Travel photos are underrated (2019)
devonzuegel.com
devonzuegel.com
I don't think I've ever thought "boy, I sure wish I took less photos back then". I have thought the opposite.
There is one exception. Whenever I fancied myself a photographer and took a zillion photos of motorsport races are a slog to get through.
I have come to realize that the vacation itself is only part of the fun. Reminiscing about the vacation afterwards, and reliving those emotions, in the long run might be more relevant to my life than the trip itself.
Photographs help me capture a moment to remember it by. They also often portrait an idealized version of the event, perhaps highlighting the beautiful, and disregarding the troublesome. And frankly, that is as it should be.
> There is one exception. Whenever I fancied myself a photographer and took a zillion photos of motorsport races are a slog to get through.
For me, the solution is editing. Quite often I only "keep" a small handful of pictures of dozens or hundreds I took. ("keep" in quotes, as I backup everything. One time a relative died and one of my discarded pictures was the last one taken of them. I was glad I hadn't deleted that "bad" shot.)
And secondly, I keep a private blog and yearly photo books with the most memorable pictures, which acts as a second level of editing. It is a lot of work, actually, but we don't have any books we hold more dearly. And our friends and relatives love them, too.
Google and Facebook and Amazon, however, do not need to see my pictures, thank you very much.
Provided that there has been a vacation, and experienced in its time too.
Because for many it's experienced as a hurried rush from one "mandatory" place to visit to another, and endless picture taking, posting, and not living in the moment.
It might also be worth noting that there are different kinds of photography. On vacation, I mostly practice "documentary" photography, that happens in the moment, without disrupting things.
For me, photography is also a way to enhance my appreciation of a moment. It forces me to be present and reactive, in a way I tend not to be otherwise. But I recon that this might be very different for other people.
There is a huge assumption that a memory is something positive because a photo looks nice.
I would really like this to be significantly more overtly optional. I would have preferred the investment in time to make 'do a panorama from these images' instead of an AI which makes a panorama IF IT FEELS LIKE IT but I cannot command.
I hate this pseudo-cutesy zero-context crap so very, very much.
The worst part is that it's unsolicited. At least have the courtesy to ask.
There's no wrong answer; for some people the past is more painful than joyous. Personally, I'll take the occasional jarring bad to get the bountiful reminders of the good. Or maybe it's just my personality to take more pictures of happy things.
If most people like it, fine to leave it on by default I guess - the growth team has to get promoted some way. But at least let me disable it.
"You have a new memory"
Disable that crap entirely. Same goes for a lot of preinstalled apps - News, Music, Game Center (why does that one still exist?), etc.
Hopefully they'll be with me for many years to come, but of course they will eventually pass away. I take a lot of photos of them, and I know after they pass, they will show up in these "X years ago" memory slots frequently enough that I will be unable to look at theses memory things at all. It's depressing to think about. I can't imagine how people who have a spouse who has died (or, god forbid, a child who has died) deal with these sorts of unexpected, unplanned, unwelcome reminders of who they've lost.
And beyond that, I've have 10+ years of photos in there... I often see ex-partners show up. Fortunately it doesn't bother me that much, but I can imagine it could be really uncomfortable for many people.
On the flip side, I really do love the innocuous trips down memory lane this sort of thing gives me all the time. But it would be so easy to completely ruin the experience if the wrong photo shows up.
I LOVE seeing Google photos rotate in pictures of them in this type of thing. It brings back great memories and I always smile. To me, this is better than having them stashed in a printed photo album that I never look at or in Google Photos album that I never look at.
Other people also loved my dogs, and giving them a final photograph to say goodbye to helped them. I also have photographs of tax documents, graves, medical issues, and, yes, lots of fun things as well, all of which serve their purpose. No one (except for Google's AI) would think they all belong in the same bucket to pull from.
Your comment and the one you replied to can be read as "you're weird and you grieve wrong", which is extremely rude and unsymapthetic given the context. It's also entirely orthogonal to the complaint that these features should be opt-in or allow you to opt out. That complaint is entirely valid but questioning the decision to capture sad moments suggests it's not.
I sympathize. Now, have it your way, take back the control by using your computer with software you can control. You are currently playing in someone else's garden, by their rules. That might have been enjoyable for a while, now just leave, your not at home.
Never my dumb photo viewer and my dumb file manager hurt me / tried to outsmart me with this kind of unwarranted behaviors. Just take an external storage drive, put your photos in there, ensure you make backups and done.
Don't let someone else / big corporations with motives not aligned with yours control you. Control your life!
And your relatives will also thank you for the increased privacy for them. It might be a bit less convenient but the peace of mind you gain is invaluable.
These "someone else's computer" sentences are very concrete.
I did turn the feature off once they let you, but it doesn't do a user much good to throw new features like that in their face and then let them opt out after you've already insulted them.
Stuff like that has to be common. Did the “growth hacking” cynics who design these features not realize the harm they cause, or is the generated “engagement” still worth it in aggregate despite a few lost users?
Another suite I like isn't doing that, but suffers from low funding and hobby time burden.
I love automatic backups, being able to view on my phone or computers, being able to search by person/location/thing
And of course it's not about just this feature. My comment is more general than that. I took excuse from this one example to encourage people to take back control on their computing because it seems important to me.
I'm am being so dramatic about this because this whole situation where people do not control anything feels alarming to me.
I understand that you like convenience. If it suits you, whatever floats your (and many people's) boat, I'm no one to tell you what to do. Of course Google is convenient. That's one of their strategy to build their monopoly.
I would not rely on Google for the backups, though. There are enough stories about people loosing access to their account over Google's whims. So that part is not solved, you still have to handle that, or pray but I'm not sure it really helps.
My honeymoon photos (divorced now), photos of friends to whom I no longer speak, regardless of the circumstances... photos of pets that died, ex girlfriends who you were sure was the one... all just add a pang of sadness to my day. Forgetting things is mercy.
My best friend died about 10 years ago. She still has a facebook account because when you die suddenly you don't get to settle your affairs. At least a few times a year I'm reminded of my memories of her, or its her birthday.
Or even just seeing how stupid I was and the dumb things I posted, is a bit painful :-)
"No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget. The things you're most afraid of have already happened. The shutter is clicked. The flash goes off and they've stopped time, as if just for the blink of an eye." - Sy Parish One Hour Photo (2002)
When I use my DSLR, I try to take a lot of photos with the intention of picking a few good ones later. These sit in storage and I usually don't see them again. As you said, it's a "zillion photos" of subject X.
When I use my phone, I generally try to take a photo here and there. But I don't need to take as many photos (vs DSLR mode).
What is a slog is when I try to take a "zillion photos" of something with my phone. It really adds noise pollution to my phone's photo album. Also, I don't like having a bunch of iPhone Burst mode photos. It really takes makes looking through my photos cumbersome and picking the "best" one to keep is a chore that nobody wants to do.
Finding the best one though is a harder problem, even for a human.
Let's take https://jeena.net/photos/301 for example. The story is that me and my brother went to Italy together for one week of a vacation. At the end we went to Rome. I really wanted to get an iconic picture of the Colosseum. I walked around and tried to find an angle which would make for a great photo, then I saw Altare della Patria https://jeena.net/photos/299 and I saw that there are people on top on the roof. That would probably be the perfect place for that photograph.
I waited until golden hour and then tried to get up, but sadly there were no stairs, only a lift. And for that lift there was a huge queue. Even worse, they already closed it so I couldn't get there that day.
So I went the next day like two hours before golden hour. I went up with the lift and waited. Slowly the light became more and more golden, but it was still 20 minutes until the perfect light conditions. They were already closing the terrace up there and pushed everyone slowly down.
I waited as long as possible until it was only me and another couple. The guy was also a photographer. So while the last people were going down they asked me if I could take a photo of them in front of the Colosseum because they also saw my semi professional camera. So the guy prepared everything on his camera and I think I took a great photo for them in the perfect golden hour light conditions. Very romantic in Rome in front of the Colosseum.
I like to imagine that they printed that photo and hung it somewhere special at home.
I don't do much photos, but for me it's action shots with gopro. An example https://youtu.be/oCXlwJYt0mg
The shot is not super spectacular, but it was lots of planning. Building the contraption, iterating on it, then trecking up the side of a mountain multiple times to get the shot I wanted. The skiing/conditions weren't out of the ordinary that place, but it's still one of the things I remember the best from that trip.
I think an important point of distinction is that you aren't just photographing for keeping a record or memory of the place, but you're photographing more artistically - you're going the extra mile to take good, planned photos with proper camera gear - making you much more like the "professional" photographer of the Baha"i Gardens than the photo the author shot.
I think that's an important point the author missed - photography-tending folks are likely going to want to take good photos of particular angles that you're unlikely to find online (especially if it's not a common tourist spot).
The big problem with videos is that the tech is not yet there is term of consumptions. Finding the highlights can be tough, and editing videos is still a manual and painful job. However, these are problems that technology will eventually solve (and is already getting better day by day, see for example how well Google Photos search for content inside a video today in a query like "[person1] [person2] [location]").
Ever since I had kids I made it habit to default to shooting videos. Not only as an observant, but actively participating in the moment (i.e. the video becomes sort of a first person view of my experience at that moment). Now that the kids are slightly older, they gain so much joy from just swiping through the videos and experiencing their favorite moments again. I do wish there was a TikTok for private videos that would make the consumption part more seamless and fun though.
I regularly watch train rides or walks through suburbs of places I've never been, and at 2k resolution and high quality audio, it can really transport you for the moment you're watching. During the pandemic lockdowns here, a bit of people watching while wandering through other countries was worth it's weight in gold.
Rambalac for walks around Japan https://www.youtube.com/c/Rambalac
HKSAMA for train rides in Japan https://www.youtube.com/c/HKASAMA
Nomadic Ambience for walking in quite a few places around the world: https://www.youtube.com/c/NomadicAmbience
And Sound Traveler for binaural walks around the world: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheSoundTraveler/videos
Destin from Smarter Every Day has been getting a bit of attention on Hacker News lately, so it might be interesting to know that Sound Traveler is his project!
It's definitely the kind of thing that stills can't beat.
I find it very hard to take videos of personal events, I'm too much of a nervous wreck. Pointing a camera at anybody, even or especially friends and family, I can hardly do it, though I wish would get over it and film more.
I take a lot of random photographs: I really like it when I find a pretty weed against a building, a nice reflection in a broken car window (junkyard picture). Abandoned houses are full of gems. I find this stuff just walking around the city and being out in the countryside. I rarely take pictures of people. If I want to document a memory, I document the pretty things I see (in general).
But I'll take a video of a partially frozen creek that is flanked with snow: It captures the creek in a different way than the still pictures I took. A combination of stillness and the sounds of flowing water and the sun gleaming off of different sparkling and shining surfaces - I just cannot capture that in film the same way, not all at once. (Don't get me wrong, the stills were pretty wonderful). I take video of the fireworks out my window on new years. It is pretty spectacular sometimes (not to mention easier to capture on a cell phone). Yet a video of Northern Lights isn't always more beautiful unless you are seeing them dance in the sky.
Of course, maybe I just use these differently than most folks - outside of the hundreds of pet photos I take.
But you have to pick one - it's either photos or videos. If you try to do both, you'll playing with your camera nonstop.
It's also good to have that one crazy person who will keep talking on the video. And if you spend some time editing, you'll create some amazing memories.
Probably it just means I'm a bad photography, and this is essentially brute force approach towards it haha
Like from a ski trip, I each evening extracted 2-3 minutes of video from the day, remembering the highlights made it quick. Then later stitched that to a short video I shared with the others, that I like to rewatch.
One other time, however, I just dumped all files to a HD thinking I'll do it later. That's 200 GB of footage from that trip I've never even looked at, it's too much to go through.
At least one nice feature of gopros is you can press the power button while recording, that adds some metadata marking that timestamp as a highlight, makes it easier to jump to the good parts later.
this works mostly only for kids though because they change a lot, once you are adult in finalized stage the videos are much less interesting because you will see same yourself just years ago, so only the place is interesting, not really the person
but yeah, take a tons of videos of kids, it will be very valuable to them, I've never had such opportunity since during my childhood videocams were very expensive for regular families to own, so oldest video of me is me in 20s I guess
with X265 even few seconds long video takes only a bit of space and it's worth gold compared to photos
We had the old essential phone, with the spherical camera attachment, and used the hell out of it. I still go back and watch those old videos. Venice in the snow was absolutely amazing.
I need to get another spherical camera ASAP, now that traveling is possible again.
The site is still online, with the original content from the 1990s: https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/
This "travel photography" journal of one man changed my life in several ways.[1] It inspired me to purchase a camera. To go travel. To not just take photos, but to try and thread them into a story of some sort. Even if it's just a paragraph per image, have some text to describe the experience. Not just for the benefit of other people, but also to reflect on what I had seen.
It's really hard to put into words how amazing this photography site was for me. I was a teenager in 1993, and that was an era where photography online was basically nonexistent. This guy scanned his negatives in at a stupid high resolution (at the time), a level of quality I had never seen coming out of a PC monitor before, and not for some years afterwards either.
But it had a story too! A simple story of going on a trip, meeting people, and describing their life. I realised that travel wasn't about some mythical "adventure" like on a book, but just about going elsewhere and getting to immerse oneself in the place and its people.
Since then I've made an effort to strike up conversations with random people on my own travels, and it has always been rewarding to take a peek into their lives.
[1] Even in a non-photography-related way: I learned SQL because his site was one of the early database-driven sites, and I read through his tutorial explaining how he did it: https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
But most travel photos a-al what you see on Instagram are derivative and overrated. The sunset, beaches, and even the framing are always almost exactly the same.
As a person who travels, I cannot tell you how many times I see people lined up to get that perfect "insta" shot.
Travel photographers who give a shit are few and far between these days.
Why would you care about that though?? It doesn't really affect you.
I've been using albumworks because their HD books look fantastic. They're a bit pricy at ~$90/book but it's 100% worth it for me.. plus there are heaps of other alternatives if you're on a budget.
An important part of the process is trimming and curating the photos down to a reasonable number. With digital it's so easy to end up with thousands of picture you never look at.
Putting together an album is a bit of work, but I found they key is not to overthink it. The end result is that it's much easier to show people and it's more interesting for people to flick through.
Also, when I'm on holiday, I got annoyed with sharing on instagram because of how it compresses the hell out of images, so I ended up making my own photo blog for friends and family to follow along.
I've got my workflow set up where I can post-process photos in Adobe Lightroom and then update my site with a Makefile and a folder full of JPGs. It's easy enough to do even at the end of a hectic day of travel—no messing around with blogs and static site generators. If you're curious: https://dn.ht/journal/ :)
More recently, for shorter trips I've also tried shooting with a film camera. Like another commented here mentioned, I find it can help stay more in the moment and you get a nice little surprise when you get your rolls back from the developer.
The film shots I've taken I consider to be 100x better than anything I've ever taken on digital cameras, and they feel a lot more alive to me.
As someone that has never took photos much (for me - being a photographer ruins the moment), I do enjoy having the physical media to flip through occasionally and this way it tends to be a bookshelf or coffee table item instead of a deep archive only viewed once a decade which was my experience prior to digital.
Now photos instantly appear on a stream, without any extra logistics. They are geotagged, and in Google Photos even tagged for search.
In a few seconds, I can figure out where I was on a certain date. I can figure out what I was doing and who was with me. Combined with a journal, they’re a powerful way to remember the past. Scrolling through the photo stream is a real delight, especially when I feel down.
The stream changed everything. Since a few months, I’ve been building a stream that combines photos to other things: journals, messages, git commits, geolocation and more. It’s a very rich journal.
Since then, I have found myself taking photos just for the record. For example a picture of the dishes I cook, of my garage, of my bicycle etc. It grounds the day in a few visual cues.
-
However, I developed one habit from my no-photo days: after I take a photo, I always linger for a few seconds, so that I don’t just see things through a phone screen. I look at the details, just like when I sketch.
Regarding photos of monuments and natural scenes, I can always just go to Google and find better pictures of that than I can take myself, but photos of PEOPLE and what I experienced there, is where personal photos shine.
A photo of Niagara Falls: meh.
A photo of Niagara Falls with my wife: Gold.
Obviously everyone enjoys things in their own way, but I really feel like people miss out on what's going on around them because they are so worried about capturing it and posting about it right then an there.
I've learnt this one from my other half: she rarely takes pictures because focusing on pictures detracts from actually living in the place. She takes pictures as a sort of "index" for where we've been: a quick of us together with the location in the background, maybe one or two snaps of beautiful sights, and so on. It's pretty rudimentary, because ultimately, the vivid memories are preserved within us rather than the photographs.
Though I won't deny that the fear of not capturing everything can get to me at times, thus I end up taking one too many snaps. I think that's a fear many people deal with when they take an inexplicable amount of photographs of the same thing!
If we immerse and let our feelings of wonder and awe prevail, it will be difficult to forget such feelings even if the visual memories change over time.
Photography is a wonderful hobby, it can be very rewarding. Not only by its products, but by making you traveling, meeting interesting people, learning things, making you think, improving your design skills and learning how to tell stories.
If pay wasn't bad, I would probably be a professional photographer instead of a programmer. But nonetheless, it's a wonderful hobby.
Yes, get some photos of your whole group together so you can remember who was there or what everyone looked like "back then". But if people aren't the subject of the photo, get the photo with them interacting with it naturally.
Yes. You get to have fun looking at the thing, and then you get to have fun again making a photo pose. And then you go have fun looking at the thing a second time.
i.e. playing with lava in 2010 - http://theroadchoseme.com/volca%CC%81n-pacaya
all the way to seeing the gorillas in Uganda in 2018 - http://theroadchoseme.com/mgahinga-mountain-gorillas
This can bite in several ways.
The main one: the online images are not mine, so if I was to use or share them for any reason I might not be able to.
Another is that after a trip, you won’t start googling for every place you liked and download, archive and perhaps geotag them to have them in your collection. At least I don’t know anyone doing that.
Related to that, they probably won’t have the metadata you really want, like the date of your trip, which is often the best way to find back a photo of a place you remember having visited during a trip.
> the online images are not mine, so if was to use or share them for any reason might not be able to.
Why is this so?
On looking back at pictures, people have wildly different relations with the pics they take, for me it's in lieu of a diary and I'll look at series from a specific time frame, and not individual "favorited" photos like some people do. In that respect it's hard to tell beforehand which pictures will be meaningful after 10 years, but it still feels worth to have the whole complete stream.
> Why is this so?
If I was asked for a photo of some place for a middle school handmade newspaper, I'd hate to have to check what's the licenses on the photos from the net and read 20 pages of legalese in the case it falls under a commercial use because they sell the paper 50 cents a unit. Or if I were to use one on a freelance blog, etc.
It's not a rational calculation, just the comfort of not having to care at all about who took the shot, for what purpose and audience etc. and just use pictures I like for whatever, wherever I want.
I don't want to choose a phone for its camera particularly, and like the sibling thread on film cameras (I used to but no longer think I want to take it that far) would prefer the separate device for the more deliberate & focussed-ness of it. Frankly it also avoids looking like I'm taking hashtagselfiez.
Any suggestions for a fairly cheap but decent, basic camera? I'd also want to automatically sync to my phone or something, but I think no reason that has to be built-in to the camera (could be SD card with WiFi, and some companion app?).
Even though you're not in favor of the idea, a phone camera of a mid-high end phone likely will be much better (especially with its computational chops) than a cheap point and shoot, especially if you already have a fancy $$$ phone.
I'm against going full DSLR just because it's too far the other way, not at all compact, ideally I'd like something that can squeeze into a pocket; definitely a small bag pocket.
I actually already have a Canon SX40 which I suppose is technically a 'compact point-and-shoot', but even that's too big, I never use it, I'm not even sure I'd bother with it on a 'big' trip.
> mid-high end phone likely will be much better (especially with its computational chops) than a cheap point and shoot, especially if you already have a fancy $$$ phone.
I don't, I suppose that's partly why I don't want camera requirements to drive my phone choice.
However if your budget is a bit flexible (I'm probably making as assumption given the average HN user) there are very solid high end point and shoots that are meant to fit in a pocket. I remember Sony made one perhaps 3-4 years back, I'm fairly certain other companies would have also made such products.
For example a couple days ago I saw a car with a license plate from the other side of the world. After I looked their handle up online after i was back home I found a super interesting story about a lovely couple traveling the world.
But yeah, I prefer nowadays candid photos of daily life, not captured by that many people instead of famous sights.
Regarding distraction, it would help to carry something like GoPro and just record everything, the problem is spending time going through hours of footage to select just highlights worth keeping.
Thanks to smartphones, it's so simple to snap a quick photo and put your phone back in your pocket. It's also trivial to share that photo with everyone. I've never thought, "Man, I wish I had taken fewer photos."
I've been trying to simplify my digital life recently. I've seriously considered buying a dumb phone for calls, texts, and music only. Giving up my camera though...
After a few years since the advent of social networks and smart phones, digital cameras, everyone is taking a lot of pictures.
I think photo journals are great, but wanting something more to share, but not sure what. Any photographers here feeling the same?
Now I really strive to take essential photos instead of snapping them all the time.
1. You will be more parsimonious with your choice of subjects (avoiding the ‘twenty-seven almost identical captures of this landmark’ problem when browsing your images afterwards)
2. You are more ‘in the moment’ as a film camera doesn’t allow you to get lost in instantly reviewing your captures, instead of actually looking around and interacting with your companions and surroundings.
PS: ought to add that unfortunately our dystopian present has almost sabotaged this, as CT-scanners will destroy all your images if your film is passed through them by a misguided airport official.
As an added bonus, I get to relive my trip a few weeks later when I get my films back from the lab.
I have to add that I don't think any of my films were ever destroyed by an airport scanner.
That is a bit of a myth these days. Modern airport hand luggage scanners are safe up to ISO 800 or so. And from my experience airport staff is very willing to hand-check high ISO film (did an intercontinental trip with T-Max 3200 once and had no issue getting it hand-checked in 4 different countries - it probably helped that I separated out only the 3200 film and got all others scanned regularly)
I hear there's new CT machines which may cause issues, but apparently the staff is well aware of this and they should be labeled.
The ability of modern digital cameras to shoot essentially unlimited photos might not be without its drawbacks, but being able to shoot low grain images practically in the dark is pretty cool.
3. You usually end up with prints of all your photos after getting the film developed. It's really nice going through them on paper and you can put them in a photo album.
One thing I found was that when you arrange your shots like that there's quite a few shots that you didn't like initially but end up growing onto, especially when juxtaposed with other photos.