Over the past 13 months, I have actually been taking a trip the world, going to and photographing lots of beautiful landscapes and cityscapes. But how did I discover all those photogenic locations? A couple of months back, I wrote an article about how to level up your photography through scouting and checking out new places. But to accomplish a great balance while traveling, you must also have a base of known image spots readily available. In this post, I demonstrate how I discover and arrange those.
It’s nearly impossible to prepare a picture travel of a number of months from start to complete. If you travel frequently, you know that, even for much shorter trips, you need to remain flexible and react to the conditions as they unfold. If you plan a travel path that’s too particular and time-constrained, you’ll miss out on numerous photo opportunities.
It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have the places you want to go to drawn up somehow. It likewise does not injured to go into the details and prepare a timeline. However be prepared to make changes throughout your travels and allow yourself to react to the weather condition and other unforeseeable occasions.
I attain this flexibility by separating the research study of image areas from the planning of my travels. The search for photo areas is a continuous undertaking, while planning my travels occurs a few weeks and sometimes months before starting a journey. I generally develop a rough overview for an image tour prior to I reserve my flights, and then improve the preparation up until and throughout the journey.
Image Area Database
Among the most fundamental parts of online or on-site location searching is arranging the information. There are several ways to do this, consisting of developing personalized maps through Google My Maps. I used this technique a couple of years ago. However the data is not available offline, and the more maps I included, the more complicated it ended up being.
That’s why I changed to Microsoft OneNote as my photo area database. It uses a great way to organize image locations, connect those to image travels, and sync the data in between various devices. This information is then also functional offline. Including OneNote to my preparation workflow has actually been a game-changer.
Inside OneNote, I keep a folder called “Locations” in which I produce extra folders for various countries. I have at least a “Locations Summary” page in each of those. It is where I initially gather potential image spots as I come across them while checking out different photo-sharing platforms, travel short articles, and other sources of motivation. The list I keep there can be a bit disorderly initially. But I go through these pages frequently and improve them.
For some locations, I add handy links ideal inside the “Locations Summary.” For others, I create devoted pages, as you can see in the screenshot listed below. Those devoted pages include the collaborates of the location along with a Google Maps link. If I am online, the link takes me to Google Maps. If I’m offline, this will not work. I can then copy the collaborates over to Google Maps. I keep offline maps for the places I take a trip to, so I constantly discover the photo spots, even if I do not have internet.
In addition to those collaborates, I also mark image areas on Google Maps. To do this, click the area inside Google Maps. In the details windows that will appear, press the “Save” button and pick the default “Starred locations” list, or produce a custom list. A marker for the location will appear on the map. Those will likewise show up inside offline maps.
It’s likewise useful to include information about hikes, the best times to check out, and links to further information on such a details page. A great source of such info is Locationscout. There I can get photography tips for popular and likewise some lesser-known locations, consisting of exact coordinates. You can also add pictures to your database. The OneNote clipper is a web browser plugin that’ll assist you with that. I show how to set up and use it in the function video.
Preparation a Photo Journey
A growing and detailed database of image areas is an excellent foundation for planning a picture trip. For such strategies, I developed a “Travels” folder next to the “Locations” folder in OneNote. There I include pages for the journeys I’m preparing. I’ll have my list of things to do before a journey, like reserving hotels, flights, trains, and other transportation. I usually also produce a picture itinerary for the trip. Depending on the length of the travel, I select places for the nation I’m going to from the areas list and combine them into a route.
The fantastic aspect of OneNote is that it allows you to create internal links between different areas. If you produce a travel plan of the locations you want to visit, you can link those places to the information pages you currently have inside the areas folder. Now is also a time to fine-tune those if you discover they lack vital information.
In the start, I was discussing versatility throughout a picture trip. If your travel plan doesn’t exercise for some factor, you search the list of photo places inside the areas folder for alternatives. Ideally, this list needs to include more photo spots than the ones that made it into your itinerary.
With a strong database, you may not even have to create an itinerary for your journeys. While traveling through Asia for 3 months in 2015, I visited three countries. Besides picking those nations, there wasn’t much prior preparation besides reserving the first flights and hotels. The itinerary was an operate in development during the journey, with a lookout of one or two weeks, which allowed me to book transport and accommodation. To do this, I leaned heavily on the areas list I had actually produced during the months and years before the travel. Extra research study was likewise involved given that my database wasn’t good enough yet. But it provided me an excellent start.
Conclusion
Even if you have produced a database of known image areas, do not forget to try to find new places. The pleasure of photography, a minimum of for me, is the discovery of scenes I have not seen photographed before. In another article, I share one method of finding those.
And do not forget to add those new places to your database. Who knows, sooner or later you might return, and after that you’ll have the ability to pick from an even richer selection of scenes to picture.
I ought to likewise mention that OneNote is not the only note-taking app you can utilize to develop such a database. My preference doesn’t need to be yours, so do your research and discover the option that finest matches your needs and workflows.