Travel photography is a specialized discipline in which travels are recorded in a photographic manner. It enables people to share and revisit their experiences. Most people who go on vacation will engage in some sort of travel photography, albeit on an amateur level, because they want to remember the enjoyment and fun they had. However, many people have come to Shahriar Ekbatani, who is a professional travel photographer, and felt a sense of failure, not understanding why the atmosphere they tried so hard to capture simply doesn’t shine through.
Shahriar Ekbatani on the Psychology of Travel Photography
If you have ever looked at other people’s travel photographs, you will recognize the feeling of boredom. You aren’t on those pictures, and you don’t really want to see them because you can’t feel what the people in those pictures are feeling. And deep down inside, you know that this is exactly how other people feel when they are looking at yours.
Now here is the psychology of it all. It isn’t because your pictures, or theirs for that matter, are boring. It is actually because of a deep rooted sense of jealousy, one that you probably don’t even know is there. We all love being on vacation. We love traveling and we love discovering the world, seeing things that others have not seen before. And when we see someone else has already done that before us, we feel a sense of jealousy. You can actually test this out! Say, for instance, that you have been on a Nile Cruise, and one of your friends has at well. They will love looking through your pictures with you, because they can share the experience with you and recognize elements. And maybe, if they’re lucky, they will have seen something that you didn’t see. If you now show the same album to someone who has not been on a Nile Cruise, you will instantly find that they seem less interested in your pictures.
Now, your goal will not be to make other people jealous of your fantastic trip. You simply want to share your experience. One way to do that, is by better organizing the pictures you had. You should categorize them in ways that are easy to recognize. Some examples include:
- Markets.
- Everyday living.
- Buskers.
- Artists.
- Food.
- Windows.
- People.
- Roofs.
- Fire hydrants.
These may seem like some very odd categories, but they are things that everybody knows. Everybody has been to a market, lives their lives, has given money to a busker, enjoyed an artist, eaten food, looked through windows, put their clothes on, and so on. This means that they have something to compare things to. They can look at your experience and put it side by side with their own. They can marvel at how different certain things are, but also enjoy finding the similarities. What you have done, in a sense, is made them a part of your holiday and this also means they will take far greater enjoyment in seeing your holiday snaps.