Travel Photography: How to Document & Share Your Next Trip | Sean Dalton | Skillshare
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Travel Photography: How to Document & Share Your Next Trip

teacher avatar Sean Dalton, Travel Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:20

    • 2.

      Class Project

      1:46

    • 3.

      Your Goals with Documentation

      3:35

    • 4.

      The Best Travel Cameras

      5:11

    • 5.

      Documenting Intentionally

      3:04

    • 6.

      Things to Look For

      4:44

    • 7.

      Hitting the Canals!

      1:13

    • 8.

      How to Photograph a Place

      5:08

    • 9.

      Capturing Local Charm

      2:40

    • 10.

      Capture Moments with Video

      5:29

    • 11.

      Sorting & Organizing Photos

      8:42

    • 12.

      Quick & Efficient Photo Editing

      10:33

    • 13.

      Saving & Sharing Your Trip

      11:20

    • 14.

      Conclusion & Next Steps

      2:48

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About This Class

Have plans to travel? Join travel photographer Sean Dalton in Venice, Italy as he breaks down how to best document your next trip.

In this course Sean walks you through his approach for documenting his trips abroad using a combination of photo, video, and text. You will learn the best way to approach documenting your trip, as well as how to save the memories you capture for easy access in the future. 

You will learn:

  • How to balance taking photos and living in the moment
  • The best travel cameras (including smartphones)
  • How to tell stories through your images
  • How to upload, sort, and edit your photos
  • How to keep a detailed travel journal
  • How to best share your travel photos online

While this course is focused on photography, documentation methods such as video and text are also discussed. At the end of this course you will have a better understanding of how to document your trip in a way that best suits you. 

Who is this course for?

This course is for anyone who wants to better document their travels, and is accessible to student of all skill-levels.

Do I need any special gear for this course?

No professional camera gear is required to take this course. In fact, a smartphone is more than enough! We will discuss several options for cameras and how to choose the best one for you.

Checkout some of Sean's other courses:

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Resources Mentioned in Course:

Meet Your Teacher

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Sean Dalton

Travel Photographer

Top Teacher

Hey guys! I'm Sean.

For the last 5 years I've been traveling the world capturing as many photos as I possibly can. I'm drawn to a wide range of photography styles, and constantly striving to improve my art. Emotion and storytelling are two central pillars of my artwork, and I am always looking for new and interesting stories to tell via my camera.

I'm originally from San Francisco, California, but have spent the last few years chasing stories and light throughout Asia.

Most of what I teach relates to my background with travel and lifestyle photography, but I am constantly expanding my focus as I continue to grow as a photographer. I'm pumped that you are here, let's grow together!

I'm active on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube.... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I find that one of the best parts about traveling beyond the actual act of traveling and all the excitement and adventure that you experience while you're doing so, is the ability to go back later on and relive some of those memories and share some of those experiences with people that you love. Hey everyone, my name is Sean Dalton. I am a travel photographer based in Bali, Indonesia, but today I'm actually solo traveling in Venice, Italy. I thought that this short trip to the floating city would be a perfect opportunity to share with you guys how I best approach documenting my trips and my travels across the world, and also how you can do so in a way that's effective as well. We're going to start things off talking about cameras and which camera you might want to use for documenting your trip. Whether that's a smartphone, a mid-range point and shoot, or a professional DSLR. Then we're going to talk about some overall philosophies and approaches to documenting your trip and making sure that you're documenting your trip in a way that doesn't get in the way of your actual traveling experience, where you can take the photos that you need, but not be overly burdened by your camera or by the actual process of documentation. After a few short photography lessons on the canals of Venice, we're going to come back here and I'm going to show you how you can sort and organize and also edit some of the images that you captured while you're out and about. Then we're going to talk about how you can best share those images with people that you love or at least put them in a place where you can easily access them in the future and truly relive those memories for years to come. This course is for anybody that might be looking to travel soon and or maybe you have aspirations to travel, or maybe you've traveled in the past and you realized that you had this epic trip, but now it's all a blur and you didn't properly document it. Well, this course will help you not repeat that mistake. You don't need any fancy cameras to take this course either. You can do everything on a smartphone. We're actually going to be talking about the smartphone a lot in this course. You also don't need any photography skills in general. This course is relevant for a complete photography beginner, but it's also relevant for people with a bit of a higher skill level, who are looking for a different way to document their travels. No matter who you are, if you're watching this course, it's clear that you do enjoy traveling like myself, so why don't we start talking about how you can best document your trip so you can be prepared for your next traveling adventure. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: This class, like all my classes here on Skillshare, does have a class project, but I want to keep it simple. I want you guys to go on a trip somewhere. It can even be a nearby city, a nearby town, whatever, capture a series of photos and then come back here to the course and post 3-5 of your favorite images that you captured. These might be random things that you saw while you were walking around town, or they might be more planned out specific shots that you really had in mind. But no matter what those images are, go ahead and take those images and post them here in the class so we can check those out and comment on them as well. Now, I recognize that not everyone can realistically travel abroad right now, but you can have an amazing mini travel experience by going somewhere near your hometown. For example, I was visiting my sister in California and we went to a little town about 30 minutes away from where we grew up. We walked around, ate some good food, went to a museum, and had a lovely day exploring this little town. I took a ton of photos because it was a great experience, and I really wanted to remember this experience that I had with my sister on a sunny day in California, walking around this old, little town. That was important to me, so I'm glad that I brought my camera and took those images. Now, if you're not necessarily interested in doing that, that's totally okay. You can write a short description of a trip that you'd like to go on. Maybe tell us about some of the things that you aspire to do when you're traveling in that location and brainstorm a little bit for photos that you might want to capture while you're traveling there in the future. But no matter what you share, I'm looking forward to seeing it and you can post your class project after you finish the course, after you go through all the content, or if you're feeling inspired midway through the course, you can go out and take those photos or write that description and post them whenever you're ready. But now that we've talked about the class project for this class, let's move on and start talking about some of the approaches that you can follow for documenting your trip. 3. Your Goals with Documentation: One thing I think everyone needs to spend time reflecting on before they go travel is how much energy do you actually want to put into your documentary process? Documenting your trip can be as intense or as simple as you would like it to be. For example, you could go on trips where the only main goal of that trip is to capture beautiful images. You're waking up at sunrise, you're going hiking, you have a ton of gear, you're location scouting, etc. The whole trip is revolved around taking beautiful photos or, I think where most people fit in, photography can just be a secondary thing to your trip. Where you're just capturing images, just to simply document the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis. You go eat at a good restaurant, you want to take some nice photos of the food that you had and just to remember that experience or just take some photos of the city that you're visiting so you remember what it was like when you were there. I personally do both. I love those crazy photography adventures where I'd go out and the only goal is to take photos but I also like these more relaxed trips, where I'm going to museums, going into restaurants, exploring a city and just documenting some of the things that I see. Just before I came here to Venice yesterday, I was actually up in the Italian Dolomites in the Alps with my friend Eliot. We were there for a week, shooting the mountains and shooting the trees, and just trying to photograph this place in the most beautiful way possible. It's hard work when you're doing something like that because you're waking up every day at sunrise and you're just doing everything you possibly can to get good photos. Now this trip in Venice is not necessarily like that. I would love to come away with some beautiful images. But like I said, this trip is more aimed at just experiencing the city, seeing some of the sites and documenting my experience here. I want to be able to look back at my experience from Venice in 5, 10, 25 years and just remember what the four days that I had here were like. For me personally, it really does depend on the trip, but I always spend time reflecting on what I want to get out of the experience and how far I want to take this documenting process. I think it's important to have that in mind before you go travel so then when you're traveling, you know your boundaries with photography and how far you actually want to take it. I think this is a really important thing to do because it does impact your overall presence while you're traveling. When I say presence, I mean your mindfulness, your ability to truly live in the moment. For some people, having a camera almost gets in the way of their overall experience. This was actually the case for me when I first started photography. I used to have a little DSLR camera that I would take a lot of photos with. But I went to Europe when I was in college and I actually didn't bring my camera because I felt that it was so difficult for me to separate creating, making images and having this amazing travel experience at the same time. I just felt like I couldn't do it because I felt like the camera was just sucking me out of that moment in time. I actually decided not to bring my camera with me to Europe on that trip because I felt that way. I ended up taking a bunch of photos on my iPhone anyways, so I couldn't fully separate myself from the photography experience. But I know for a lot of people that is a stressor and it is important to come to that designation before you travel is what type of role is photography playing in this trip? Is it everything to me? Do I really need to come away with all these amazing photos or is it just a simple way for me to document the trip that I'm going on? Now, the actual specific camera does have an effect on this. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about some of the cameras you might want to use, everything from a smartphone to a professional DSLR and help you decide which one is best for what you're trying to achieve on your specific trip. 4. The Best Travel Cameras: When it comes to taking photos or videos, of course, you need some type of camera. In this day and age, a smartphone is absolutely amazing for documenting your trip. You can do a video, you can do photo, you can write text, I mean, it's just an incredible tool. If you only have one of these and you don't have a dedicated camera, that's totally fine. You can do everything you need on a smartphone. I actually use my iPhone probably more than my other cameras for documenting my trips just because it's always available to me, the images look great and it's just a nice tool to have. But I think there is a case for having a dedicated camera as well, having something like this. This is a Fuji X100V, and this is probably my favorite camera right now because of the fact that it's small, it's light, and it looks really cool and it also takes amazing photos. It's nice to have a dedicated camera. I'm not like holding my phone all day and looking at my phone and reading texts and that can pull me out of my traveling experience. Having something like this, a dedicated camera that isn't connected to the Internet, where I can just snap photos of things that look interesting to me, I can go on little photo walks throughout the city. This is really probably my favorite little travel camera for documenting my trips. I probably use it less than the iPhone because the iPhone is always with me, but I really do love this camera. I'm using it a lot, so I definitely recommend little mid-range cameras like these. Now this specific camera actually doesn't have a zoom lens. One of the things that is important for travel photography, if you're trying to capture a wide range of different photos, is to have a camera that can zoom in and out. A lot of little point and shoot cameras like the Sony RX100 series, I'll put a link to those in the description of this course as well as all the other cameras I'm going to talk about in this class. Those cameras are great because it's small and it can zoom in and out, so you can get a wide range of photos, you can shoot wide scenes, big landscapes, and then you can zoom in on specific things and get really tight detailed shots as well. For the everyday person, I think having a camera like that or having a camera like this, the Fuji is just a really great travel tool if you're not seriously invested in photography and you're not necessarily looking to capture the most amazing photos ever, but you do want to capture some really solid imagery and just remember some of the things that you see on your trip, these type of mid-range little cameras are perfect for that. But if you are somebody that's much more invested in your craft, much more invested in photography, you can definitely use something like this. This is a professional DSLR. This is a Sony A7III, and it has a 24-70 lens on it, which means I can zoom out and shoot wide or I can zoom in and go close. I also have other lenses with me so I can take this lens off and put other lenses on this. Now this is much more of a professional setup. When I'm using a camera like this, I'm in work mode and this isn't something I like to carry with me when I'm just walking around through the streets because I feel like it's big, it's bulky, and it just doesn't make me necessarily inspired to take different types of photos like something like this little Fuji would, or maybe even an iPhone would, because it's just so simple to use. This is a much more hands-on process. Now if I have a very specific photo in mind and I think why I really want to get that photo, this is exactly what I want it to look like, I'll approach it from a more technical standpoint and I'll use something like this. But like I said before, this trip for me here in Venice isn't necessarily that type of trip. I just want to relax and hang out, have a light setup, and explore the city on my own two feet without carrying a bunch of gear around. I'm not really going to be shooting with this camera too much during this class, maybe a little bit, we'll see. But for the most part, I'm going to be shooting with my little Fuji here, as well as an iPhone. Now in terms of which camera is best for you, there's a lot of different cameras on the market and there's people on YouTube that dedicate there entire lives to reviewing different cameras. But I would definitely recommend the Sony RX100 series, I would definitely recommend the newer iPhone models. This is the iPhone 13 Pro and it's incredible. It has a zoom lens, it has a wide lens. It just takes amazing images, and also for you photography purists, I would definitely recommend this little Fuji X100V. It has a fixed lens, which means it can't zoom in or out, but it simplifies the shooting experience. It makes me want to take more photos and I just shoot in aperture priority, which means I select the aperture and the camera does everything else. It's pretty hands off and I just really enjoy shooting with this. But I do urge you to find a camera that's best for what you're looking for. You don't need a big DSLR to get the photos that you often need. It's a big camera and it can get in the way, and it's also much more expensive. But if you are seriously dedicated to photography and you really have these images in mind, a camera like this might be for you as well. It really does depend on what your intentions are for documenting your trip and what you'd like to get from the experience. 5. Documenting Intentionally: One thing you need to be careful of with photography is getting trigger happy and just taking photos of absolutely everything that you see. I'm certainly a victim of this. I've gone on trips where I've captured thousands of photos, only to find later on when I'm looking at them that I'm completely overwhelmed by the amount of images, and I never take the time to go through them all, and sort them, and publish them later on. I think it's really important that we really take the time to evaluate scenes in front of us and think through shots before we take them instead of just spraying and praying and taking a ton of pictures, hoping that one of them will turn out nicely. I think the best way to do this is just to really be intentional with every photo that you take. When you're walking down the street and you see something interesting, take a moment and just see everything for what it is and take it in before you actually raise your camera and take a photo. Slowing down and doing this will allow you to determine the best way to capture that scene. This will not only allow you to take more high-quality photos, but also less photos that you'll never do anything with, and that will just slow you down later on when you're sorting through your photos and you're editing them at home. Another thing to keep in mind with documenting intentionally is, do you want to tell a story with your photos? Do you want to tell a story on each day where you're waking up and you show a picture of your breakfast and then you're just going throughout your day and it's a linear story of your entire trip, or are you not necessarily fast about that, and you just want to remember specific moments on your trip, and just some of the beautiful things that you saw when you're traveling. Just keeping a mental note of this can be really helpful for you while you're taking photos, so you know which photos that you need to take, and which photos you don't really need to take. Now one thing to know about documenting your trip with photos is not every photo that you're going to capture has to be this incredible, beautiful image that you're going to post online, and put on a postcard and do all these crazy things with. You can also just take snapshots as well. Simple phone snapshots where you're really not fussed about how the image necessarily looks, but you just wanted to capture that specific moment in time, maybe you saw something interesting. For example, last night I was walking and I saw this little dog sitting in the doorway of a little shop and I was like, oh, that's cute. My mom would like that, she likes dogs. I just took a crooked photo of this dog and it's not like a beautiful photo or anything, but it shows this dog sitting in the doorway and that's what I wanted to show. Snapshots are totally fine. Not every photo has to be this incredible grand, well-thought-through technical photo. If you're not into that at all, you don't have to do that at all. You can just take a photo for what it is, a snapshot. But I still think it is important to focus on what you're trying to achieve with your photos. This, once again, just all comes back to what are your intentions with documenting your trip? Do you just want to capture the moment or would you also like to have some nicer photos that are well-thought-out, the lighting looks nice, and just a photo is a beautiful image? I like to have both of those, I like to walk away with, yes, some simple snapshots, but also some really beautiful images that I'm proud to share online. 6. Things to Look For: Like I said in the last lesson, there are two types of photos I like to take on my trips. General snapshots that aren't made to be particularly beautiful, but more so just to capture the moment, and also photos that are quite beautiful that really do capture a scene in a beautiful way, and photos that I'm proud to share with friends and family. This second type of photo is a more engaged process. This is where you might want to slow down and take in the scene and capture it in the best way possible. I think there are four things you should be looking for in order to capture photos like these. Those four things are subject matter, light, color, and composition. Let's talk about those now. Subject matter is the actual thing in your photo, the actual subject in your photo. Shooting interesting subject matter can often lead to a good photo. For example, I've been really drawn to the old architecture here in Venice. I think it looks really cool and it just looks nice in photos as well. I've been taking a lot of photos of old doors and rooftops of buildings, always just looking out for things that are culturally interesting, visually interesting, socially interesting, whatever it is, if it looks cool or fascinating to you, take a picture of it. The second thing I always look out for is light. Cameras actually capture light. That's how an image is created. Light is very important for photographers that's why a lot of photographers like to shoot at sunrise and sunset is because the light is nice and soft during that time. But you can take photos at any time of the day and they'll look great. I'm always looking for interesting ways that light is hitting things. For example, I woke up this morning in this beautiful apartment and the light was spilling in through the windows and it just looked gorgeous. So I snapped a few photos of that. In a lot of my photos online you'll see that I really do place an emphasis on light because that can really help shape the photo and make what might look like a boring scene, make it look quite interesting. Always be on the lookout for lights and always be on the lookout for color as well. We're humans, we love color and color is everywhere. It's naturally occurring, it's man-made, and it can really make or break a photo. Here in Venice, there's a couple of streets that are really colorful. I'm looking forward to go checking those out and seeing if I can capture some of that color. The last thing everyone should be thinking about is this concept of composition. Composition is essentially how all of the elements in your scene in front of you are arranged in your camera. A photo with good composition is usually just much easier to look at, your eye will naturally move from one side of the frame to the other, and it'll pick up on all the most important details and it won't get trapped in certain parts of the photo. When it comes to composition, there really is no right or wrong as to how to do this. Each scene is so unique. It's hard to teach specific rules about composition. If you're even thinking about composition and you're thinking about how you can best capture a scene in front of you, that puts you ahead of 99 percent of other people that are out there taking pictures. Like I said it earlier on in this class, before you take a picture sitting there and really taking in the scene and evaluating it and looking at all the different details and then deciding how to best photograph it, is the best thing that you can do to ensuring that you're capturing beautiful images. One of the best tips I have for composition is to just try to photograph a scene from different perspectives. Perspective is how you orient yourself in accordance to your subject matter. For example, you're going to see when I'm out shooting later today, I'm going to photograph something wide, I might shoot it from far away, and then I might move a little closer and photograph it up-close, maybe from the side, from the top, from the bottom, etc. I really do like to photograph things from different angles, and I like to walk around something as I'm photographing it so I can identify the angle in which it looks the best. There is one more thing I think we should be looking for when we're out shooting, and that is human interests. As human beings, we like to see other humans in photos, and just having a human in a photo makes an image much more powerful and much more relatable to the viewer. I was out walking through out Venice last night and it was blue hour, the sun had just gone down, and all the street lights were on, and it looked absolutely incredible. I captured a bunch of different photos, but all my favorite ones were the ones that actually had people in them. Like this particular photo, the lady is walking under the light. I really do love this image. It's a great photo and I'm happy that I did take the time to go on that walk and capture those photos. Those are some of the things you should be looking for if you're trying to capture this beautiful images, is interesting subject matter, light, color, composition, as well as having a human being in your photo as well. 7. Hitting the Canals!: It is day two here in Venice, and it's finally time for me to get outside and do some exploring. I'm very excited to be here. From what I've seen so far, this is an incredibly beautiful place, not overrated at all. It's exactly what I was expecting to see. It's beautiful, it's old, there's so much history and character, and I'm really excited to capture some images here, and also just see the city and document my experience eating, drinking, seeing the sights, and generally just having a nice time. Today is going to be spent just walking around, exploring, capturing images, and just trying to see the city for what it is and take everything in. I really do want to document it as best as I can. I want to take snapshots of some of the things that I'm doing, some of the things that I'm eating, but I also want to capture some more artistic photos as well, and I want to do so in a way that's not going to rip me out of the scenario. I don't want to be glued to my camera. I want to be able to be in the moment. I'm focusing on documenting intentionally, and really trying to capture the photos I need so that I can put my camera away and be present in the scenario. That is my main goal today, is to really explore the city, but also capture some nice photos, live in the moment, and just generally have a good time. Why don't we head out, capture some images, and see what Venice is all about. 8. How to Photograph a Place: I'm currently in Murano, which is a little island right next to Venice. I think this is the perfect location to talk about the next concept in this course, and that is how to properly photograph a place. Now it might seem self-explanatory, you photograph a place, you just take pictures of it. But I think it's important to set guidelines or formulas that we can follow in order to make sure that we're properly capturing a place but not being fully consumed by our camera. This allows us to really get the photos that we need and then we can put our cameras away and truly enjoy the experience. A general rule I like to follow for doing this is to aim for about 4-5 wide shots. Shots that show a lot of the scene. Maybe you're using a wider angle lens, like the wide-angle lens on your iPhone. Then once you capture 4-5 wide shots, then you go into the scene and you find specific things to photograph, and you capture about 8-10 detailed shots. These detailed shots are really going to help add to that story of that place. The wide shots are great, they're all encompassing and they show everything as a whole. But the detailed shots really bring everything together. There is a bridge very close to me now, here in Murano, and I think it's a perfect location to put this to the test. I'm going to capture a few wide photos from the top using my iPhone and my Fuji. I'm going to move to both sides as well, I'm going to change my perspective, and then I'm going to walk down into the scene and just walk slowly and look for interesting things to photograph. Things that might be unique to this place. Interesting people, interesting storefronts, whatever it is, I'm just going to photograph whatever catches my eye. Now the exact number of photos isn't actually that important. You don't have to capture exactly 4-5 wide photos and 8-10 detailed photos. But it is a good guideline and a good formula to follow if you're just starting out and you feel like your camera really does get in the way of your overall travel experience. Not fussed about that, if creating doesn't get in your way of your experience, then take as many photos as you want. Throughout my years of traveling, I've found that I've been able to develop a pretty good balance between creating and living in the moment. That 4-5 wide photos and 8-10 detailed photos is just a really good formula to follow. Let's head over to the bridge and capture those photos now. Moving on to the detailed shots now, some of the things I'm looking for while I'm doing this is anything off the bat that just catches my eye. First and foremost, I'm also looking for some of the things that we talked about earlier in this course; light, color, composition, lines, shapes, just really anything that stands out to me that I think might make a cool photo or a cool memory. Putting a lot of emphasis on subject matter, the things actually that are in my photo, the things in front of me, and maybe it's things that I've interacted with or things that I just really associate with the place that I've been visiting. In Venice, for example, the boats come to mind. There's boats everywhere and I feel it's very specific and unique to Venice. That is something I really want to capture in some of these photos is the boat and the boat culture and the colors associated with the boats and everything related to that. You can see some of those things in the photos. There's a few boats in there. There's a few storefronts that I was interacting with on the trip. Just anything that I thought was interesting. I've also edited the photos in a few different styles as well. Some of them I pushed a little bit more and made up more stylized. Some of the edits are more natural. There's even a black and white one in there as well. But some of my favorite photos of this trip were actually on one of the boat terminals. In Venice, they have these boat taxis. It's just like a bus stop like you would see in a city except for everything is done on these little boat buses and they're so cool. I was just so drawn to the light and the colors and the shapes in this little boat terminal. I just took a bunch of pictures and I'm so happy with how they came out. These were all shot with the Fuji and I edited them to look like film, to look like specifically Portra 400, which is a very popular film stock. It has been for decades. Artistically, I just really I'm drawn to these photos, but there are also a really good depiction of the boat buses in Venice, which I just thought was the coolest thing. I'm really happy with how these images came out. When I look at all the photos I took of this place, I really did capture about four wide photos and about 10 to 12 detailed photos. Pretty close to that formula that we've been talking about in this lesson. I definitely think that's a good formula to follow if you're trying to strike that balance. But that's the gist of photographing a place and making sure you walk away with just the right amount of photos and not too many, but I think it's time to head on to the next lesson. Let's move on to that now. 9. Capturing Local Charm: I've made my way over to another little island in Venice called Burano. Now Burano is famous for these amazingly colorful buildings that you can see behind me. The entire island is covered in these gorgeous buildings. I think this is the perfect place to talk about, capturing cultural charm and cultural character. Now everywhere you go in the world that has some type of cultural uniqueness to it and Venice is probably one of the easiest ones. Everywhere you look is culturally different from the rest of the world. There's these amazing canals that just span through the entire city and Burano is just an offset of Venice, really close to it. This place is same as for, like I said, these colorful buildings. I think one of the best things we can do when we're traveling is to capture this cultural charm, capture this cultural character because it really does stand out in our photos. I think one of the best ways to do that to capture cultural trauma, cultural character is to go for photo walks. Now if you guys have seen some of my other classes here on Skillshare, you know, that I love photo walks. I think they're an amazing way to see cities. They're amazing way to explore. It's also a very healthy activity creatively because you're getting out there and you're pushing your creative mind and things like that. I definitely recommend going on photo walks and much of my trip here in Venice has actually just been going on these photo walks and exploring and trying to capture cultural interests of this amazing city. You can probably see that based on the photos that I've shown you already throughout this class, a lot of it is really focused on capturing that uniqueness of Venice. I just wanted to make this short lesson to talk about how you can use these creative photo walks. Just walking through a city, instead of taking a bus or a train. Just go on your feet, just walk on your two feet if you can, and take it slow and taken all the sights, smells, the conversations really immerse yourself in the culture and keep an eye out for good photo opportunities because some of the best photos of ever taken were captured on a spur the moment when I was walking through some crazy city somewhere and I saw something happened in front of me and I just happened to have my camera and boom, I caught an amazing photo. Always be on the lookout for photos and don't be afraid to walk. Because walking is going to put you in some pretty amazing scenarios that you wouldn't be in if you took a car or a train or something like that. Now I've already been shooting a little bit here in Burano, but the sun is setting now it's getting quite dark, so I'm going to use the rest of my time to capture a few more photos before I catch the boat back to Burano, but hope you guys found this lesson useful. I'll see you in the next one. 10. Capture Moments with Video: All right, guys, well, welcome to a completely different room that you guys have never seen before and you're also probably wondering why I'm talking into what looks to be a small ferret. This is just my microphone. I'm actually in Lisbon, Portugal, and I'm staying in a hotel and the acoustics in this room are just terrible so I have to keep the mic close to my face hence why I'm talking like a reporter. But the reason why I'm in Lisbon now and no longer Venice is because this is the end of my European travels. I've been traveling in Europe, solo traveling for about a month and most of the course was filmed out there and Venice, but the second half of the course is going to be filmed here in Lisbon. I have a more stable setup and I'm not on the go all the time, you know when you're traveling things are always on the go. But there is a video that I realized once I got here, I completely forgot to film when I was in Venice and that is a lesson on short-form video. Now, short-form video, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to document your trip. I think a lot of people are put off by it because they're intimidated by the idea of having all of these clips and then trying to figure out how to edit them together and you actually don't need to edit your videos at all, you can just save those clips just as you would save photos so you can watch those later on and relive those memories. The iPhone and your smartphone is an incredible way to film short-form video. I have filmed so many smartphone videos over the years and I'm so happy that I did because I can just open up my camera roll, go to any of my albums of any of my trips and there's just videos there that I can watch and just really transport myself back into that place. I think if you have a smartphone, you definitely should be shooting just a little bit of short-form video while you're on your trips and I have a few tips for doing so. Now all of the photography concepts we've discussed in this course so far in the things to look for lesson, light, color, composition, wide shots, detailed shots, all of those things translate perfectly into video. All of those concepts are exactly the same with video, the only other thing you need to be thinking about with video is this idea of motion, because with video you're capturing a ton of photos all at once and you can actually capture movement in motion and that is one of the things with video that you should definitely be focusing on. When I'm shooting video a lot of the time I like to move with my camera, so I'll walk forwards or I'll walk backwards or I'll do a pan or I'll look for things that are moving and I'll film those things and I'm also listening, I'm also paying attention to audio as well because audio is something that we often neglect and audio can completely make a video hence why I'm talking into this microphone because I want you guys to have a good audio experience. So if someone's playing music or something, just pull out your phone and record a short video of that person playing that music, you might not be creating a YouTube video of your trip, maybe you are, but even if you aren't you will have that clip to look back on later on. Now the other tip I have for you in filming short-form video is to film clips that are both vertical and horizontal. In this day and age, social media dominates our sharing and a lot of the video that we consume on our phones are vertical videos. If you're planning to post your videos on Facebook, on Instagram, on Snapchat, whatever the social media is of the time TikTok, vertical format is definitely the way to go because it takes up more screen real estate. For me personally, I love to share my trips on my Instagram stories and we're going to talk about this a little bit later on in the class, but I shoot short-form videos specifically for my Instagram stories and then I can save those stories as a highlight. I have just a really great documentation of my entire trip with videos that show emotion, sound, movement, and it's just very immersive. But I also like to shoot horizontal videos as well because horizontal videos are great for just seeing more of the scene. In fact, a lot of the videos that you guys have seen in this course, a lot of the B-roll footage was actually shot on my iPhone and I just pulled it out of our pocket, hit record, I didn't change any of the settings and I just let the phone do its thing. You really don't need to overthink that either, you can just pull your smartphone out of your pocket, open the camera app, hit record and start shooting video. But horizontal video is great if you're not planning to share those videos with anybody or you're planning to edit those into a YouTube video or something, horizontal footage is great for that. I just really wanted to highlight the importance of video because for me it's an amazing way for me to document my trip and while this course is focused primarily on photography, photography and videography go hand in hand and I don't think at this day and age they're mutually exclusive. I think if you're taking photos and your phone or your camera also has the ability to shoot video, why not just capture some videos, capture a few clips of some of the things you're doing and save those. Don't necessarily think about sharing those later on, just think about preserving that memory, preserving that moment and videos do that really well. But now that we've talked a little bit about video, now let's move on and start talking about what to do after you get home from your trip or after your day of exploring the city that you're in and what to do with all the photos that you now have, how to organize them, how to sort them, and how to find a place for them to live for the rest of your life, whether that's on social media, whether that's in a travel journal, etc. 11. Sorting & Organizing Photos: You've gone on your trip and you come home and now you have hundreds of photos and you have no idea what to do with all of them because it's so difficult to even just start looking at all of them and choosing the best ones. I know exactly how you feel. I think a lot of people feel like that. That's exactly why it's so important, right after you get back from your trip or even after you get home from the day of exploring, is to sit down, import your photos, and start the process of organizing them. Organizing your photos and making sure they're in the right place is so important. For example, when I was 21 years old, I went on a two-month solo backpacking trip through China. It was absolutely insane, and I went to some of the most incredible places I've ever seen, the abandoned section of the Great Wall of China, all of these amazing places, and I lost the photos, all of these amazing photos. Pretty much my first photography trip, all I have is like the edited JPEGs that are low quality. [LAUGHTER] Don't make that mistake, I really do recommend spending the time to just organize and sort through all your images. Now in terms of doing this, it's going to really depend on, number 1, what you're taking photos with. Number 2, just your general overall workflow, whether you use a computer or not. There's so many different factors that go into this. In this video, I've found a few simple ways that I think most people can use, most people can follow to make sure that they're organizing their photos in the right way. Now first things first, if you're shooting on a smartphone, this makes it really easy. If all your photos are on a phone, it's really easy to just select all of the photos from that trip and then add them into an album for that specific trip. I do this for all of my photos and videos while I'm traveling. For example, under my photos, under albums, I have a folder called trips. Then in that folder, I just have some of the trips that I've done recently. But you can see, I have some of the trips here, and right there I have Venice, so these are all the photos and videos that I captured with my phone in Venice. That's so nice because they're just right there, they're easy to access and I know exactly where they are. Then once I have all those photos there, I can just go through and delete the ones that I don't think I'll ever use or I don't need or if I have a repeat of an image, I can just go ahead and delete that. I do recommend deleting photos because, otherwise, you're just going to get a massive backlog of images of thousands, tens of thousands of photos that's going to bog down your hard drives. If possible, it is really good to sort through your images, select the best ones, and then delete the ones that you're not going to use. But if you're also like me and you shoot with a camera, something like this, or one of the cameras we talked about earlier on in the course, you're going to have an SD card. Getting the photos off of the SD card onto your computer is a completely different process, so let's talk about that now. A lot of these cameras actually have Wi-Fi now, and you can just send the photos from your camera to your phone, which is super cool. I think it's a really great idea. If you are only taking, not that many photos, I would definitely recommend trying that out. It's finicky, it can be annoying to set it up at times, but I definitely would recommend trying it out. I take a lot more photos and it's just not really practical for me to have all of my images on my phone, all the images that I'm taking with my camera on my phone as well. Instead, I import using my SD card and a card reader. This is actually a very simple process. All you have to do is plug your SD card into your computer and this is relevant for both PC and Mac. I'm using a Mac and we're going to be using something called Finder. But the PC folder function is basically the same as Macs. On my desktop here I have my SD card labeled as untitled 1. Sometimes you might have to look through your photos on Fuji. They keep it under DCIM and then 101 Fuji, and these are all the photos here. I actually have a tone of photos because I didn't just take photos in Venice. I took photos in Verona, in Milan, in France, so there's a bunch of photos on this hard drive, and I've actually already imported them, so I don't actually need to reimport them again. One thing you'll notice here on the screen is you'll see that there's JPEG files and then there's also RAF files. Now, the RAF file is essentially just a raw photo. The difference between a raw photo and a JPEG photo is, a JPEG photo is slightly edited in camera. It looks nice just right away. Whereas a raw photo has as much information as possible, which means it's better for editing. If you're professional, you're taking photography very seriously. Shooting in raw is definitely recommended, but if you're not too fast about that, then JPEGs are fine. JPEGs are what we upload onto the Internet anyways, and you can still edit a JPEG. It's not the end of the world, so I actually shoot both. Every time I click the shutter, my camera will shoot both a raw photo and a JPEG photo, which is great because then I can use the JPEG if I want. If not, if I want to edit it more, then I can use the raw photo. Here are all of my photos here from the trip, and now I just need to drag and drop these onto my hard drive. Now you can add a folder on your desktop, you can create a folder under your photos here on the left-hand side, something like that. For me personally, I organize all my photos on an external hard drive. This is because I have a lot of photos that I work with, and the internal memory on my computer is just not enough to handle all those photos. I have a two-terabyte external hard drive. Within that, I have places where I can store my photos, my videos, and all those different things. You can see here up on the top right, extreme SSD. If I click that, click "Photos", "2021", "Europe", and then I have just a bunch of my folders here from just different trips that I've taken or different shoots that I've done here in Europe. Then I can just go ahead and create a new one, we'll just do 1125 test album, something like that. Then I can go ahead and just select two or three of these photos. I have already imported these, so I don't actually need to import them, but I'm just going to show you guys. Then I can just drag and drop them there. That'll just take a little bit of time to import, but then your photos are actually on your computer so you don't need to worry about carrying the SD card around. You can clear it and then go take more photos. You don't want to keep your photos on an SD card for very long because they're a little bit unstable and they are known to fail from time to time. It's very rare, but it happens. So just try to get your photos off of your SD card and onto your computer as soon as you can. Now if you're not planning to edit your photos, you're pretty much done. All your photos are in this folder. Now you can just sort through them, delete the ones that you don't want, and then all your photos are here, nice and organized, ready to share online. If you do plan to edit your photos, I recommend using a software called Adobe Lightroom. I like to use a software called Adobe Lightroom to edit my photos, but also just to sort through them a little bit more and just better organize all of them. Adobe Lightroom is free, but I think for an extra $10 a month, you get Cloud storage, which allow you to edit your photos between all of your different devices. This is something I absolutely love and I use religiously because I love to edit on my phone, on my tablet, on my computer. Then I can just edit on one, switch over to another device, and all my edits will be saved. It's so cool, it's so efficient and so nice to use. I'm just going to show you guys how to import into Adobe Lightroom now and then sort through some of your images. Once you have Adobe Lightroom open, you just click "Add Photos". Go ahead and click "Browse", and then you can find the folder with your photos in it, and there it is, 1125 test album. Then I can just click "Review for Import", create a new album, 1125 test album, click "Create", and then go ahead and add photos. Now I've actually already imported the photos, was not going to let me do that. Once you've done that now, all your photos are in a nice little album here. Then what I recommend doing is going through and sorting through them and finding the best ones. I have to do is click on the album and then just hit the arrow keys and all your photos will pop up, and then if you find a photo that you really like, you can just hit "Five stars". Boom, and then when you're done with that, you can go up here to the top, click "Five stars", and then all of your favorite photos, the ones that you labeled as five stars, will be right here. All the best ones are right here, and then you can delete the other ones if you want. I recommend doing that, but I would recommend going through a few times to make sure you don't delete any really nice photos. Now that we've done this, now that we've imported our photos and we've sorted through all of them and found our best ones. Now it's time to edit your photos and really bring a little bit of magic back into those images. Let's move on and talk about that now. 12. Quick & Efficient Photo Editing: In this lesson, I want to talk a little bit about editing your images. I don't want to spend too much time on this because I don't want to just get into a rabbit hole of editing. There's just so many different things you can do with your photos. I do want to focus more on the process of documentation, organizing, and then also sharing, and finding a place for those photos to live in the future. But editing is an important part of the process, so I do want to talk a little bit about it. Now I've always felt like editing falls into two trains of thought. You can edit quick and easy using filter apps, or you can spend a little bit more time and really focus on each individual photo and try to bring out the details in each one. I personally use both. Sometimes I'll edit a photo, I'll just slap a filter on it and I'm done. Sometimes I'll spend a lot of time, meticulously editing an image to get it to look exactly how I want it to look. But in this lesson, I'm just going to show you guys a few apps that I use and I would recommend you to use for editing your images. Now, I actually edit a lot on my phone. The reason for that is because phones these days can do almost everything that a computer can do. It's absolutely crazy. But the best app I like to use for quickly editing my photos is an app called VSCO. I've talked about this in so many of my other courses, I love this app so much. I mean there's one filter in particular that I really love. I'll just open the app here, VSCO, then I have photos from my camera roll or I can go into drafts where I already have some photos I was working on. I'll just scroll down here. There's this one from Murano, which I really like. I've actually already applied a filter to it. But if I just click "Edit" here, you can see there's just so many different filters that I can try, and they all just do so many different things to my photo. There's so many to try here. I think it's just the best app for editing because they look really good as well, they're very nicely made filters. My favorite personally is a filter called A6. Where is it? There's so many filters that it can be difficult to find the right one. There it is, A6. This one gives a film look. Increases the contrast, desaturates some of the colors, but makes them brighter and also saturate some of the other colors. It just looks really nice, and that's probably my favorite filter. This is what I use for quickly editing my images. Then I'll just go ahead and click "Next", "Save to Camera Roll", and I'm basically done editing that photo. I'll just show you again on a another photo here. Let's find another one from Venice. There's so many. I loved a lot of the photos I took there. They were really cool. We'll do this one. This is another one from Murano, which was that really beautiful, colorful island. You can see here, I can just tap and all these different filters are available to me. I use A6, like I said, and there's more features as well. Like you can crop, you can increase your exposure, darken it if you want to. When I'm using apps like this, I really don't spend too much time doing that. I just like to apply the filter and I'm done. But they do have really solid functionality. You really can't spend the time editing your images if you're into that. But usually, just basic filter, contrast, adjustments and you're pretty much good to go. Yeah, big fan of VSCO. Other apps that are great for quickly editing your images on your phone are Snapseed is a good one. There's an app called Rookie that I've been using for years. That one has a lot of cool effects. Be I recommend just heading to the App Store and just trying out a few of the different apps that are available there. There's so many, and I guarantee you one of them is going to work out for you. But if you are like me and you want to spend a little bit more time editing your images, I would definitely recommend Adobe Lightroom. We talked about it in the last lesson. It's such a good software and it really gives you full control over your edits. There's so much you can do with it. But in this lesson, I wanted to just talk about a basic overview that you can follow to make sure that you're doing all the right things when you're editing your images, and you're not missing any of the most important features. Now, I'm going to be editing on my phone using Lightroom, but you can follow along using your computer. The sliders are exactly the same. It's just in a different layout, but everything is exactly the same. It doesn't matter if you're editing on your phone, or on your computer, or on your tablet, Adobe Lightroom is exactly the same between all three devices. Now when I open Lightroom, you can already see I have all of my photos that I've already imported, all the different albums that I have. There is my Venice trip right there. All the photos that I imported on my computer are right here on my phone because I do have that creative cloud package. You can see I have it sorted by five stars already. It's only showing me the photos that I ranked as five stars. These are all my favorite images that I've already selected, which is so great. It's nice to just be able to quickly and easily access all of my favorite images from this trip right there in my pocket at any time of the day. These are full-res photos too. These are full-res raw photos. Let's just find a cool photo here and I'll just show you guys a basic editing rundown. This is a good one. I think this photo is really nice. It's simple, the exposure is really nice, and it just looks pretty good. If it's your first time using Lightroom, there's actually tutorials built into the app, which is so cool. It's such a good software for beginners, as well as advanced users. But there's a lot going on here on the bottom, but you really don't need to pay attention too much. I'm going to walk you guys through the whole thing. But the first thing I like to do is crop my photo which is right here, just click "Crop", and then go ahead and crop in a way that you think looks nice. This photo doesn't actually need a crop, but I just wanted to show you guys that. You can also straighten it if it's crooked by just dragging left to right. Then there's another feature that I think is really worth highlighting and that's the presets feature. Now, Lightroom actually comes with presets already in the software. You can just click those and just run through them and try out the different filters. There's so many cool ones in here, and I definitely recommend going ahead and trying out some of these. You can also purchase presets from your favorite creator. For example, I sell presets on my website. I have a bunch of different packs. Then you can just go ahead and apply those presets onto your images and it'll just do a different effect on your photo. I definitely recommend trying out presets if you do use Lightroom. But in this lesson, we're not going to be using a preset. I'm going to be showing you guys how I would do it from scratch. I like to follow a very basic principle. After I crop the image, I just go ahead and work my way down the line here. I start with light, color, effects, detail, and honestly, that's pretty much it. Let's go ahead and start with light. This image is really nicely exposed. I don't need to adjust the exposure, but that's just going to make your image light or dark. I might enhance the contrast a little bit. You can just do that with the contrast slider. Maybe bring the shadows up a little bit to enhance the detail. Highlights down to bring more detail out in the sky there, make it more colorful. Then I also like to enhance the contrast by bringing the whites up and the blacks down a little bit. But that's pretty much it for the light and you can see it just adds a little bit of a kick, a little bit of a punch, brings out some of those colors. Pretty simple, but very effective. Then we move on to color here. The white balance is going to have a big impact on the overall color of your photo. If you go to the right, it'll get warm. If you go to the left, it will get blue. I like to just work my way through all of these different options here and see which one looks the best. Honestly, usually as shot looks the best or auto. In this case, as shot looks the best, so I'll leave that there. Then you can come in here and adjust the vibrance, which is going to affect their colors that aren't very saturated. It'll pull more color into those more desaturated colors, or you can increase the saturation, which is just going to increase the saturation of the entire image. You can try that, but don't go too heavy-handed on this. I think a common beginner mistake is going too heavy-handed with the saturation slider, so I wouldn't recommend doing that. Now in the top left-hand corner, you can click that to make your photo black and white. In the top right-hand corner here, you have a color mix, and this is going to allow you to adjust each color individually. For example, there's the blue hue here. I can drag this hue slider to the left or the right, and that's going to change the actual color of the blue. I can adjust the saturation of that blue, and I can adjust the brightness of the blue as well and the luminance. You can do this for each color. There's so many options available here. I mean that is one of the features that makes Lightroom so powerful. I might just bring up the oranges, just a tad there, and then maybe make the sky a little bit brighter. But that's basically it for the color. We've only done a few things to the image and already it looks so much better. There's so much life being breathed back into the image. Then we'll move on to effects. There's a bunch of stuff going on here. One of the things that I like to do is add a bit of Dehaze, that just adds a bit of contrast. Then I'll add a bit of clarity, maybe plus five. You can see clarity does a lot to the photo, but you really have to be careful with this. A lot of people go too much with this. I'll just add five, and I'll basically leave everything else the same. Maybe go down on the vignette, minus five there. Last but not least, I'll come into detail and I'd like to add a little bit of sharpening, just about plus 40, plus 45. That's it. There's our before, there's our after. This is definitely a more realistic edit. Now I definitely could spend more time editing this image and making it really stylized. But I think for most people, having just a realistic depiction of what they encountered, nice natural colors, good contrast, is part of the best thing you could do for your photos and definitely shows when somebody edits to the photo in a nice way. I would recommend just following that basic workflow that will ensure you pretty much do everything you need to do with your image. You're hitting all the right sliders and you're not really missing anything at all. Once you're done with that, you can just go up here and click "Export to Camera Roll", and then your photo is good to go. But now it's time to talk about sharing our images, finding a place for our images to live forever. Let's move on to that lesson now. 13. Saving & Sharing Your Trip: At this point, you've come home from your trip and you've gone through all your photos and videos and you've sorted them and you've done a bit of editing, but now it's time to sit down and give those photos a home. When I say give those photos a home, I mean find a place where you can save those images so you can easily access them for years to come. I think this sounds a lot easier than it actually is. The reason for that is because our mediums of choice, our apps of choice, or the methods in which we consume our media, is constantly changing throughout the course of our lives. Back when I was a kid, everything was physical. There were no computers. We didn't have digital photos that we could look at. Everything was in physical printed folders. Then when I became a teenager and a young adult and I was traveling then, everything was on Facebook and I would share all of my trips and all of my travels on Facebook. Then I got older and then it was Snapchat and then it was Instagram and physical albums dropped by the wayside. Even to this day, my mediums of choice are constantly changing. That's why I think when it comes to actually publishing your images or your thoughts about your trip, it's so important to think about the medium or the location that you want those photos to be stored in for the rest of your life. This really is just a very personal decision and it's going to depend on number one, what is your medium of choice? Do you like digital? Do you want to look at your photos digitally? Do you want to look at them physically? Do want to print them out? Also, do you plan to share those photos? Are these photos only for you? Do you want to share them with the broader world or just with your collective local circle, your family and your friends? Also generally what do you think you're going to be using in 20 years that you can easily look back on to see those images. I know this is a lot easier said than done. I'm sure my parents thought that the film that they were taking in the '90s of me and my brother and my sister running around Disneyland was totally going to be viable in 2021. It's not unless you have it digitized. It's not really an easy process, but I do really think we should spend the time to think about where we want to publish our photos for the future. I can't speak to all the different options that you can possibly use to give your photos a permanent home. But I can speak to the methods that I have used over the years and the ones I think I'm going to stick with from here going out. The first one I want to talk about; this is the one that I have learned to love the most and that is travel journaling. When I am out traveling and I get back from an awesome day of adventure, one of the first things I do is plot myself down on the couch, open up the Notepad on my iPhone and just start typing out some of the things that I've done throughout the day. I started doing this back in 2012 on my Belize trip. I was so enamored by everything that was happening around me. I needed to document it and I wasn't into documenting through photos at that time. A little bit, but not so much, but it was very text heavy. I would sit down and I would write everything throughout my trip. I would write my full day, everything that I did, the girls that I was falling in love with and everything that was happening in my life. I'm so glad that I took the time to write those things out and save those memories because now I still keep that habit. I still like to write things out, but now I also have the ability to document my trips visually through my photos, through my videos. When I put those two together and I line up the text with the photos, it tells such a comprehensive story that I know it's going to elicit emotions in me when I'm 85 years old laying on the couch, looking back at my trips from my 20s. I've tried out several methods of travel journaling over the years, but the one I just keep coming back to, honestly, is the simplest one and that is just writing everything in the notes app on my iPhone. The reason for this is because it's a very accessible app. I can just open it, find my note, and just start writing. I can upload photos and also everything is saved onto the Cloud. So if I get new iPhones later on, all my stuff will still be here. That's actually so important because back in 2011, I went on this trip to Belize 2012 and I wrote out all this text. That text would be gone if I didn't save it to the Cloud because I wasn't the most responsible person in backing up my iPhone when I was 20 years old. I'm glad that I took the time to write that out and save it to the Cloud. My travel journals are really simple. When I open up my Notes tab, you can see I have travel journal here and I have some of the trips that I've done over the years and I can't say I've done every trip as a travel journal. Sometimes the trips are quick and I'm not good about sitting down and writing and that's okay. I'm not forcing myself to do this. This is something I like to do. I have got a few trips here that I like. You can see here I'm working on the Portugal one now, I've been writing in it a little bit. There is some private stuff in all of these so I'm not going to show you guys all of them but I will show you the one that I did for Venice. I've changed the way I structure these notes over the years back in my first one with the Belize, it was a wall of text. There was nothing really organized about it. As I got older, I started to organize them a little bit more and you can see here in the Venice one, I have Day 0. I have a little write-up about what I did that day. Then I've added some photos, then I'll show you how to do that in a second. Just day by day, just a little bit of text and a little bit of photos for each day that I was traveling. I also have some videos in there. I'd get home, I'd sit down on the couch and I'd start writing. To add photos here, all you have to do, it's so easy. You just tap there and you click the camera here, choose photo or video and then you can just go in and very easily add a photo. When you first do it, the images are actually going to be really big. All you have to do is, if you only have a few images that's not bad, but you have to do is tap and hold the image and click "Small images", and then they all become small. My only grab with the notes as of right now is the videos are still really big. I can't make the videos small, which is so annoying because I want to put my videos in there as well. But for now, my videos will probably stay in the photos album under each trip. That's not the end of the world, but it is nice to have the photos right next to the text. I'm really happy with how this works. I'm able to save all my memories and I'm glad that I've done this over the years and I've been able to document my travels through this way. There's so many different ways you can travel journal. If you want to physically write in a journal, you can do that. There's apps that you can try. But like I said, I've used some of those apps in the past and you never know if those apps are going to be around in 20 years. The Apple Notes app, Apple is a massive company I'm sure they'll be around. I would also say the same for the equivalent on an Android phone. Android phone has a similar note feature. It's honestly just as good and I really think it is a great way to document your trips. Besides travel journaling, I think we should talk about social media. Social media is one of those things where the landscape is always changing. Like I said before, I was posting on Facebook for a while and I'd post my photos there. That was great. It's nice to look on my Facebook page and see some of my old trips. I found an album from South Korea that I took back in the day and the photos are great and it's so fun seeing all those photos and the people that I met on that trip and the things that I was doing. But I really don't use Facebook too much anymore if I'm being completely honest. The only social media form that I use now really is Instagram. I do like Instagram. I have a love-hate relationship with it, but it's probably my most active social media next to Twitter. I love sharing my trips on Instagram because it's a really great way to share photos and videos like I showed you guys earlier with the Instagram stories. Instagram stories are a really great way for me to document my trips because I can put everything into a linear timeline. I can show you when I'm getting there, some of the things that I'm doing while I'm there, I can share funny moments, sad moments, emotional moments, things that are generally happening that are interesting. I can capture a video of it, a photo of it, I can be artistic with it. There's so many opportunities with these Instagram stories and it's none of big barrier to entry. You post something on there, it'll stay for 24 hours. Then you can also save it as a highlight and it'll stay there forever on your page. I really like that feature because all my trips are right there on my front page. If you guys want to go see any of my trips, my California trip, or any of my trips to Europe or Bali, anything. They're all on there and the Venice trip is on there as well. So you can see all the things that I caught up to while I was in Venice. Instagram also has other features like Instagram Reels, which are essentially TikToks. There's also Snapchat. There's so many different options available for social media. It really is a personal decision. I'm not going to say Instagram stories are the best way to share your trip online. I'm not going to say Facebook is the best way to share your trip online. It does depend on you, your choice of social media and what you think you're going to be using in the future as well. The last place I'd recommend giving your home, and I will recommend this until the day I die. That is in physical form. One of my favorite things to do in the entire world is to go home and visit my mom and look into the garage and see all the physical photos that we've captured throughout the course of my childhood, all the way through my dad's childhood, my mom's childhood. There's something about holding a physical image that just does something that looking at a photo on a screen doesn't do. It allows you to focus on the image. You can feel it, and you're just present in the scenario. That's why I always say, if you have the time and the patience and the organization to go through all of your images and make a really good selection and print those out into a physical form, that's the best thing you can do for preserving your trip. I am personally a nomad. I'm always on the go. So it's very difficult for me to print out my photos and keep physical copies of my images with me. But later in life, when I find a little bit more stability, one of the first things I'm going to do is sit down and create physical albums of my travels. While I don't have photos of my travels in particular, I do carry a lot of photobooks around with me. I absolutely love photo books. For example, one of the first things I did it in Lisbon was find a magazine store and buy this magazine that I've been wanting to read forever. It's called Rucksack Mag. It's a collection of beautiful photographs from amazing photographers that I've looked up to. I love sitting with a coffee in the morning and looking at these photos in physical print form. It does something to me that, like I said, looking at a screen doesn't do. If you do decide to print your photos, I would recommend a service like Artifact Uprising. I've had several friends use them in the past and I've actually held them in my hands. They're really nice books and they actually have a travel journal option. You can upload all your photos in there and organize it in a way that you like. You can choose the paper, the texture, and the colors. Everything is just really nice and easily laid out. I checked out the website and I would definitely recommend a service like that. But there's also many others out there as well. If you know somebody that's printed folders in the past, maybe you have some friends that have some nice travel journals. Just ask them who they use and if they recommend them to you. But in short in summing everything up, I think it really is important to take the time to reflect on your favorite mediums and how you want to be able to consume those photos and those videos and that text later on in life. I found the methods that personally work for me, but the methods that work for you might be completely different. But now that we've talked about this and we've summed everything up in the class. Let's move on to one last lesson. We'll talk about a few more important points and then I'll send you guys on your way. 14. Conclusion & Next Steps: Well, if you've made it to this last lesson, I just want to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you for watching me for the past hour, and I hope you guys have enjoyed the course thus far. I think travel is a super exciting thing. It's certainly is for me, it's my life, it's what I love to do. I'm glad that I've taken the time to think through the process of documenting my trip, finding what works for me so I can relive some of those memories later on in future, especially when I have kids in the future. While this class did focus on a lot of really solid concrete information, that's not really what this class was about. It's more about getting you to think about how you want to document your trip and giving you a few tools that you can use to do that effectively as well. We talked about some of the basics of photography, some of the things you might want to look for while you're shooting, how to identify your intentions for your trip and what you want to document on your trip, as well as how to sort through your images, edit your images, and eventually find a place for those images to live for the rest of your life. That last part, finding a place for your images to live, finding a place for those memories to live, really is probably the most important part of this course. You can capture all these images, but if you can't put them in a place where you're going to be able to find them [LAUGHTER] later on in life and really remember them and consume them in an efficient way, then all of that photo-taking, all of the editing and all that was really for nothing. I think it's really is important to give your photos a good home. If you have a trip coming up or you have a trip that you're aspiring to go on, I just want to say have an epic time. Traveling is one of the best things we can do, I think, to better ourselves as people. It's one of my favorite things to do in the entire world. I don't think I'll ever stop traveling and I'm excited that you're going to be able to go on your own trip and explore somewhere new. If you guys want to learn more from me, I have a ton of other courses here on Skillshare that really do hammer in some of the things that we talked about in this course. I have courses that focus specifically on smartphone photography and photography in general and how to use your DSLR and a lot of other courses as well. I recommend checking those out. If you guys just want to say hi or what's up, or see some of my work, I'm available on Instagram. You can send me a DM there. I'm super open. I love to chat. I'm very active there and I'm also very active on Twitter as well. I love sharing just some of the moments from my trip, some of the smaller things that I see as well as some general thoughts. Last but not least, I'm also on YouTube where I create videos about photography and traveling and stuff like that. If you guys do enjoy my teaching style or just want to learn a little bit more about photography, you can stop by there as well. But seriously, thank you so much for watching this course up into this point. The sun is setting and I'm actually going on another trip tomorrow, so I have to get my stuff together. We're going to the Madeira Islands in Portugal. I have a few friends coming out from England and we're going to go take some photos out there. I got to get ready to go. Thank you guys so much again for watching this class. I'm going to hope to see you in some other courses.