What is travel photography? How to make your vacation photos pop? Is there an art to capturing a city, or small town with your camera?
Those questions and many more will be tackled in Tuesday/Wednesday’s online Travel Photography Conference, being staged by our good friends at KelbyOne Live.
I’ll be speaking, along with the masters, including Scott Kelby, Erik Kuna, Tamara Lackey, Rick Sammon and Ian Plant.
My topics: the art of photographing the backroads (a subject near and dear to my heart) along with how to make your travel photos pop. Others dive into the art of cityscapes, how to deal with harsh light and how to balance your travels and enjoying the moments with your photography.
ON1, which makes plug-ins for Photoshop and Lightroom to take your photos to the next level with creative filters and edit tools, is the sponsor of the event, and we’re all showing fun things we’ve done with ON1 in our photos.
I’ll be speaking for two hours (please sign up), but meanwhile, I wanted to spotlight one tip: something I have found very useful for getting to know a town when I helicopter in.
Study travel brochures.
By doing this, you can learn a lot about travel photography, and about the area.
You can also see a different perspective that tourism departments have over what we think of as travel photography.
We see: beautiful landscapes or bodies of water, and photograph them, ideally, without anyone in them.
They see: smiling faces and active people, doing things on those bodies of water, or landscapes.
For instance: our blank landscape is filled in their image with a couple riding a horse. Their wide open lake has two people kayaking.
Who is right?

My tip: in my vision, active, happy smiles and expressions always win out. Plus, the tourism departments really do go the extra mile to make their photo that much more memorable. We should try to emulate that when we’re out on the road.
Hope to see you Tuesday and Wednesday at the KelbyOne Live Travel Conference!
Next stop: Battle Creek
My latest road stop didn’t actually give me lots of opportunity for great travel photography, sadly. I pulled off, en route to Detroit, and spent some time in Battle Creek, Michigan looking for fun things to photograph like “Corn Flakes Blvd.” and “Froot Loops Avenue.” But in the place they call “Cereal City,” there was little visible examples for my camera and self to see.
I did meet two nice locals, however, Mary and Linda, who told me about the place where breakfast cereal was invented, and stocked me up. (Thank you very much!) And on the week where the iconic Kellogg’s company agreed to be sold for $3.1 billion to the Italian makers of Nutella, I thought you might enjoy taking a look at the streets of Battle Creek with me.
(If you’re counting, Battle Creek is the 118th location we’ve covered with the Photowalks cameras, with Michigan marking the 24th state we’ve visited for the show.)
And speaking of Superman and Cleveland!
Did you happen to see the great new Superman movie this weekend? As you may recall, the Man of Steel was created in Cleveland by two young men who have largely been forgotten. Luckily, the makers of the new film decided to honor Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster by filming a portion of the movie in their native city—the first ever for a Superman film, which I explored recently for a Photowalks episode.
They also brought their cameras to the Queen City of Cincinnati, and there’s a great scene there as well, at the historic Union Terminal building, where the Justice League operate from. Next week on Photowalks: we’ll be in Cincinnati, and I can’t wait to show her off to you.
As always, please let me hear from you—questions or comments?
Thanks for taking the time to read, watch and listen.
Jeff