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Travel Photography Tip – Don’t Forget the Signs

April 4, 2011 by 5 Comments

When I was traveling out West a couple of weeks ago I remembered to do something that I don’t do nearly often enough, take photos of signs. I’m not talking about every sign I see. More specifically, things like park signs, trail signs, or anything that will be a visual clue for me when I get back home and start uploading my images.

The reason for doing so isn’t because I have short term memory loss and can’t remember where I was just a few days earlier, it’s to address my long term loss, when it has been a few years and one trip has melted into another. It’s also very helpful when you are visiting a lot of places during one trip and you would like to keep them separated. There might be some landmarks that will give you an immediate clue but what if you are in an unfamiliar location?

I first started doing this during my trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Many of the temples looked very similar to me but each one had a sign at the entrance that told something about the location. All I had to do was snap a shot and then get on with my normal shooting. When I returned to the hotel each night after visiting 4 or 5 locations, it was easy for me to organize my shots by location.

It’s true that you can now put a GPS on most cameras and geo-tag your images but this low-tech method is free, and doesn’t require special software or an Internet connection to get results.

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Filed Under: Travel Photography
  • http://www.stevekalman.com Steve K

    Also, If you pay and entry fee, the ticket itself might become a good “sign” to photograph.

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  • Michael Preston

    I do this regularly for all sorts of flora at the Norfolk Botanical Garden. Thanks, Jeff. :)

  • http://rhicarian.wordpress.com/ Michele

    I do this in museums too. I photograph the explanatory signs beside exhibits and displays. With young children, I was often unable to linger long enough to read about the exhibits, so I photographed the information to read later at home.

  • William

    Photo’s of signs are always a good resource during a trip. You touched briefly on entering data during a trip. My nightly routine was to upload photos into Lightroom and add info in the notes.
    And the GPS thing is great too. I use a thing called I-Go it is about the size of a 9v battery. It is a GPS and it takes a reading every six seconds. I upload that in the evening and get a detailed map of where I’ve been. By syncing my camera’s time to that of I-Go I know where I was when I took every picture that day. Sometimes there is a location error but the bulk of the photos I know exactly where I am when I took the photo.
    Some of the newer cameras have this feature built in and I think it is useful.
    I also collect post cards and brochures of things I’ve seen so I can learn more about some of the sights I’ve visited. Not free but a wealth of info.