How To Choose Your Favorite Travel Photos
Don't let your travel photos sit somewhere in the digital world never to see the light of day once you're back in the grind of your day to day life. The reason you took that trip was to have a great experience and make memories, isn't it?
Most photos taken today (over 95%) are never printed or looked at again.
Most images end up in the digital void of a cell phone photo stream or, at best, filed away in a computer somewhere.
Imagine how different the world is today in 2016 compared to 1996 where film was the only option and you had it developed at your neighborhood drug store.
The fact is the vast majority of photos never see the light of day.
Being photographers, it's only natural that photos dominated our trip to Egypt. In fact, I became the 'official photographer' of the trip after a few days. (It was an honorary title obviously, but if you're ever in need of an 'official photographer' for your next trip, we would be happy to come along).
We have received many messages asking further questions about the trip, the highlights and our favorite parts. If you haven't read our post about The 20 Most Surprising Things about Traveling to Egypt or How We Found at Great Travel Deal To Egypt, those two posts may be of interest to you as well.
Here are my top 3 tips on how to choose your favorite travel photos.
1) Make Sure You Can View the Entire Gallery at One Time
What I mean by this is be sure to take a few minutes to sit down and look through the complete gallery of images you've taken during your travels.
From beginning to end look through your photos.
Perhaps you do this on a computer (like I do) or perhaps right on your mobile device. Go back through them. You did take them so you could remember the trip, right?
2) Delete Images That Are Obviously Bad
As you are going through your gallery, know that you're only going to keep the best images.
In the photo world, we call this "editing in". This means that we start from a position of "I want to allow as FEW photos as possible into this gallery."
As you go through the photos, delete the ones that are obviously bad.
Don't fret or event think twice about photos with closed eyes or where someone is looking awful.
3) Keep Your Top 25 Favorites and Do Something With Them
The number 25 doesn't have any specific meaning, but to me, 25 images can tell a story from beginning to end. A roll of film used to have 24 images on it and people could use one roll for an entire vacation.
So as you're going through, somehow highlight, favorite or star your top images.
More than likely your first pass will yield anywhere from 50 to 100 images and you'll have to keep going back through your favorites to narrow down your selection to only 25.
This allows you to look through the photos, as I did with images of the pyramids below, and ask the question, which one of these should I keep because it tells the best story? That's how you are able to continue narrowing down your selection to only 25 images.
Now that you have your favorite 25 photos, now do something with them.
Print them. Put them in a book. Post them online.
Just make sure you do something with them so the rest of the world can see what you saw while traveling.