Paul Le Chien

Travel photography is maybe one of the most misunderstood fields of professional photography. For most photographers, the sole criteria for shooting travel photos is for them to be travelling, but the truth of the matter is totally different. The advantage to you is, this mass misconception means there's real opportunity for the photographers who do get it right.

Travel photography is as commercial as it gets. Travel photography users want photos that actively sell the destination or the experience. They require the sort of images that engage the viewer and leave them wanting to do it all themselves. In most situations, that will mean using photos of travellers enjoying the destination or experience.

The problem they face is most photographers are much more likely to be shooting vacation snaps, rather than commercial travel photographs. Most photographers think of travel photography simply as photographs taken on their travels, and little consideration is given to the end-user. They shoot whatever they see, as they see it, and concentrate their attention the physical features alone.

As a result they're simply documenting their travels, making an individual record, with very little thought of sharing and selling the experience itself.

Don't misunderstand what I mean here: the physical record type shots can and do sell: the classic landmarks, the famous vistas, the local wildlife, the buildings, bridges and skylines. There is a definite demand for every one of them, but when you start researching the images travel buyers use you'll soon see that these only make up a small fraction of the photographs used. The vast majority of photographs employed in travel guides and leaflets fall into the travel-lifestyle category: toursists experiencing the destination.

This supply-and-demand problem is exacerbated by the indisputable fact that everyone captures the classic shots, and they've been shooting them since cameras were invented. It's also reasonable to say that most travel photography publishers are also going to have their own in-house collection of the classic shots they use most often. So if that's all you ever shoot, you're going to face intense competition for a small part of the potential sales.

So when you start shooting travel stock images that focus on the visitor-experience, you are targeting a gap in the market with much lower competition and noticeably higher demand. If you can then create the types of images that engage the viewer and fire their imagination ... making them want to experience it for themselves then you're shooting commercial travel photography.

The extra bonus of focusing on the visitor experience is that as soon as 'people ' are included, travel photography buyers are going to need current photographs showing recent hairstyles & fashions. So these are the shots that are always in demand and can't always be obtained from the in-house archive. The setting might be a 2000 years old landmark, but the people viewing it will need to be contemporary.

As frequently occurs, most of this is simple, common-sense, once you take a Client-centric approach and plan & shoot for your end-user instead of yourself. Research your destinations, identify the landmarks and icons, but take a little more time to completely understand the total experience of the destination.

The advantage for you is, most photographers won't bother, so any time you create the type of travel photography the viewer wants to be a part of, that they would like to experience for themselves, you'll be shooting the kind of travel photos that sells itself.