Do you travel and take pictures of the journey or is taking pictures the reason why you travel?
If the answer for you is the latter, then you probably have photographic ambitions and want to go beyond documentation and snapshooting. Let us assume that your primary intention is share the photographs and tell a stories about the amazing things you can encounter all across the world. Well all know too well that hour long slideshows can be overwhelmingly boring. But how is that possible if the trip itself was amazing and what can photography do about it?
The reason why viewers of still images can hardly share the excitement and the feelings of the traveller presenting his photographs is because they are unable to feel part of the experience. When there are no inner feelings emerging from the images and the stories there can be no excitement. Obviously, the narrator can add a lot to lower the detachement between the viewers and the stories but the photographs themselves can add more than words can. How so? By making the viewer feel right at the spot and letting him emerse in the experience by evoking emotions!
While this concept is fairly abstract, the practical realization of this also roots in photographic technique. It’s about being close to the subject of interest (e.g. wide angle), not having distracting elements in the image, having an emphasizing lighting, choosing a dynamic perspective (e.g. no perfect horizon), framing the image to complement the emotions you want to evoke (e.g. extreme crowds, silence, chaos) and much more.
The image above is a very puristic example for this concept and was taken during a trip to Cuba in 2006. This is the last thing I saw before jumping into the fresh warm water of the Caribbean summer sea.