Photography Tips for Documenting Travel
Everybody is a photography expert and takes lots of photos when they travel. But few have a good process to document the trip to organize and preserve their photos. Many people like to post their pictures to Facebook or other sites while they are traveling. We will occasionally post a picture or two to Facebook. But we usually wait until after the trip, and only post really unusual photos. We don’t think our Facebook friends really care to see what we ate for dinner every night.
Photography Books
Facebook or Instagram can be a great online tool to record your experiences. However, our favorite way to remember our trips is to document them in a photo book or post them to this blog. If you are like us, you have plenty of old, pre-digital pictures stored away in your attic. Perhaps in a traditional photo album or even a shoe box that you haven’t looked at in ages. We have found that making photo books, not only is fun, but we actually go back and look at them. The whole process of taking and recording the pictures has actually helped improve our photo taking skills.
While there are many ways to build your photo book, we strongly prefer and recommend Shutterfly. We find their services to be excellent. They charge a fair price based on the number of pages in the book. They turn the book around quickly, and the quality of the books is excellent. Shutterfly and other companies offer many other ways to record your digital photos including calendars and other kinds of gifts. Like a lot of online tools, there is a learning curve to use Shutterfly. It can take a little while to get comfortable with the tool. You can access the Shutterfly website here: shutterfly.com.
Photography Tools
We find that in posting our pictures to either our blog or to social media we usually have to do a fair amount of editing. Cropping and resizing the pictures is often necessary. Unfortunately, the Iphone pictures have too many pixels to store online. We have found Adobe Express to be a great tool to help in this process (see express.Adobe.com).
While Cos is not a photography expert, he owns a really nice 35mm digital camera from Canon. However, in our effort to reduce the amount of stuff we need to pack, the camera and its assorted lenses are often left home. We are finding that we can really take great photos with our mobile phones. Cos and Robin both have iPhones. We find the Apple ecosystem to be able to meet all our photographic needs with one exception: taking tele-photic pictures. You just can’t get a good high resolution long-distance picture with the phone.
However, the good news is that there are plenty of other features, like the Pano-feature. It makes it easy to take wide-angle high-quality pictures. In addition, while talking about Apple Products, we need to also give them a plug for their Earpods and Airpods. They are also much easier to bring with you on those long flights. You can find out more about the iPhone, and other Apple Products here: apple.com.
Travel Journal
Many people like t keep a hard-copy travel journey. Robin and Cos don’t personally document much in a hard-copy written travel journal. Instead, we document our trips using Trip-It. For more information about Trip-it please see our Planning Tools post. We find that saving our Trip-it itineraries and our photo books does a pretty good job of documenting our trips. However, if you want to document the unusual things that you have done or seen, then you should consider a travel journal. If you are looking for a travel journal, we have found some really nice travel logs at Amazon.
