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Travel photos are underrated (2019)

173 points by luu 5y ago

mario_kart_snes 5y ago
I went on a trip 10 years ago and took lots of photos. Most of them I cannot remember what it was or what was the significance. Since then I make sure to always have a person (myself or travel companion) in all photos because it helps remember what we were doing - having a person in the photo prompts the memory for some reason.
- Yhippa 5y ago
  I definitely agree. I cringe thinking about how little I didn't want to be in photos in the past or that I took pictures without anybody I knew in them as a frame of reference.
- jdyyc 5y ago
  That's actually what I would add to the original article. 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.
- dylan604 5y ago
  I'd recommend taking fewer pictures and just enjoying where you are and absorbing it all yourself rather than through the screen on a device. The lower number of pictures will be of higher significance to you. I relate it to taking handwritten notes in lectures. 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.
  - CraigRood 5y ago
    I get your take, but I somewhat disagree. I have just come back from a 2+ week trip to Italy and every day I had my camera glued to my hand. Looking a the world with the desire to capture the shots allows you to see the environment in different way. You see the lighting, angles, details, emotions etc that I'm honestly not sure I would see otherwise. The nature or even the number of photos don't matter, but I love taking photos as a way of "absorbing it all".
- mbg721 5y ago
  I had some solo road-trips in college where I took photos with nobody in them, and the most important thing to me was the order of the photos. I can still look at them and put together where I was and what I was doing, what I probably ate that day, etc.
Yhippa 5y ago
This is going to sound corny but those "X years ago on this date" features of Amazon Photos and Google Photos are a great trip down memory lane for me. Even cornier, I really enjoy the Timehop app. It does a decent job of tying memories from Tweets, Facebbook posts, Foursquare check-ins, and photos together. 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.
- ggm 5y ago
  I totally hate them. I have very beautiful photos of funerals. I have very beautiful photos of places I was mugged. I have bad memories which are initiated by good photographs. 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.
  - s0rce 5y ago
    I never really thought about it too much but your post made me think. I also have photos of bad/negative memories but I think overall I really enjoying seeing the photos from the happy times and the photos from the bad remind me of things or make me think and don't tend to ruin my day. Overall, I like the feature but I totally see where you are coming from and its not great the AI just sends you these memories basically randomly, not sure how to do this without curation (still prone to error or magic all knowing AI (more scary really).
    - Yhippa 5y ago
      I've had the same thing happen too. I will say that I have taken some final pictures of my pets at the vet before they passed away. I did take the pictures for a reason at the time. When those pictures come up it is sad, but in a perverse way, it helps me viscerally remember my beloved pets. This is all a part of life and what made their existence with me special.
markdown 5y ago
HN hug of death.
eric4smith 5y ago
The author's photos are really nice and different. 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.
- megablast 5y ago
  > As a person who travels, I cannot tell you how many times I see people lined up to get that perfect "insta" shot. Why would you care about that though?? It doesn't really affect you.
  - eric4smith 5y ago
    It does because it pollutes the sphere with photos that look exactly the same. So it's harder and harder to surface good photos like those the author took.
    - prawn 5y ago
      Does however remind me of the "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" line. For lots of people, that's the photo they want to take, that they think looks best. They may not feel they have an eye to find another angle, or creativity to do something different. Regardless of whether the photos are different, we're all there making up the crowd.
- splonk 5y ago
  I like showing people the picture of the line for the standard Trolltunga shot that everyone likes to post. https://www.google.com/search?q=trolltunga+line&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=trolltunga+line&tbm=isch
blamazon 5y ago
My general rule of travel photos is each one must have a person I know in it, unless there's a good reason otherwise.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Are you my father? He has the same photographic philosophy.
grecy 5y ago
I work very hard to name, catalogue and caption all my photos as the trip goes. I ruthlessly delete duplicates or blurry / not so good ones, until I'm left with 5-10 photos from any given event that I will have forever and always remember. i.e. playing with lava in 2010 - http://theroadchoseme.com/volca%CC%81n-pacaya http://theroadchoseme.com/volca%CC%81n-pacaya all the way to seeing the gorillas in Uganda in 2018 - http://theroadchoseme.com/mgahinga-mountain-gorillas http://theroadchoseme.com/mgahinga-mountain-gorillas
diebeforei485 5y ago
I used to scoff at selfies, but they are very efficient.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> I can find better images online. 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.
- hackernewds 5y ago
  So interesting to read the psychology behind this. Some of the photos taking has been linked to mild hoarding - similar to why we save links (on HNs as well) in hindsight to never look into it again. Gives us both a sense of ownership + FOMO > 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?
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    There is definitely a hoarding part, the saving grace being that taking and storing dozens of thousands of pictures doesn't cost much nor incur severe penalties compared to the IRL counterpart. 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.
null_object 5y ago
Hope this doesn't come across as pretentious, but if you carry a film camera with you on your travels it really helps in two ways: 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.
- codingdave 5y ago
  This has nothing to do with film, and everything to do with your habits. It is 100% possible to have those behaviors with a digital camera.
  - glitchcrab 5y ago
    Agreed. I put thought into the photo that I'm taking so that one or two is sufficient to capture what I want, and I have image review disabled so I rarely see the image afterwards. I do occasionally check it manually if I'm not sure that I nailed what I was after, but that's not a regular occurrence.
  - canbus 5y ago
    Or even a phone, for that matter!
  - the_af 5y ago
    But in practice it's way more difficult. Adding a physical impediment helps you develop better habits. At least for me and my weak willpower.
- friseurtermin 5y ago
  100% what I came here to say. My film camera restricts me from checking each photo instantly, keeps other people from checking each photo ("Show me! Do I look good in that? Take another one") or from sharing online. 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.
gpt5 5y ago
The real underrated medium is video. Video captures the moment in a much more real way, and brings back memories in a way that photos just can't. Think about the experience of seeing a photo of your young self (or your child at a young age) vs a video, it just doesn't compare. 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.
- Void_ 5y ago
  I love making little vlogs when I go somewhere with my friends. 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.
- jeena 5y ago
  As a workaround for the private TikTok, I use PeerTube. It's not as nice and seamless but it kind of does the trick and it safes a lot of metadata so you can search for hashtags, titles, etc.
- voussoir 5y ago
  Your comment reminded me of this video: "2:30am at 7-11 near Disney World - 1987" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA 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.
Existenceblinks 5y ago
Good memory also sucks to me because it's already gone, it has negative meaning embedded in its definition.
dhotson 5y ago
One thing that changed it for me was making my own physical photo albums when I get back from a holiday. 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/ 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.
- mjrbrennan 5y ago
  I've picked up film photography over the last couple of years and I am so happy with it, the experience of slowing down and seeing the results much later is a much more satisfying way of taking photos for me. I can't wait until I finally get to do some overseas travel again later this year and shoot a few rolls of film while I am at it. 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.
- conductr 5y ago
  My entire family does photo albums for nearly every event/holiday/vacation. They even make multiple and give as gifts to each other. "They" as it's typically led by the women in my family and the guys pretty much stay out of it. We regularly take vacations with extended family so it's always a group of folks taking pictures and they get pooled and curated by someone at the end. 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.
stardenburden 5y ago
I don't just take pictures while traveling. Anything that I find interesting gets saved. 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.
jeena 5y ago
I like to take photos because it brings me to places where I'd never go if I wouldn't want to try to take a photo and the stories themselves on how I got the photo are super interesting. Let's take https://jeena.net/photos/301 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 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.
- matsemann 5y ago
  I feel somewhat the same. Not necessarily with photography, but the act of planning it makes the experience better. You can go somewhere, look at it, snatch a photo and leave, and be perfectly content. But the payoff when you achieve what you planned makes it an even greater memory. I don't do much photos, but for me it's action shots with gopro. An example https://youtu.be/oCXlwJYt0mg 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.
- user_7832 5y ago
yumiris 5y ago
When possible, I first visit the place without a camera and strive to immerse completely. I then visit it again and take pictures. Not using the camera the first time - and having to think about how I'll take the pictures when revisiting - provides a lot of opportunity to appreciate and reflect on the sight in question. With places I can only visit once, I try to take as little pictures as possible, and instead embrace living in the moment to let my mind and heart preserve the memories. 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!
- glitchcrab 5y ago
  This is the thing though; the human brain is fallible and those vivid memories are not preserved because they change over time.
  - yumiris 5y ago
    Absolutely, it's sadly a compromise. Although there's one thing that's much harder to forget and won't be prone to distortion: how we felt! 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.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Why I photograph stuff? Because it renders my view on the world, it represents my personal experience. Because, while I don't think photography itself is an art form, it still requires thought, observation, experimentation, design skills and a lot of practice to do a decent job. And while the act of photography itself might not be an art form, setting up a scene and postprocessing can be quite artistic. 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.
unictek 5y ago
Just stop taking photos, you’re bad at it :)
- speedgoose 5y ago
  But I enjoy taking photos.
jerrygoyal 5y ago
I don't (usually) take photos anymore. Instead, I capture short videos (10-20sec long) from my phone. These are easy to consume later and help in better capturing the "moment" because of audio+frames instead of a single static frame.
nicbou 5y ago
I went through a no-photo phase, but switching to just my phone’s camera changed my opinion. 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.
Markoff 5y ago
I agree with sentiment you don't need 35 different photos of famous sight you can easily find online, but of course it doesn't make sense skipping any photos completely, since when you are looking at your vacation photos the last thing you wanna do is every 2 minutes searching Google for photos of sight you didn't take photo, let's ignore the fact you wont even remember names of many sights after years, so you wont be able to find them immediately or at all if it's less touristy sights. 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.
jiggawatts 5y ago
Something that captivated my imagination back in 1993 was the blog -- before there was a word for it -- called Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun. The site is still online, with the original content from the 1990s: https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/ 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/ https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/
tiku 5y ago
I remember a site where they found all similar photos of the same places. Does anyone know what i'm talking about?
jzer0cool 5y ago
Travel photos was a leisure of mine. I spent many hours browsing photos, blogs, and at the time flickr. I never knew what I might do with some of my photos other than "sharing them". I want to do something more with them, but not sure what. 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?
fbn79 5y ago
I really miss a mass-used service that let me browse user-uploaded photos by geolocation. I found it interesting to discover places and life in these places through people's casual photos. In the beginning, I was doing such browsing in Panoramio. It was very mass-used (for that time "mass" meaning) and full of nice photos than Google ruined it. Then I discovered Instagram geolocation. I was able browse Instagram photos by latitude/longitude with many websites offering that way to browse Instagram and was so enjoying. Then Instagram closed the API that let it possible. And the location hashtag browsing is not comparable. That's very sad. We have instruments that attach geolocation to every photo automatically, we upload photos on the Net because we like to share them and make them public but there is no mass-used service that let this data be browsed by lat/lng.
tabiv 5y ago
I completely aggree with this. I also used to hate taking photos. I think it was because my grandmother would always take at least 100 photos at every gathering. No one would ever see them. 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...
OJFord 5y ago
I like the idea of it, and was looking recently for a compact/'point and shoot' type camera that's decent, but pretty cheap (say £100-250 was the range I expected to look at). I'm sure there used to be loads! But it seemed they'd all but evaporated - is it just chip shortage, or have 'camera phones' (heh, remember that?) decimated the market at the low end? 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?).
- user_7832 5y ago
  I can't comment about the availability of cheap cameras, but I'd caution you if you're going that way (particularly if you want to shoot at less than ideal situations). The contrast autofocus most of them use is finicky at best, and I don't think you'll get phase detection AF in a cheap cam. However a 2nd hand DSLR might be a much better idea. 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 $$$ phone.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't be looking for (or expecting, or putting the time and effort in to learning how to take) great shots, just nice holiday snaps etc. to look back on. I'm against going full DSLR just because it's too far the other way, not at all compact, ideally I'd like something that can squeeze into a pocket; definitely a small bag pocket. I actually already have a Canon SX40 which I suppose is technically a 'compact point-and-shoot', but even that's too big, I never use it, I'm not even sure I'd bother with it on a 'big' trip. > mid-high end phone likely will be much better (especially with its computational chops) than a cheap point and shoot, especially if you already have a fancy $$$ phone. I don't, I suppose that's partly why I don't want camera requirements to drive my phone choice.
edpichler 5y ago
I pay much more attention in the moment when I am taking photos. It´s a therapy to me. I automatically enjoy all the angles of a subject or an area I am visiting.
LanceH 5y ago
My advice for shooting a photo: Avoid the "standing in front of something looking at the camera smiling" photo. If your party will be in the picture, get a picture of them looking at the subject. There is a difference in reminiscing about looking at something-incredible and reminiscing about turning your back on it to squint into the sun while someone fiddles with the camera. 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.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > There is a difference in reminiscing about looking at something-incredible and reminiscing about turning your back on it to squint into the sun while someone fiddles with the camera. 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.
uhtred 5y ago
Composition matters more than the quality of the camera. Sure his shot of the gardens sucked because it had half a moving car, some traffic lights, a zebra crossing, etc.
canbus 5y ago
I feel like this article has popped up just as I needed to read it as I've been debating just "living the moment" vs taking pictures as I normally would - I am going to carry on with the latter. Taking photos doesn't detract from living in the moment, it just means you can re-live it (or memories of it) a year later.
the_af 5y ago
I get really anxious taking photos. I take tons of them but only ever see a few of them again, so what they actually do is prevent me from living in the moment. I find myself looking at all those beautiful places through the phone's screen instead of with my own eyes, and for what? Plus, like TFA mentions, it's rude to your companions. Now I really strive to take essential photos instead of snapping them all the time.

173 points by luu 5y ago

I went on a trip 10 years ago and took lots of photos. Most of them I cannot remember what it was or what was the significance. Since then I make sure to always have a person (myself or travel companion) in all photos because it helps remember what we were doing - having a person in the photo prompts the memory for some reason.

Yhippa 5y ago
I definitely agree. I cringe thinking about how little I didn't want to be in photos in the past or that I took pictures without anybody I knew in them as a frame of reference.
jdyyc 5y ago
That's actually what I would add to the original article. 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.
dylan604 5y ago
I'd recommend taking fewer pictures and just enjoying where you are and absorbing it all yourself rather than through the screen on a device. The lower number of pictures will be of higher significance to you. I relate it to taking handwritten notes in lectures. 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.
- CraigRood 5y ago
  I get your take, but I somewhat disagree. I have just come back from a 2+ week trip to Italy and every day I had my camera glued to my hand. Looking a the world with the desire to capture the shots allows you to see the environment in different way. You see the lighting, angles, details, emotions etc that I'm honestly not sure I would see otherwise. The nature or even the number of photos don't matter, but I love taking photos as a way of "absorbing it all".
mbg721 5y ago
I had some solo road-trips in college where I took photos with nobody in them, and the most important thing to me was the order of the photos. I can still look at them and put together where I was and what I was doing, what I probably ate that day, etc.

Yhippa 5y ago

This is going to sound corny but those "X years ago on this date" features of Amazon Photos and Google Photos are a great trip down memory lane for me. Even cornier, I really enjoy the Timehop app. It does a decent job of tying memories from Tweets, Facebbook posts, Foursquare check-ins, and photos together. 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.

ggm 5y ago
I totally hate them. I have very beautiful photos of funerals. I have very beautiful photos of places I was mugged. I have bad memories which are initiated by good photographs. 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.
- s0rce 5y ago
  I never really thought about it too much but your post made me think. I also have photos of bad/negative memories but I think overall I really enjoying seeing the photos from the happy times and the photos from the bad remind me of things or make me think and don't tend to ruin my day. Overall, I like the feature but I totally see where you are coming from and its not great the AI just sends you these memories basically randomly, not sure how to do this without curation (still prone to error or magic all knowing AI (more scary really).
  - Yhippa 5y ago
    I've had the same thing happen too. I will say that I have taken some final pictures of my pets at the vet before they passed away. I did take the pictures for a reason at the time. When those pictures come up it is sad, but in a perverse way, it helps me viscerally remember my beloved pets. This is all a part of life and what made their existence with me special.

markdown 5y ago

HN hug of death.

eric4smith 5y ago

The author's photos are really nice and different. 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.

megablast 5y ago
> As a person who travels, I cannot tell you how many times I see people lined up to get that perfect "insta" shot. Why would you care about that though?? It doesn't really affect you.
- eric4smith 5y ago
  It does because it pollutes the sphere with photos that look exactly the same. So it's harder and harder to surface good photos like those the author took.
  - prawn 5y ago
    Does however remind me of the "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" line. For lots of people, that's the photo they want to take, that they think looks best. They may not feel they have an eye to find another angle, or creativity to do something different. Regardless of whether the photos are different, we're all there making up the crowd.
splonk 5y ago
I like showing people the picture of the line for the standard Trolltunga shot that everyone likes to post. https://www.google.com/search?q=trolltunga+line&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=trolltunga+line&tbm=isch

blamazon 5y ago

My general rule of travel photos is each one must have a person I know in it, unless there's a good reason otherwise.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Are you my father? He has the same photographic philosophy.

grecy 5y ago

I work very hard to name, catalogue and caption all my photos as the trip goes. I ruthlessly delete duplicates or blurry / not so good ones, until I'm left with 5-10 photos from any given event that I will have forever and always remember. i.e. playing with lava in 2010 - http://theroadchoseme.com/volca%CC%81n-pacaya http://theroadchoseme.com/volca%CC%81n-pacaya all the way to seeing the gorillas in Uganda in 2018 - http://theroadchoseme.com/mgahinga-mountain-gorillas http://theroadchoseme.com/mgahinga-mountain-gorillas

diebeforei485 5y ago

I used to scoff at selfies, but they are very efficient.

makeitdouble 5y ago

> I can find better images online. 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.

hackernewds 5y ago
So interesting to read the psychology behind this. Some of the photos taking has been linked to mild hoarding - similar to why we save links (on HNs as well) in hindsight to never look into it again. Gives us both a sense of ownership + FOMO > 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?
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  There is definitely a hoarding part, the saving grace being that taking and storing dozens of thousands of pictures doesn't cost much nor incur severe penalties compared to the IRL counterpart. 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.

null_object 5y ago

Hope this doesn't come across as pretentious, but if you carry a film camera with you on your travels it really helps in two ways: 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.

codingdave 5y ago
This has nothing to do with film, and everything to do with your habits. It is 100% possible to have those behaviors with a digital camera.
- glitchcrab 5y ago
  Agreed. I put thought into the photo that I'm taking so that one or two is sufficient to capture what I want, and I have image review disabled so I rarely see the image afterwards. I do occasionally check it manually if I'm not sure that I nailed what I was after, but that's not a regular occurrence.
- canbus 5y ago
  Or even a phone, for that matter!
- the_af 5y ago
  But in practice it's way more difficult. Adding a physical impediment helps you develop better habits. At least for me and my weak willpower.
friseurtermin 5y ago
100% what I came here to say. My film camera restricts me from checking each photo instantly, keeps other people from checking each photo ("Show me! Do I look good in that? Take another one") or from sharing online. 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.

gpt5 5y ago

The real underrated medium is video. Video captures the moment in a much more real way, and brings back memories in a way that photos just can't. Think about the experience of seeing a photo of your young self (or your child at a young age) vs a video, it just doesn't compare. 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.

Void_ 5y ago
I love making little vlogs when I go somewhere with my friends. 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.
jeena 5y ago
As a workaround for the private TikTok, I use PeerTube. It's not as nice and seamless but it kind of does the trick and it safes a lot of metadata so you can search for hashtags, titles, etc.
voussoir 5y ago
Your comment reminded me of this video: "2:30am at 7-11 near Disney World - 1987" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA 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.

Existenceblinks 5y ago

Good memory also sucks to me because it's already gone, it has negative meaning embedded in its definition.

dhotson 5y ago

One thing that changed it for me was making my own physical photo albums when I get back from a holiday. 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/ 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.

mjrbrennan 5y ago
I've picked up film photography over the last couple of years and I am so happy with it, the experience of slowing down and seeing the results much later is a much more satisfying way of taking photos for me. I can't wait until I finally get to do some overseas travel again later this year and shoot a few rolls of film while I am at it. 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.
conductr 5y ago
My entire family does photo albums for nearly every event/holiday/vacation. They even make multiple and give as gifts to each other. "They" as it's typically led by the women in my family and the guys pretty much stay out of it. We regularly take vacations with extended family so it's always a group of folks taking pictures and they get pooled and curated by someone at the end. 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.

stardenburden 5y ago

I don't just take pictures while traveling. Anything that I find interesting gets saved. 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.

jeena 5y ago

I like to take photos because it brings me to places where I'd never go if I wouldn't want to try to take a photo and the stories themselves on how I got the photo are super interesting. Let's take https://jeena.net/photos/301 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 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.

matsemann 5y ago
I feel somewhat the same. Not necessarily with photography, but the act of planning it makes the experience better. You can go somewhere, look at it, snatch a photo and leave, and be perfectly content. But the payoff when you achieve what you planned makes it an even greater memory. I don't do much photos, but for me it's action shots with gopro. An example https://youtu.be/oCXlwJYt0mg 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.
user_7832 5y ago

yumiris 5y ago

When possible, I first visit the place without a camera and strive to immerse completely. I then visit it again and take pictures. Not using the camera the first time - and having to think about how I'll take the pictures when revisiting - provides a lot of opportunity to appreciate and reflect on the sight in question. With places I can only visit once, I try to take as little pictures as possible, and instead embrace living in the moment to let my mind and heart preserve the memories. 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!

glitchcrab 5y ago
This is the thing though; the human brain is fallible and those vivid memories are not preserved because they change over time.
- yumiris 5y ago
  Absolutely, it's sadly a compromise. Although there's one thing that's much harder to forget and won't be prone to distortion: how we felt! 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.

DeathArrow 5y ago

Why I photograph stuff? Because it renders my view on the world, it represents my personal experience. Because, while I don't think photography itself is an art form, it still requires thought, observation, experimentation, design skills and a lot of practice to do a decent job. And while the act of photography itself might not be an art form, setting up a scene and postprocessing can be quite artistic. 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.

unictek 5y ago

Just stop taking photos, you’re bad at it :)

speedgoose 5y ago
But I enjoy taking photos.

jerrygoyal 5y ago

I don't (usually) take photos anymore. Instead, I capture short videos (10-20sec long) from my phone. These are easy to consume later and help in better capturing the "moment" because of audio+frames instead of a single static frame.

nicbou 5y ago

I went through a no-photo phase, but switching to just my phone’s camera changed my opinion. 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.

Markoff 5y ago

I agree with sentiment you don't need 35 different photos of famous sight you can easily find online, but of course it doesn't make sense skipping any photos completely, since when you are looking at your vacation photos the last thing you wanna do is every 2 minutes searching Google for photos of sight you didn't take photo, let's ignore the fact you wont even remember names of many sights after years, so you wont be able to find them immediately or at all if it's less touristy sights. 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.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Something that captivated my imagination back in 1993 was the blog -- before there was a word for it -- called Travels with Samantha by Philip Greenspun. The site is still online, with the original content from the 1990s: https://philip.greenspun.com/samantha/ 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/ https://philip.greenspun.com/sql/

tiku 5y ago

I remember a site where they found all similar photos of the same places. Does anyone know what i'm talking about?

jzer0cool 5y ago

Travel photos was a leisure of mine. I spent many hours browsing photos, blogs, and at the time flickr. I never knew what I might do with some of my photos other than "sharing them". I want to do something more with them, but not sure what. 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?

fbn79 5y ago

I really miss a mass-used service that let me browse user-uploaded photos by geolocation. I found it interesting to discover places and life in these places through people's casual photos. In the beginning, I was doing such browsing in Panoramio. It was very mass-used (for that time "mass" meaning) and full of nice photos than Google ruined it. Then I discovered Instagram geolocation. I was able browse Instagram photos by latitude/longitude with many websites offering that way to browse Instagram and was so enjoying. Then Instagram closed the API that let it possible. And the location hashtag browsing is not comparable. That's very sad. We have instruments that attach geolocation to every photo automatically, we upload photos on the Net because we like to share them and make them public but there is no mass-used service that let this data be browsed by lat/lng.

tabiv 5y ago

I completely aggree with this. I also used to hate taking photos. I think it was because my grandmother would always take at least 100 photos at every gathering. No one would ever see them. 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...

OJFord 5y ago

I like the idea of it, and was looking recently for a compact/'point and shoot' type camera that's decent, but pretty cheap (say £100-250 was the range I expected to look at). I'm sure there used to be loads! But it seemed they'd all but evaporated - is it just chip shortage, or have 'camera phones' (heh, remember that?) decimated the market at the low end? 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?).

user_7832 5y ago
I can't comment about the availability of cheap cameras, but I'd caution you if you're going that way (particularly if you want to shoot at less than ideal situations). The contrast autofocus most of them use is finicky at best, and I don't think you'll get phase detection AF in a cheap cam. However a 2nd hand DSLR might be a much better idea. 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 $$$ phone.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't be looking for (or expecting, or putting the time and effort in to learning how to take) great shots, just nice holiday snaps etc. to look back on. I'm against going full DSLR just because it's too far the other way, not at all compact, ideally I'd like something that can squeeze into a pocket; definitely a small bag pocket. I actually already have a Canon SX40 which I suppose is technically a 'compact point-and-shoot', but even that's too big, I never use it, I'm not even sure I'd bother with it on a 'big' trip. > mid-high end phone likely will be much better (especially with its computational chops) than a cheap point and shoot, especially if you already have a fancy $$$ phone. I don't, I suppose that's partly why I don't want camera requirements to drive my phone choice.

edpichler 5y ago

I pay much more attention in the moment when I am taking photos. It´s a therapy to me. I automatically enjoy all the angles of a subject or an area I am visiting.

LanceH 5y ago

My advice for shooting a photo: Avoid the "standing in front of something looking at the camera smiling" photo. If your party will be in the picture, get a picture of them looking at the subject. There is a difference in reminiscing about looking at something-incredible and reminiscing about turning your back on it to squint into the sun while someone fiddles with the camera. 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.

marcosdumay 5y ago
> There is a difference in reminiscing about looking at something-incredible and reminiscing about turning your back on it to squint into the sun while someone fiddles with the camera. 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.

uhtred 5y ago

Composition matters more than the quality of the camera. Sure his shot of the gardens sucked because it had half a moving car, some traffic lights, a zebra crossing, etc.

canbus 5y ago

I feel like this article has popped up just as I needed to read it as I've been debating just "living the moment" vs taking pictures as I normally would - I am going to carry on with the latter. Taking photos doesn't detract from living in the moment, it just means you can re-live it (or memories of it) a year later.

the_af 5y ago

I get really anxious taking photos. I take tons of them but only ever see a few of them again, so what they actually do is prevent me from living in the moment. I find myself looking at all those beautiful places through the phone's screen instead of with my own eyes, and for what? Plus, like TFA mentions, it's rude to your companions. Now I really strive to take essential photos instead of snapping them all the time.