A guide to planning your next photography adventure

Even if you wanted to just travel the world and randomly photograph everything that appears in front of you, it is always a good rule to plan every aspect of your trip. Up next I’ll be giving you some advice on planning your next trip. Your job is not done after purchasing your airplane ticket.

Make an itinerary

Making an itinerary is probably one of the hardest things about planning your next adventure. Certainly we cannot predict the future but we can create a route to the places of interest.

The first thing about making your itinerary is picking every point of interest you want to visit. After listing them, it’s time to go to Google Maps and mark all of them but always start from the place you’re staying. After marking them, organize them in order and try to make every point of interest into a single line. Always keep in mind the travel time between each point of interest.

Remember that in Google Maps you can grab each location and drag it to align the route. This will give you an accurate description of travel time between each point. After concluding your route comes the fun part of this ordeal.

Creating a Photography Shot List

Now that you selected each location, now you will go to Google Photo, and look up photographs of the location from another photographer. This will give you an idea of what to expect when you get to the location.

Now for this part you’ll have to do some investigation and try to guess the exact location of the photograph. The intention is to try to replicate at least one photograph from each location. Write each location and create the photography shot list in a small notebook which it will come in handy when you are out scouting on the location.

Be midful of time

After creating the itinerary, you have to divide it in days and what you will do during the day. We might get focused on the things we want to do and explore but we forget that we need to eat, stop to rest, use the restroom, etc. Make sure you plan according to the day and that way you’ll play with the light (morning, afternoon, or sunset) to capture a compelling photograph.

Also don’t forget to add the travel time between each activity, some areas you might have to travel far, you will miss and exit or get lost. These factors affect how the itinerary will go.

Create a Gear List

This also will be very handy since you want to travel with the most amount of weight without straining your body. The good rule of thumb is: 1 camera, 2 zoom lenses of different focal points, a sturdy lightweight tripod, extra batteries, and a small camera bag either shoulder or backpack. I wrote an in depth article on Traveling Light with your Photography Equipment.

Use apps

In today’s modern era we gave a great tool at the tip of our fingertips and that is our phone. The app store is filled with apps that are meant to help the photographer to improve his journey, especially when it comes to planning.

1 — PhotoPills ($9.99)

This is probably the best app out there for planning every shot you want to take. It will help you with landscapes, where to find the milky way and capture the best starlight photograph. This app is very dense and kind of overwhelming when learning for the first time, but the PhotoPills offers free tutorials on everything inside the app.

2 — The Photographer’s Ephemeris ($9.99)

This app is very similar to PhotoPhill but this will help you organize each shot, the only difference is that it will try to recreate the scene in 3D and this way you’ll have an idea of what the photograph will look like. PhotoPills will not give you this 3D look but instead will use your cell phone camera to recreate the scene.

3 — Snapseed (FREE)

This is the BEST free photo editing software you will find in the app store. You can find probably a 1,000 photo editing apps but the two best apps for editing are Lightroom (subscription required) and Snapseed (free). Snapseed will help you edit the photograph on the go and it will share easily from within the app.