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Composition in travel photography is the business of arranging a frame when almost every variable has already been decided for you. Where you are, what hour you got there, how many people are in the way, when the bus leaves. You're using exactly the same techniques you'd use at home. You're just using them once, quickly, in a place you'll probably never stand in again.
If you want the foundations — thirds, leading lines, framing, negative space — they're set out in the rules of composition, and they hold everywhere on earth. This article is about the other half: what actually goes wrong when you're composing on the move, and what to do about it.
What makes composition in travel photography different?
Nothing about the principles. Everything about the circumstances. Five things separate composing on a trip from composing at home.
- One attempt. You are not coming back on Thursday when the light is better.
- No local knowledge. Someone who lives there knows the alley, the wall, the hour. You have a map and about twenty minutes.
- People in every frame, and they are not yours to direct or move.
- Light you were given, not chosen. The itinerary put you there at two in the afternoon.
- One lens. Whatever you were willing to carry all day.
Everything below follows from those five.
One attempt, and that's it
At home you can go back. The field down the road will still be there on Thursday, and if the light is flat today, you shrug and return when it isn't.
Travel takes that away. You're at the temple at two in the afternoon because that's when the itinerary got you there, and you will never stand in that spot again.
Which changes the calculation. At home, holding out for the perfect frame costs you nothing. Away, it can cost you the only frame you're going to get.
Take the obvious shot, then find the second shot
This is the single most useful habit in travel photography, and almost nobody does it in the right order.
Somewhere near every famous thing there is a spot, usually within sight of where the coaches park, and the photograph taken from it exists several million times already. Take it. It's why you came; you'll want it, and standing there refusing on principle helps nobody. Ninety seconds, get it sharp, move on.
Then go and find the second shot. This normally means walking a couple of hundred meters in a direction nobody else bothered with and turning round. What's behind the monument is often more interesting than the monument, and the side street running off the square usually has a better view of it than the square does. Shop windows reflect things. Gaps between buildings frame things. Doors have detail on them that nobody photographs because everyone's looking up.
Almost every over-photographed place has a second picture within a short walk of the first one, and hardly anyone goes to find it because the tour has moved on.
The version everybody has is the version nobody remembers. But take it first, because a photographer who spends forty minutes hunting for something extraordinary and comes away with nothing at all is a common sight.
The five-minute composition routine
Arriving somewhere unfamiliar, this gets you most of the way to local knowledge fast. Five minutes, four steps, camera down for the first two.
- Walk the space. Two minutes, no camera. Just cover the ground and see what's there. You cannot compose a place you haven't looked at.
- Find the light. Wherever it's doing something interesting is usually where your picture is, so look for a wall catching sun, or a doorway with brightness coming through it. Then work out which way the sun is heading, because whatever you've spotted will have moved within the half hour.
- Watch the people. Give it a minute. Every place has its own traffic: a way in, a place where everyone slows down, and one particular spot where every single visitor stops to take the identical photograph. Knowing all three is as useful for deciding where not to stand as where to.
- Find your near thing. Somewhere unfamiliar, this is genuinely hard, because your attention is on the far thing you traveled to see. But a railing or a flower or somebody's hand in the bottom of the frame is what stops the picture from going flat, and no amount of impressive view will do that job on its own.
Four steps, five minutes, and you've compressed a fair amount of local knowledge into something usable.
How do you photograph crowded places?
Crowds are the defining condition of travel photography and most advice carries on as though they aren't there. Three approaches work, and which one you use depends on what you're trying to say about the place.
Should I wait for the crowd to clear?
Usually not. A popular square does not empty out, and waiting is how you spend an afternoon and come home with nothing. Waiting works at dawn, or for ninety seconds while one tour group passes. It does not work at midday in August.
When should I include the crowd on purpose?
When the crowd is the truth about that place. A square with two hundred people in it at eleven in the morning is what that square is. The density, the movement, the fact of it — shot as a subject rather than an obstacle, that's frequently the better photograph. The empty version is a lie about the place, just a very pretty one.
How do I make people disappear?
Long exposures thin them out. Rest the camera on a wall or a railing and try something around a quarter of a second first. At that speed, anyone walking through your frame arrives as a blur while the building behind them stays completely sharp. A second or two and they mostly stop registering at all. In daylight you won't get anywhere near those speeds without a neutral density filter, and from there it's the same set of decisions as any other long exposure work. Worth checking the frame first, though, since anybody who stops to look at something will record perfectly normally and you'll have a sharp tourist standing in the middle of an otherwise empty square.
How do I shoot around people when I can't do either?
Change your height. A first-floor café window, a set of steps, a low wall gets you above the crowd line. Or go the other way, down to a couple of feet off the ground with something in the foreground, shooting underneath it. Both are faster than waiting, and both give you a frame nobody else in that square is getting.
Composing in whatever light you're given
At home you pick your hour. On a trip, your hour is picked for you, and it's frequently the worst one. The answer is almost never to take the planned photograph badly. It's to take a different photograph that suits the light in front of you.
Harsh midday sun
Wide landscapes suffer badly in this. Shadows do very well. Point the camera at the shadow rather than the thing casting it — railings laid across a wall, the edge of a staircase, whatever shape a passing figure throws down onto a square. Anything where contrast is doing the work will hold up. Shaded doorways with hard light behind them photograph beautifully at midday. Faces in open sun, less so, unless squinting is what you were after.
Flat overcast
Grand vistas want something happening in the sky and flat cloud won't give you it, so your options are to crop the sky out or leave it in as deliberately empty space. What overcast is good for is almost everything else. Skin tones behave in it. Market colour holds rather than blowing out. A wet street under grey cloud picks up reflections that bright sun would kill.
Rain
Usually the best light you'll get on a trip, and almost everyone puts the camera away. Reflections in pavement, color saturation, people under umbrellas, light from shop windows. Bring a cloth and shoot.
Dusk and blue hour
Twenty minutes after sunset, when building lights come on and the sky still holds color, is when most cities look their best. It's also when the tour has usually taken you back to the hotel, which is the argument for going out again afterward.
Nothing is working
Some places just won't give you a wide shot. You walk round, you try the obvious angle and three unobvious ones, and nothing holds together. At that point the sensible move is to give up on the place and start photographing things in it. A door handle that's been worn smooth by a few hundred years of hands. Tiling. Whatever's on the counter at a market stall. People tend to skip these because at the time they feel like something you shoot when you've failed, and then six months later they're half of what makes the trip look like a trip.
Photographing people who did not ask for it
Ask. That's the short answer, and it's the one most photographers avoid because it feels awkward.
It takes a gesture rather than a language. It is rarely refused. And the photograph afterward is almost always better than the one you'd have taken from across the road, because now you can position someone, wait for the expression, and shoot more than one frame instead of grabbing whatever you got.
The alternative — a long lens from a distance — is less intrusive and tends to produce distant, disconnected pictures. Getting close gets you the photograph and means the person knows. There's no clean answer, and pretending there is doesn't help. Working with people rather than around them is most of what our Fearless Faces course is about.
Where asking genuinely isn't practical, use people as shapes in the scene instead: a figure walking through a doorway, a silhouette on a bridge, someone at the end of a street. Nobody identifiable, and the picture still has a person in it doing something.
One lens, one bag
Nobody decides to work under restriction on a trip. It just happens, because you've been carrying the bag since eight in the morning and swapping lenses in the middle of a busy street is more trouble than it's worth. So most people end up shooting a whole trip on one zoom.
Which does something useful to your composition. Framing with your feet instead of the zoom ring is the better habit anyway, and it's the one you're forced into. You also stop reaching for whatever focal length suits each scene and start working within what one lens does well, and the pictures come home looking more like a set as a result.
If you're choosing before you leave, something around 24–70mm will handle most of what you run into. Go wider for a trip that's mostly buildings, longer if you're after wildlife or people from across a street.
Travel photography composition checklist
Worth running through in the thirty seconds before you press the shutter. Most of it becomes automatic within a few trips.
Before you lift the camera
Have I walked the whole space?
Where is the light, and which way is it moving?
Where is everyone else standing, and can I be somewhere else?
Composing the frame
Can I say in one sentence what this picture is of?
Is there something within a meter of the lens?
Am I at eye level? Could I be lower, or higher?
Where does the line go, and does it arrive anywhere?
What's behind my subject — poles, signs, stray arms?
Before you move on
Have I taken the obvious shot, and then gone looking for the second one?
Have I got any details — doors, hands, textures, signage?
Is there a frame worth waiting ninety seconds for?
Twenty minutes at a place
Tour schedules are what they are. Here's how to use a short stop.
First two minutes: no camera. Walk, look, see where the light is, watch where people go.
Next three: take the obvious shot. Get it done, get it sharp, stop worrying about it.
Next ten: work. Find your foreground. Get lower. Go round the back. Try the side street. This is where the photograph you keep gets made.
Last five: details. Doors, hands, textures, signage. Quick, close, and they'll carry a set when you get home.
In short
There's no such thing as travel composition, strictly speaking. There's composition, and there are the circumstances that make people do it badly when they're away from home. Those circumstances are the part you have some control over.
Look before you shoot. Take the obvious frame, then go and find the better one. Work with the light you were given rather than the light you wanted. Deal with crowds deliberately instead of waiting them out. Ask before you photograph someone. Get one near thing in every frame.
Photographers who come home with strong work from a trip usually aren't the ones who saw the most places. They're the ones who did something deliberate at each of the few they stopped at — which leaves you free to think about the rest of what travel throws at you.
Frequently asked questions
How do you compose travel photos quickly?
Walk the space for two minutes without the camera, find where the light is doing something, watch where people move, then find something close to put in the foreground. Four steps, about five minutes, and it gets you most of the way to the local knowledge you don't have.
How do you take good travel photos in crowded places?
You can photograph the crowd as your subject rather than treating it as something in the way. You can slow the shutter to a quarter of a second or longer so that anyone moving blurs away. Or you can get above them from a café window or a set of steps, or below them by shooting low with something in the foreground. What almost never works is standing there waiting for a popular place to empty out.
Does composition work differently in travel photography?
No. The principles are identical. What differs is that you're applying them fast, somewhere unfamiliar, in light you didn't choose, and usually with people in the frame. It's a conditions problem rather than a technique problem.
What should I do when the light is bad, and I can't come back?
Photograph something else. Harsh midday light suits hard shadow, texture and geometry. Flat grey light suits faces, detail and color. Rain suits reflections and saturation. Change the subject to fit the light rather than taking a planned photograph badly.
Should I ask before photographing someone?
Usually yes. It's rarely refused, and the resulting picture tends to be better because you can direct a little and shoot more than one frame. Where asking isn't practical, use people as shapes in the scene rather than identifiable subjects.
How long should I spend at one location?
Longer than feels comfortable. Five minutes looking before you lift the camera, and a couple of minutes waiting once you've found your frame, will do more for your photographs than seeing twice as many places.
