Travel Photography How To

While nothing beats practice and time spent in the field waiting for perfect light, there are a few essential tools that should be found in every landscape photographer’s bag. These photo accessories might not be as exciting as that new camera we all dream of, but they will help you take your photography to the next level much quicker than upping your megapixel count.

What makes a great travel photo? Many things, of course, but we’ve found the best images always tell some sort of story. For this assignment, we weren’t simply looking for pretty pictures from a vacation. Beautiful photos are all well and good but they’re a dime a dozen these days. Instead, we were seeking unique travel photos that included some interesting elements in the frame to give a sense of place or context. We wanted to imagine we were standing right beside the photographer, whether they were taking a photo on a dusty street in Marrakesh, or turning their camera toward a vast plain in Montana. While neither of those locales are featured in our 10 favorite images from readers, the places that are presented here look pretty awesome.

On a recent trip to Jordan I was going through my nightly routine of cleaning the cameras’ sensors and backing up the day’s shoot when it came to me that these two exercises in what you might call preventive maintenance—keeping dust off the sensors and making sure my pictures are safe—are among the things that concern me most as a professional travel photographer.

In terms of extreme locations, you can’t pick a place much more remote than the Falkland Islands. Located 300 miles off the tip of Argentina in the South Atlantic Ocean, the Falkland Islands consists of two main isles—East and West Falkland Islands, plus 776 smaller islets, covering 4,700 square miles.

It wasn’t long ago that I began to notice I had competition—and I’m not talking about other travel photographers.

The idea of flying above the earth in a craft composed of a wicker basket and a large balloon lifted by heated air and at the mercy of air current and vectors has always been a subject of wonder and fascination. Indeed, it was the first method by which humans went aloft, a sensation witnessed by amazed crowds in Paris way back in 1783. Fast forward 232 years later, and add hundreds of balloons more, and you get a sense of the thrill you can experience at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, held this year from October 3-11 in New Mexico.