P#23 Q3C: The Best Way to Plan Your Travel Shot

Laying it Out

Scott Stulberg: When I'm planning a travel shot I download pictures from the Web and I make a contact sheet out of them in Photoshop. I print them out and I bring these pictures with me so I have a visual reference. This way, if I'm with a taxi driver, I can say, "Where is this bridge?" or, "Where's the best vantage point?" which brings me to another point...

I do my vantage point research before I go. Once I'm at a given location I'll also go to a lot of shops and I'll look for the best postcards. The pictures on those postcards are usually taken by locals. They live there so they know the best places to shoot and they know the best times of the year to shoot.

Postcards of the places you're traveling to are a great travel shot research tool. Even if you've never been to Paris before, go into a shop and you'll see the amazing vantage points available from the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower.

You can find beautiful locations on these postcards and even if you don't know exactly where it is, you could show the postcards to the locals, especially taxi drivers or hotel concierges, and they can tell you where you need to go.

If you want to know a goldmine for travel photography, it's the taxi drivers and the hotel concierges. They live there and they know where to go. They can also help you out with models. Postcards, taxi drivers, and hotel concierges are very, very important.

Audri Lanford: It's so funny that you mention this. We were just very recently in Charleston and they have the oldest oak tree there. It's just absolutely unbelievable, and in the little hut they have there they offer a whole bunch of postcards.

Before we started photographing I went and I looked at all of these pictures from the postcards of this incredible tree. It gave me so many good ideas of how to capture the enormity of the tree.

Scott Stulberg: Yes, you can definitely get ideas from other photographers. It's not that you want to copy them, but they inspire you to try something different.

One of the things I try and teach in all my classes is to think different, like Apple says. It's always good to think and see differently.

Don't just sit there like a typical tourist -- put the camera up, take a picture, and then say, "Okay, next." Think, "How else can I shoot that?" If that means putting on a super wide lens and getting on your back to shoot with the sun behind the tree, then that's what you have to do because you want to get shots like that.

And if you're a travel photographer, you need to be thinking, "What would make a great postcard? What would make a great image that could be in a book or a magazine?"

You don't want to get into the same old habits of just putting the camera up to your eye and shooting. It gets so mundane after awhile. What happens is you come back with all your travel photos and you go, "Hey, everyone want to see my pictures?" and they're all like, "Well, we'd like to but we have a root canal today so see ya."

The last thing anyone wants to do is look at a boring travel shot. If, on the other hand, your level of photography moved up a notch and you're starting to impress your friends, your friends are going to, "Oh my gosh, when can I come over and see what you shot?" They really get interested and that's when magazines get interested and then you can start entering contests and winning.

In Closing

Travel photography isn't without its challenges and planning ahead can mean the difference between a successful trip and a photography nightmare. According to Scott Stulberg, you need to utilize all of the available tools and resources if you want to plan your photography trips properly. That means turning to postcards, taxi cab drivers and hotel concierge services to get the 4-1-1 on the best travel shot vantage points and locations.