What to photograph when you travel
If you are traveling, or living abroad, I URGE you: take pictures of daily life stuff. Touristy shots are great, but the majority of your most treasured memories AREN’T going to have happened at famous landmarks. And if they did happen at famous landmarks, they probably didn’t happen right while you were looking directly AT the landmark, but at the scenery around it. So if you’re photographing landmarks, photograph the surrounding sights too. What’s at your back when you gaze at that famous statue or riverfront? What’s to your right, your left? Take photos of that too.
But when I say, take photos of daily life stuff, I mean places that YOU go in your daily life – not just locals going about theirs (though that’s good too), but we’re aiming for snapshots of the scenery that set the backdrop for YOUR personal “movie,” the moving picture story that reveals you becoming who you are. Immortalize the sights that made this city so important in your memory. Stuff like…
Your hostel’s lounge area. Your front porch. The place where you routinely did your laundry. The vendor on the street who sells the fried dough sticks you eat for breakfast on sunny mornings. The park where you had memorable conversations with a dear friend. The post office you made frequent trips to to send postcards home to family and friends. Random shots along the walk to work (or random shots along the path back to home from wherever you frequently went). Your favorite cafes, inside and out, where you spent so much time writing. The table where a friend improvised a coughing remedy for you when you were sick and neither of you could read the language on any of the medicines in town. The convenience store you always hit up for late-night snacks; you will want to remember what 4:00am looked like. The view from the window at your left during all those countless hours you spent at the library doing research for weeks on end; you will want to remember this window because this was where you glanced to rest your eyes or watch how quickly day was fading into dusk.
Take pictures that focus in on small details. Not just your favorite dish, but the pitted surface of the ancient, wooden table. Not just the facade of your favorite bakery, but the bricks or cobblestones on the sidewalk in front of it, or the tile under your feet when you step inside. Details like the texture of furniture, the patterns on seats or windows on the train, the plants in a garden that you loved. You’d be amazed at how easily even these small, frequently overlooked details can catapult you into some beautifully vivid reverie.
If you can include meaningful people in these photographs, all the better, faces you will be surprised to realize you miss (or maybe you won’t be surprised; you knew you’d miss them): the man who worked at the front desk of your building. The lady you bought lunch from every day, who taught you some phrases while she grilled your sandwiches. The fruit vendor who valued your regular business and occasionally gave you freebies, like the best strawberry you ever tasted in your life.
And on that note, photographs of memories rich with sensory detail – smells, flavors, sounds – are even more intense. Take these.
When you leave, it won’t be the museums and monuments that you miss. It will be the sidewalks and alleyways, the trees, the places where you holed up on rainy afternoons with a hot drink, the spaces where you entertained friends or met new ones.
When you come home and start missing those “small” places, you won’t be able to satisfy your nostalgia by browsing other people’s pictures on the web because no one else will have taken these same photos you will have been inspired to take. They will have been busy documenting the same old landmarks that everyone has 100 shots of apiece.
So take pictures of the small places for yourself. These will be your most treasured mementos. All told, the simplest things are usually the most special.
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