How to: Make your photos more interesting.

‘Stopping your happy snaps from turning into crappy snaps’.

Have you ever gotten back from a trip and uploaded (I nearly said developed –how nineties!!) your photos and thought ‘what (or who) the heck is that’? I know I'm not the only person to have a memory stick chock full of random pictures of frescos, close-up elaborate tiles and 'pillar detail'. Sure it’s stunning when you’re there looking at it but boring and meaningless a few months after the fact. Those types of photos are sure to push rellies over the edge too. Most of the fun of looking at peoples photos is looking at the people. Scenery and landscapes have meaning and memories for the people who experienced them but often it would be more interesting for a viewer to look at pictures in a glossy book.

Some ideas:

• Get in your photos! If you’re travelling by yourself or in a pair then accost people on the street to take your photo, buy a tripod or one of those mini beanbags and set the thing up! Make sure there is a good mix of positions and postures too. Sit down, turn side on, take a picture from behind looking at a landmark, from above and below and vary the distance. Don’t always take the photo from a metre or two away. Walk way away or really close. Get down on your knees; take photos looking up at someone (just make sure they are not wearing a skirt). Practise facial expressions (watch Top Model for hints). Be angry, pensive, innocent, exasperated don’t just turn on the ‘photo smile’. Also don’t fall into the photo pose. For me and my boyfriend it was arms around each other, me always on the left .Blah! So boring we looked like cardboard cut outs or like we had just photo-shopped ourselves into tourist brochures. Also do a montage i.e. walking into a shop, trying on clothes, walking out with a bag(fun photos+clothes=awesome). Even mundane things tell a story when you capture all the elements. Always remember too, that 10-15 years on that mullet you had in 1989 far outshines the Eiffel tower in the background anyway.
  

• Some of the best photos are the candid ones. It is truly hard to catch some people unawares but that’s part of the fun. If anything you will at least get a photo of them looking seriously peeved! If you are travelling in a group or as a couple assign one person paparazzi duty for the day and get them to snap away. You will soon forget that they are taking photos of you (just don't pick your nose) and it is truly hilarious at the end of the day going back over them.
  

• Have a mascot. I have had a little Kipling monkey and a Nici magnetic elephant at various times. Take close-ups of it where ever you go. Pose it in naughty places, scaling replica landmarks, getting wasted with a glass of beer or tucked up into bed, basically just doing everything you do. Use your imagination to get the little buddy in some awkward situations. When you get home, print out all the photos and write an accompanying story and give it to a little cousin or if it’s heading more towards the adult fiction section have it as a coffee table book. If stuffed things aren’t really your style make your own version of ‘where’s Wally’ get a hat or scarf or something and pose it on people or things in the background of regular photos. Maybe bribe a person to walk by wearing it in the background or put it on a mannequin in a shop window. When you get home, have friends find it in your photos. Très dorky fun!
  

• Colour / shape/sign study. Groups of pictures (especially triptychs) look great on your wall at home but to make them into extra special works of art they need to have some sort of cohesive quality. If you are trying to match a particular colour scheme at home then that sort of makes your choice for you but if not, decide on a colour you love and look for it everywhere! If you picked pink, take a picture of lips on advertising boards, chewed gum on the footpath, cupcakes, graffiti, tiles, flowers whatever! Just take them so that the colour fills the majority of the frame. If that’s impossible then you can always crop and magnify once they are on a computer. Shapes are super fun too. Round things could be whole cakes, traffic lights, windows, tops of cocktail glasses, patterns on money just keep a look out. It’s a visual treasure hunt! You can also take photos of letters and cobble them into a friends or your own name when you get home. This looks cute in matching plain frames and lets the person know that even though they were not there, that you were thinking of them (aww...). Remember you can make your own letters out of food, drawn in the sand, shaped out by body parts ala YMCA. Another idea is to pick one item and take a photo of it in whatever country you go to. This could turn into a life-long tradition, sort of the visual equivalent of Lonely Planets ‘Big Mac’ index. Some ideas: take a photo of a bottle of milk, an ‘open’ or public transport sign, police car or a newspaper. Whatever. There are a million ideas out there, just pick something that exists everywhere.
  
  Above all though remember to be in the moment, photos are only part of the fun, practise taking ‘photos’ with your whole body. Stop for a second and think I’m going to remember this moment for the rest of my life. Remember what you are looking at, but close your eyes and feel the temperature of the air, listen to the sounds, feel your clothes on your body and most importantly breathe through your nose and smell deeply. File the snapshot of time away in a filing cabinet in the back room of your brain. Our olfactory memory is amazing, so the smell will be especially evocative and you will become one of those (annoying) people who are always saying stuff like “that smell totally takes me back to last time I was in Berlin, have I told you about that Amy?”....”well, um, I’m sure I’ve heard that story at least once before......”

www.fodors.com/focus/ -such pretty pictures!

http://goeurope.about.com/cs/photography/l/aa_photo_101.htm -enough of my 'skillz', let the experts inform you.