Five Tips for Better Solo Travel Pics

Traveling solo to distant lands and want to make sure you capture your adventure with some great pictures with you in them? Here are my five top tips :

What’s Your Share Method?

How are you going to show off your images? Facebook? Instagram? Your Blog?

None of the above, you’re just going to text randomly to friends or put them in a Shutterfly book when you get home? You’ll need to figure that out first since it affects your choice of subject and post production.

Make Friends with Your Selfie Stick and Timer

I find other travelers to be more than kind about taking my picture when they see that I’m traveling alone. In fact, they usually offer. But there are times when no one is around and I want that candid shot of me and a gorgeous dinner. I keep my collapsible self-stick handy, pop on my phone, snap a few pics and voila!

Or, I prop my phone on a fence, wall or other safe surface (not on a bridge. Keyword here is safe), set the timer, jump into the frame and autosnap away. Check your picture and redo as needed. Remember you can always crop and resize later.

Here are a couple of shots with the selfie and the timer:

Plan Your Shots. Don’t Plan Your Shots.

Some of my favorite travel pictures were spontaneous moments that just happened while I was thinking about where I was going to eat that night or which museum I was going to visit or (and this happens a lot) exactly HOW did I get so lost?

Here are a few of those:

The truth is, you can take the required statue, castle, cathedral, memorial, sunset/sunrise picture but don’t miss the lovely store window, school kids walking by, doorway silhouette…

Airdrop on the Tour Bus

Iphone editing (from Artifact Uprising )

Cropping changes everything: It draws the eye into the image, emphasizes the details of a scene, and cuts out the distractions. Want to remove the busyness from an image? Create space? Highlight one part? Crop it. It’s a sure way to add an artistic element to your image, and it creates focus immediately. 

Enhance colors. Saturation, or intensity of colors, affects how vivid or muted they appear in your photo. The key to editing saturation is to make small adjustments to simply enhance or even mute the colors, while keeping them realistic to what your eye truly saw.

Use the Live Feature. Select frames from Live Photo, an iPhone feature that produces a 3-second video clip. It’s a convenient feature for capturing just the right moment. This comes in handy when you’d rather not bank on a single millisecond for your photo, but instead, choose a single frame from a range of facial expressions or movements. iPhone Photos automatically selects a frame among your Live Photo “clip,” but you can also manually select your own, and convert it into a stand-alone still.

Create contrast. Contrast brings depth into your photograph and illuminates the details. At its core, this effect darkens your shadows and highlights the rest. It can be a powerful tool, so as with all iPhone editing tips, apply it little by little until you get the desired outcome.

Buy The App

Some random person walks into the shot? No problem. Erase them out with a handy editing tool that replicates the photo background. There are dozens of editing apps out there but I use Flitertune by Lightricks for the insanely easy, intuitive ways to improve your photos and save them right back to your camera roll. There’s a free version with ads but paid plans up to $24 for 12 months. If you have a better one, please share it!