During a trip, people use cameras to record their personal memories. It’s fairly common to see people upload pictures after pictures to social media platforms when they are traveling. Smartphones have decent cameras and they are more than enough to deliver quality picture for casual usages. Because smartphones are convenient to use, it is quite easy to produce hundreds of pictures in just a few days. When making and choosing photos among hundreds of others, we should make sure that they are able to convey a feel for the culture and a sense of place. It’s not possible to re-tell rich history of an area with only smartphone, but a photo can still be equal to a thousand words. Cloud-lined mountains, vast expanse of grasslands, chaos on the streets of a distant capital city and other scenes tell so much information for people who haven’t been there. We don’t really need to bring an expensive DSLR camera to bring powerful impact to our social media viewers. It’s easy to attract attention when we carry an expensive camera and it is also relatively bulky.
We can stay conspicuous when we have a smartphone ready for us on our hand. Middle-range smartphones and even some affordable models are able to produce great photo quality. With smartphones, we are able to stay alert and quickly catch wonderful moments. Some models are equipped with burst feature, so we are able to multiple pictures with just a button push. Smartphones can also be loaded with a variety of photo editing apps, to enhance our photos. Even quick snaps of street signs can also be quite interesting for our friends and family. After taking a few pictures, we may record our own voice about stories of a landmark or monument. The information can be written on social media pages, so it can become an educational experience for people who see our photos. Smartphones can also be easily used to take pictures of local cuisines. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks can also tell a lot of story about local culture. Good composition will leave people wondering about the taste of the dish. We may also smartphone camera to take picture of landmark building and infrastructure. However, we should take pictures when the sun is behind us, because smartphone cameras perform poorly against direct sunlight exposure.
Some museums may charge us additional fare for bringing cameras. However, we could freely carry smartphones on our pocket. Having specific information can be quite helpful and we may take picture of exhibits in the museum with much more convenience. However, we should know that some areas inside the museum can have dim lighting for artistic purposes, which could result in grainy photos and the tiny flash won’t help much. When taking a picture of an item, we should make sure that a bright light source is behind us, so we will get better results. Flash can be enabled indoor, although it could only offer marginal improvement to photo quality.