A great opportunity to exercise your photography muscles is when you travel for leisure. You may visit scores of venues around the globe that reveal beautiful and interesting subjects for taking photos. Wherever I travel, even without any advanced plans for specific images in mind, I am never disappointed in the many amazing sites that I stumble upon that provide me ample occasion to release the shutter. Every corner of the world has different flavors of countryside, architecture, culture and fascinating people.
Now travel photography can introduce it’s own set of photographic challenges. You may not want to carry tons of gear on vacation as you might if you ventured to some location intent on getting a particular type of shot. You may not want to lug a tripod or a backpack full of lenses. This may limit you at certain times but can also push you to get the best out of a small amount of gear. Leaning against a tree or building can steady your camera pretty well to grab some low-light images without a tripod. And one or two carefully selected lenses can end up covering a lot of ground for needed focal lengths and apertures.
When you travel to distant places that have famous structures such as Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum in Rome, or London’s Buckingham Palace, bringing home photos of those places are a must. But as a photographer, you will want to challenge yourself to capture images of these locations that will be slightly different than those 10 million photos already taken by the multitude of people who go there. For instance, after taking scores of close-up shots of the Colosseum on a trip to Rome my wife and I took in 2019, I was able to find a distant location where I took the photo shown above.