Travel photography is maybe one of the most misunderstood fields of commercial photography. For most photographers, the only requirement for shooting travel photos is for them to be travelling, but the reality is very different. The advantage to you is, this mass misconception means there’s bonafide opportunity for the photographers who do get it right.
Travel photography is as commercial as it gets. Travel photography publishers need photos that actively sell the destination or the experience. They buy the sort of photos that engage the reader and leave them wanting to do it all themselves. In most cases, that might mean using photos of tourists enjoying the destination or experience.
The problem they are facing is most photographers are more likely to be shooting holiday snaps, rather than commercial travel photos. Most photographers think of travel photography simply as images taken on their own travels, and little thought is given to the end user. They shoot whatever they see, as they see it, and focus on the physical features alone.
As a result they’re simply recording their travels, making an individual record, with very little thought of sharing and selling the experience itself.
Don’t misunderstand me 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’s a definite demand for every one of them, but when you start researching what travel buyers actually use you’ll soon see that these only make up a small part of the images used. The great majority of photographs used in travel guides and brochures fall into the travel-lifestyle category: toursists experiencing the destination.
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This supply-and-demand problem is worsened by the undeniable fact that everyone stops for 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 is all that you shoot, you will face major competition for a little portion of the potential sales.
So when you start shooting travel stock photos that capture the visitor-experience, you are targeting a gap in the market with lower competition and noticeably more demand. If you can then create the sort of photos that engage the audience and fire their imagination … making them need to experience it first-hand then you are shooting commercial travel photography.
The extra bonus of focusing on the visitor experience is that as soon as ‘people ‘ are included, travel photography publishers are likely to want current images showing contemporary hairstyles & fashions. So these are the shots that are always in demand and can’t always be sourced from the in-house library. The backdrop could be a 2000 year old landmark, but the people viewing it will need to be contemporary.
As often occurs, most of this is straightforward, common-sense, once you take a Client-centric approach and begin to plan & shoot for your end-user instead of yourself. Research your destinations, identify the landmarks and icons, but take a little more time to totally understand the total experience of the destination.
The good news is, most photographers won’t make the effort , so any time you create the kind of travel photography that the audience wants to be a part of, that they’d like to experience for themselves, you will be shooting the kind of travel photography that sells itself.
Matt Brading contributes photography and articles to GlobalEye Photo Stock Agency, which represents many top travel photographers. If you’d like to know more about selling photographs online with GlobalEye, you can download a free stock photography business kit in our photographers area.