, it’s posing for pictures. I bet yours do too. Some of them submit, knowing that resistance is futile. Others refuse or make silly faces.

If your camera has a good zoom lens, you can skip all this drama by taking surreptitious candid shots of your photo-averse traveling companions when they’re not looking – it beats posing them in front of various monuments and commanding them to look happy.

5. Delete, delete, delete

© Jamie Pearson

You know what makes good pictures look great? Not mixing them with lots of mediocre pictures. For this reason, you should delete at least 90 percent of all pictures you take, probably more. I recently took a series of hilarious pictures of my kids body surfing in Mexico, and weeding them out was pure torture. Force yourself to choose your absolute favorite shots and delete the rest. Your hard drive will thank you, and so will your friends.

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Jamie Pearson

Jamie Pearson is a freelance writer, a mother of two, and the publisher of the independent family travel blog Travel Savvy Mom. She regularly writes about family travel for Vail Resorts and Homewood Suites, and her dispatches have also appeared on National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel Blog and on Fodors.com.

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