Road trips offer the perfect opportunity to photograph your most unforgettable moments. Whether you’re exploring the lush, rolling hills of Wales, embarking on a cross-country tour through Europe, or taking your trusty vehicle further afield for a sightseeing adventure, photographing your travels is the key to preserving your memories for decades to come.
If you’re planning a road trip, sharpening your photography skills will help you capture the full splendour of the scenery that awaits you. However, it can be tricky to take crisp, clear photos of the outdoors, especially while in a moving vehicle!
Here’s my tried-and-tested guide to five simple yet effective photography hacks for taking exceptional photos while exploring on four wheels.
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Your Must-Know Road Trip Photography Hacks
1. Take the Scenic Route To Maximise Your Photo Ops
Taking the highway during your road trip might be quicker, but the scenery is often lacking in charm and novelty. Taking the road less travelled can help you find beautiful landscapes and scenes to capture while you’re on the road.
The best way to take the scenic route for great photographs is to plan your route ahead of time. Consult a road map or an online map of the area you’re travelling through, identify small country or rural roads that wind through picturesque farms, majestic mountains, and breathtaking forests, and plan your routes accordingly. There are lots of photography apps that can help with the planning stages of a road trip.
Taking lesser-known roads through new towns and regions can provide excellent photographic opportunities and give you the chance to discover exciting new places, landmarks, cultures, and people. Better still, taking the back roads minimises your need to traverse busy highways and peak-hour traffic, so you can safely slow down or stop to get the perfect shot!
2. Time Your Travels For The Best Light
When thinking of road trip photos, images of spectacular sunrises, ruby-red sunsets, and dusky forest scenes come to mind. The trick to capturing these unique scenes is to be in the right places at the right times.
The time of day when you choose to take shots of your surroundings is an essential aspect of capturing memorable photos. Setting out and arriving at the right times will ensure you can capture scenes and places exactly how you want to remember them.
If you don’t have a plan in mind for when you want to photograph specific scenes, it’s a good idea to get on the road as early as possible. Embarking at least half an hour before sunrise will allow you to take advantage of the golden hour, when everything is bathed in crisp, warm, early morning light. This magic hour also occurs before sunset, so you can plan for it twice a day if it’s the aesthetic you’re going for.
If you do have a definite plan, plan your trip to ensure that you arrive at your photo location at the best time to capture the sights.
3. Define Your Subject, Focal Point, and Leading Lines
Focal points, subjects, and leading lines are the core elements of a great image. Your focal point is the area of your photo that will immediately draw the eye. This could be one of your fellow travellers, a stunning landscape, the setting sun, or a fascinating building or tree featured in your shot.
Once you’ve determined your focal point, you can adjust your camera settings to capture it in full detail. For example, if your subject and focal point are a sunny landscape, you can increase your camera’s aperture and reduce your shutter speed for best results. If your subject is moving or you’re in a moving vehicle while capturing it, you can increase your shutter speed and reduce your aperture to keep it focused and defined.
Leading lines are particularly important if you include the road ahead of you in your shot. These lines are prominent visual guides that you can position in your photos to direct the viewer’s eye towards a specific subject or focal point.
Leading lines can be vertical, horizontal, converging, or diagonal. Converging lines can include a road or train track that converges on a horizon or an open dirt road that leads visually to a towering mountain, a striking barn, or a stunning night sky. Remember that these lines don’t always need to lead your eye to the centre of your image, either. Positioning your focal point to the side or corner of an image can help you create unique and unexpected compositions in your shots.
4. Invest in a Circular Polarising Filter
One of the biggest challenges in taking perfect photos on the road is finding the right balance between contrast, reflection, and exposure. Reflective roads can interfere with your composition and lighting, and sunlight can wash out your contrast and leave your pictures looking grainy and pale.
A circular polarising filter can address all of these challenges. It increases the colour contrast in your photos for richer, more defined results, and can also reduce or enhance reflective features like roads, depending on the effects you wish to achieve.
If you want to bring out the colours of your shot, use your filter to minimise glare and optimise exposure. For images with a gentle glow or noticeable highlights, adjust your filter to maximise reflection instead. A circular polarising filter offers you a high degree of control over your photographs, while balancing their contrast, colours, and light exposure for beautiful results.
5. Perfect Your Editing Process
Editing your road trip photos can help bring out their grandeur, even if the original shots were overexposed, blurry, or washed out. Shoot your images in RAW format and use a functional editing suite to adjust their colour balance, contrast, lighting, and sharpness.
Editing can accentuate the character of your shots, infuse photos with specific moods, and help you to choose which feelings and atmospheres your final photographs will convey. Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom (which is my preferred tool), or Corel are popular editing suites that make it easy to perfect your skills.
Polished, expressive photos are great for sharing on Instagram and ideal for building a standout landscape photography portfolio, especially if you’re an aspiring pro who wants to take the next step in your side hustle or career.
Capturing Memories, One Shot at a Time
Road trip photography is surprisingly simple once you know the best tips, tricks, and strategies to enhance your shots.
Be sure to plan ahead and take the road less travelled to find the best photographic opportunities your route offers. Once you’ve arrived, include a focal point and leading lines in your images, and use a versatile editing suite to create photos you’ll love looking back on.