One of my favourite things to do while travelling is to take photos and shoot video. I want to capture my experience and share it with friends and family back home. For me, it’s about cultural immersion and new friendships, visiting landscapes and exploring environments, exotic wildlife encounters and amazing memories of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences. This is all part of the essence of travel and with our ever-connected digital world it is easier and easier to share these experiences in the moment, real time.
I am a social traveller and I use social media platforms daily to share my adventures and tales from the road. This post is a couple of tips and tricks I’ve learned for making the most of content-sharing while travelling.
Social platforms make it easy to share in real time.
Vibrancy, lots of colour, animals, big epic landscapes, beaches, paradise shots, popular destinations, sunrises and sunsets are a few basic winners with Instagram. Another good thing keep in mind is to manage your captions. People don’t usually like long and drawn out explanations in captions. Keep it short and to the point. Also adding #hastags is key. Some popular ones include #nofilter (‘cause not all shots on Instagram need a filter to look awesome), #lonelyplanet, #natgeotravel, #natureaddict, #passionpassport, etc. Following and adding certain hashtags will definitely increase the exposure of your photos. Tagging your location will expose you to new followers and ‘likes’, too.
I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark III, not my iPhone. Am I cheating? Maybe, but most of the photos I tend to ‘like’ on Instagram are from other travel photographers using professional quality equipment, and their photos are great. Here’s how I do it.
I snap the photo and then upload it to my laptop and do a basic edit it in Adobe Lightroom. I then export it to a specific Instagram folder on my desktop. I have pre-set my Instagram exports to be 1000 x 750 pixels, making the photo size about 500KB. I then upload the compressed photo to my DropBox cloud (you can also Bluetooth the compressed photos directly to your phone). From there I open the DropBox app on my phone, find my desired photo, download it onto my phone then upload the photo onto Instagram. Voilà!
Keep your captions simple and don't for get to use hastags.
Tagging your location also connects you with others who are there, too.
Photo posts, always. People respond to visual storytelling now more than ever, so it’s really about sharing your experience through the medium of photography or film. (Short videos also work very well, if the quality is good.) Don’t post more than five photographs at a time and make sure there is a range of activities. The classic #selfie is also a good way of first-person storytelling. It automatically places you and whoever else can cram in, at the centre of your experience.
Facebook is a good way to digitally map your travels. Think of it like an online photo diary. You can upload your photos as you go, allowing friends, acquaintances, and family access to your experience through your personal visual storytelling. You don’t need to share everything, of course. At the end of the day, this is your trip.. Whether you want to share it or not is up to you, but if you do, always go the route of photos or short videos.
Unlike Instagram and Twitter, we don’t control how much visibility or reach our posts get once live on Facebook, thanks to their algorithms. It’s still, however, a valuable tool for sharing content with friends and family while travelling. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up along the way.
Try not to add more than five photos at a time.
VSCO and IFTTT
These are two popular applications that make social sharing easier. VSCO is a popular smart phone app that allows easy and cutting-edge editing access right in the palm of your hand. It is a great alternative to using an editing software on a laptop, like Lightroom. I know several talented photographers with VSCO on their phones. It’s a fun app.
Use VSCO for on-the-go editing.
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a website that takes my daily Instagram posts and replicates them in Twitter with the look of a native Twitter photo post. This may seem unnecessary, but this algorithm does allow me more free time. IFTTT posts my photos for me and keeps my content-sharing consistent across Instagram and Twitter.
This post on Twitter was organized on IFTTT.
At the end of the day, your vacation is always going to be about your experience and how you wish to share that is up to you. I am a social traveller who loves taking photos, capturing my experiences abroad to share with friends and family back home.
Follow along with G
Come follow along with the G Adventures social community. We share posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram(https://www.facebook.com/gadventures). And hey, if you’re out there on the road, don't forget to tag us and use the hashtag #gadv. See you online!
