Round The World Tickets
RTW photography and you
If you take a one-week vacation to, say, New York City, then photographing the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building is a perfectly natural thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with this, even though your own photos will almost always be of much lower quality than hundreds or thousands of better photographers with better equipment who’ve taken those photos from the exact same angle in the past. Search the internet when you get home and finding your same photos, except better, is easy. But still, this is what people do on short trips, and again, there is nothing wrong with that.
But on a RTW trip your goals should be a little different. There is still nothing wrong with snapping the Brandenburg Gate or Angkor Wat, even though your photos still won’t usually be up to professional standards. These can be a key part of your blog or just your own collection of memories, so go right ahead.
The things you want to make sure to also photograph might seem unusual before you are well into your trip. It’s the little things that you’ll forget more easily that will be your most treasured shots when you return. If you check into a room that is literally smaller than a walk-in closet back home, take a picture. You’ll want to describe it later and you won’t be able to find photos of it on the internet when you get home like you can of Angkor Wat.
If you are served a strange meal, snap it. With the cost of digital photographs being basically zero, you can obviously afford to be pretty indiscriminant with things like this. You might delete it later, or it might become one of the most popular photos in your collection after you return.
You’ll meet people every day on your trip, and the majority of them you’ll never see again. You might meet a kind old man or a girl so stunningly good looking that you can barely believe it yourself. Even if you have no intention of exchanging contact information with these people, go ahead and take a photo. Again, it’s things (and people) like this that will fade from your memory quickly when you are a full-time traveler, and photos of popular landmarks are already out there.
The new generation of digital cameras are so small that you can easily take them with you nearly every step of your trip, and photo storage solutions are cheap and easy as well. If the line to enter the Louvre is a mile long, take a photo of that, because your photo of the Mona Lisa inside is sure to be disappointing.
One last piece of photo advice, and this applies to all forms of travel, not just RTW trips. Many of us have to remind ourselves to actually soak in the sight rather than just lining up a photo and moving on. When we carry cameras the photos can seem like a high priority, when they are really there mostly just to help us remember and share our trip. When you arrive at those Greek ruins on that island, remind yourself to actually LOOK at them and try to understand them a bit rather than just snapping a quick photo and moving on. Some people purposely don’t travel with a camera for this reason, but a compromise is possible if we remind ourselves why we are there in the first place every once in a while.
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« Tiny and cheap gadgets worth bringing | Home | Planning your route to stretch your RTW funds »
