Photographing & sharing your dream trip

Photographing your dream trip and sharing it with friends, as it happens or later, gets easier and cheaper all the time. Digital photography was the biggest change in that direction – where I used to always at least subconsciously ask myself if the photo I had framed was worth 50 cents, now I just shoot. The downside of that can be that many people posting photos online don’t know what makes a good photograph.

First, they don’t know how to take a given scene and make it work (I had the photo below in my mind, for example, but had to wait 10 minutes or so for those hikers to come along). and then don’t know how to edit their photos down to just the best before posting. Sorry, but I just haven’t got time to wade through the entire 1,000 photos you took to see the 30 best ones.

Cathedral Cove trailhead, New Zealand

It takes more than an excellent camera to get excellent photos, but if you’re up for a very good digital SLR, the Canon Digital Rebel XTi has probably bottomed out now – I just got an email from CameraWorld.com, who has it on for $580. I’m extremely happy with the one I got before going to New Zealand.

There is a lot of information online about how to take good photos, and there are scores of magazines that can help. For some people, taking a course such as New York Institute of Photography’s Fundamentals of Digital Photography-Short Course may be the way to go.

To share your journey as it happens, a blog can be a lot of fun – I thoroughly enjoyed writing mine from New Zealand. To make that really simple even if you have no Web-site-building expertise, TravelPod.com, the big player in that field, is pretty tough to beat (and it’s all free). If spending any part of your valuable vacation time blogging/journaling isn’t your idea of fun, digital picture frames offer an excellent way to share your best photos with visitors to your home, and there are a huge variety to choose from now. And, of course, there are many other ways to share your photos, both online and off.

Have fun!