Travel photography is a genre of photography that may involve the documentation of an area’s landscape, people, cultures, customs and history. Wikipedia

Some things you need to remember when you are interested in photography

To get right to it:

Take your camera with you

Always

Always always take your camera with you, always

This is the most important habit you can develop to allow you to become a good photographer of landscape, people, cultures, customs and history

Get to know your camera

If you’re not familiar with your camera get to know it now!  Consider like minded people and become part of sites that talk about cameras, and your camera, groups that talk about composition. And then practice practice practice

Focus on one subject

The nitty gritty to help you focus:

One thing that I have found to be beneficial in my photography and finding my own style is to pick a subject and go with it, and what I mean by that is now that you’re taking your camera with you everywhere you go, start snapping.  Look for those things that interest you and start shooting.

Always be ready

Learn how to take pictures quickly, learn how to take your camera out of its bag and ready it quickly.  Most people are used to this as they are carrying their phone with them at all times and snapping pictures all over the place.

Doorways?  What?

One of the first things that I started when I became interested in photographing my trips was picking a subject and taking photographs of that. I was in San Francisco, and sometime before that trip, I started taking pictures of doorways. So I would keep my eyes open for interesting doorways. And then I took those pictures.  Then I would go home and sort through the photos and put the doorway pictures into one folder and sorted the others.  Pretty soon I had a lot of pictures of doorways which were fun to look at.  I could see a progression in my photographs from doorways to certain angles of those doorways, and then some details caught my eye, and pretty soon I had another set of photos which were abstract in nature but interesting nonetheless, at least to my eye!

Interestingly enough, I ran into other people that were doing the same thing.

Today I find subjects that interest me at the time where I am.  Today I took a whole bunch of photos of mushrooms, and decided to pull them all together and voila, I had another series.

Ideas to get you started

Here are some ideas of subject matter that you can participate in to advance your travel photography in your own hometown

• Farmers market photos – animals, people, products, produce
• Doorways – you can focus on doorways from around the world if you travel a lot, or just in your neighbourhood, look for doorways which interest you and have some unique features that capture your attention
• Fares – colours, candy, toys, black and white, people, feet, food
• Buses – old and new, parts, stairs, lights, signage.  Cabs.  Names on vehicles
• Fire hydrants – different colours
• Interesting blocks of cement with writing on them – look down when you travel, you will be amazed at what you see under your feet
• Graffiti – hopefully this does not perpetuate the problem.  Some cities have special areas for graffiti artists
• Mushrooms, berries, leaves – This subject caught my attention on my walk today
• Wind vanes, chimneys
• Water droplets
• Shoes
• Puddles
• Yellow signs, yellow leaves, yellow flowers,
• Rusted pieces of equipment, rusted signs, rusted metal on buildings, rest rusted pieces of tools
• Anything red – such as cranberries, red fire hydrants, see how many things that you can find the red, signs that have rust or things growing on them.

Try to plan new ways of showing off your subject matter. Create some tension. Have it falling off the frame a little bit. This will help you to develop your own style. Always think of composition.  Some ideas will work, some will not.

When it comes to editing your photos, it is better to edit them less rather than more but if you feel like you want to turn them into an abstract painting that is what you should do. At least experiment with it. There are many good apps and many good programs which you can experiment with.

Now you might say what does all of this have to do with travel photography, and it might or might not have anything to do with travel photography, but it will help to develop your eye, it will help to develop how you put pictures within the frame, and it will show you how easy it is to take really good photographs.