Capture the Moment

The hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset do 80% of the work for you. Plan one shoot per day in either window.

If the light is flat, photograph people instead of buildings. People work in any light; architecture rarely does.

When a photo feels great in the moment, jot three things in your notes app: where, who, and what was happening.

Six months later, those three lines are why the photo still means something. The image holds the light; the notes hold the feeling.

Postcards already exist. The hands of the baker, the steam of the morning coffee, the empty chair at the end of dinner — those are the photos that hold a trip together a year later.

Take three photos per scene: the wide, the medium, the detail. The wide tells you where you were; the medium tells you what was happening; the detail tells you how you felt.

Watch the moment for sixty seconds before reaching for the phone. Half the time, you won't need the photo — you'll have the memory, which is better.

Set a daily phone-photo limit. Twenty is plenty. The discipline forces you to choose, and the chosen ones are always better than the hundred you would have deleted.

Lean the phone against a glass, a backpack, a step. Use the timer on burst mode. You'll get one good frame out of ten and that's all you need.

Ask other travellers for a photo. Most people are happy to take three — just offer to do the same for them. The exchange is one of the small kindnesses of solo travel.

On the flight home, delete every duplicate. On the first weekend back, pick ten favourite photos and put them in a single named album — that's the trip you'll remember.

Print one photo per trip. A physical photo on a shelf does what a digital album never quite does: it stops the trip from disappearing into the camera roll.