A person who loves travelling and photography has a great scope of pursuing a career in travel photography. It includes clicking unique pictures of your destination, including historical and cultural significance places. Not only the monuments, people, and things, but an eye for detail to tell a story through photography is needed.
Travelling allows you to explore the world from a different perspective and gain experiences. Travelling combined with photography lets you capture those experiences and reminisce about them later. Moreover, you can share those experiences with people by sharing your captured moments through social media.
Well, in this blog, we will discuss all this in detail so that you can understand the art of travel photography and how to shape your career in it.
The History Of Photography
The history of photography dates back to the 19th century when Louis Daguerre invented a box-like camera called the Daguerreotype. The device generated black-and-white pictures. It was like magic for people of that time.
Later in the 19th century, Kodak launched cameras that were easy to carry, use and handle. People had to press a button to develop pictures on films. As time passed, the camera developed into a digital device. In the 20th century, digital cameras gained popularity that used pixels to capture pictures, instead of using films.
However, professional photography was more expensive before the digital camera, as it required a lot of equipment, especially lenses. However, today, it is cheaper comparatively, as many camera and lens brands are selling equipment at reasonable prices.
The rise of social media and access to the internet generated interest in budding photographers who wanted to pursue their photography careers.
Learn more about the history of photography- A Brief History of Photography and the Camera
Understanding Travel Photography
It is a niche in professional photography in which people share their travelling experiences through stills they capture during their tours. However, travel photographers can have diverse specialisations, from portrait and landscape to street photography.
Although travel photography is an interesting field of work, it needs a lot of money to travel and involves arduous research work. They plan a destination, arrange the itinerary, sometimes travel a lot, and reach the remotest part for ideal photography.
Moreover, travel photographers have to be well prepared according to the destination’s weather conditions and must know local culture and traditions to share them with their audience. In addition, it helps them respect cultural and legal boundaries while performing the photoshoot.
Nevertheless, it may feel like a piece of cake, but as an enthusiast, one has to invest money, time, and a lot of effort to excel.
Let’s move further and learn about it, these are some points to know:
1. Learn The Art of Photography
Photography is an art, therefore you need to practise it to reach perfection. Moreover, you need to practise it a lot to master it.
The task begins with travelling to nearby cities, capturing the important aspects of the area like arts, architecture and culture. In addition to photography, learn facts and get information about the stills that you capture.
Learn the basics of photography either from a professional, or online mentorship or from the web. Get to know the things like ISO, aperture, shutter speed, etc.
2. Build Your Portfolio
Clicking pictures is just the beginning of a career in travel photography, it involves a lot of other things, and building your portfolio is one such. To build your portfolio, you need to edit and process the clicked pictures, for this, you need to learn editing techniques and tools.
Once you gain enough confidence in these skills, you can go ahead with building your portfolio. Profile building is quite important as it helps you get recognised and get you paid jobs.
3. Create or Join a Network
Creating or joining a network is significant for a professional photographer to grow.
In the beginning, it might be a tedious task to build and grow your network, but it will certainly help you gain followers and opportunities.
To begin with, to create a network, you can take the help of online communities and participate in different events, competitions, and photography tours. These will connect you with people with similar interests.
4. Make Your Presence Online
Making your presence online will help you get recognition and your talent will get noticed, moreover, you gain followers. Create your profile on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Imgur, etc for sharing your work. In addition, If you have enough budget, you can build your website.
There are other things to take care of like always keeping your portfolio and social media accounts updated with your work. Furthermore, provide your email address and contact number so that clients can contact you.
5. Gain Experience
Learn, practice, collaborate and clear your doubts to gain experience. Moreover, you can work as an assistant to any known travel photographer, or company.
Gaining experience with a reputed company or person will increase your credibility and make your portfolio appealing. As a result, you are more likely to get potential clients.
6. Brand Yourself
In today’s time, doing hard work and having a portfolio is not enough, you have to market it to create an awareness in the minds of potential clients. So, the next step for a budding photographer shall be to market his work by running ads, or by other means. This will make you reach a larger audience and gain more clients.
Related blog- Fun Hobbies That Are Still Interesting
Conclusion
Photography has been known to us for quite a long time, however, digital photography has become popular and affordable in recent years. The availability of the internet, and affordable accessories made photography accessible to all.
However, to become a professional photographer, especially a travel photographer, one should do a lot of hard work by doing proper research, acquiring skills, travelling places, capturing photos, editing them and then finally sharing them on various platforms.
However, to earn a livelihood from travel photography, marketing your work is quintessential. It helps to gain more followers and potential clients.
While the beginning of a photography career can be full of struggle, a lot of hard work, dedication, practice, and perseverance can pay off.
Tanu Bhardwaj