Our Top Ten Photography Tips For Solo Travellers

Have you got your next holiday booked? Do you want to collect beautiful images of the places you will visit? Whether you want to use a camera or a smartphone, our simple travel photography tips for beginners will help enhance your photos to help showcase all your exciting adventures.

1. Clean your lens
Although this sounds obvious, when carrying a camera or smartphone in a bag or pocket it will likely collect dust and foreign material that will show up in your photos. Cleaning your lens will prevent this and lead to clearer pictures while you're on your solo travels with us.

2. Keep still
When taking photos on your phone or camera, it is important to be still and hold the device still to avoid low-quality focus, shaky photos and poor composition. If you want to be really professional, you could invest in a tripod for the perfect, balanced photograph. This would be great for one of our ocean cruises or rail holidays, when travel conditions make it tricky to stay still!

3. Look for colour
Keep an eye out for bold vivid colours. Pictures with strong colours are often more powerful and bring the place back to life in your photos. You'll be sure to find yourself in vibrant, busy places whilst on a solo holiday with us. You might find yourself taking a photograph of anything from beautiful buildings, to vintage cars, buses, bikes, wonderful markets or sensational clothing.

4. Lighting
The best lighting is the natural kind, and you should always try to avoid using the flash. The more light going into the lens, the more your camera will have to work with. Our holidays visit some incredible places, from the bright, clear lakes and mountains found scattered across Europe to the scenes of the Northern Lights in Norway. If you can master the art of lighting, you will have some truly wonderful pictures to share from your solo holiday with us.

5. Golden hour
A great time to take photos is either right after sunrise or right before sunset. We're lucky here in the UK to have some spectacular sunrises and sunsets - have a look at our UK holidays to discover how you can watch the sunset from all over the UK with us.

6. Composition
A popular technique is the ‘rule of thirds’ which involves using the grid on your camera screen. In Rule of Thirds photography, the image is divided evenly into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, and the subject of the image is placed at the intersection of those dividing lines, or along one of the lines itself. This helps create a strong, balanced image - great for when you're snapping monuments and impressive buildings on one of our worldwide holidays.

7. Framing
When you look through the viewfinder or at your screen, don’t just focus on your subject. Run your eyes around the entire frame to make sure you’re not accidentally cutting off something important.

8. Angles
You may be inclined to take your photos at eye level but don’t forget to try different angles! Getting low to the ground or holding your camera high can offer new perspectives.

9. Get in close
Often image quality will suffer when you zoom in with a smartphone camera, so before using the zoom function, see if you can move in closer to your subject.

10. Take videos
Photos are fantastic: however, if you really want to capture a moment, switch to video and record the event, plus, once you're done, you can make sure you share your great videos and photographs with us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.