Tom Jauncey and his brother, Jeremy, make a living out of traveling and taking pictures from some of the most amazing places in the world. Their Instagram account, Beautiful Destinations, has over 7 million followers (including Kendall Jenner), and features the work of travel photographers from all over the world. But when there are literally hundreds of million people posting pictures to Instagram daily, how can a photographer set their work apart and get noticed? Tom shared some of his best secrets to help your travel photos standout from the rest.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BLXDLGRD1nP/?taken-by=beautifuldestinations&hl=en
Use the Instagram in-app editing features. There are a couple of apps, Snapseed, for example, that are amazing for editing, I actually really like to dive into the Instagram app itself. My rule of thumb is that for every Instagram picture, I’ll always sharpen between 20 to 30% – it’s just a much clearer image. Structure is another one to play with on the Instagram app that would give a bit more detail to the image.
Use local hashtags. People think they have to hashtag something with a lot of popular hashtags, like #instagood or #picoftheday. But the reality is that you are just going to be one shot on that board for, literally, a second before another comes up. You’ll never get noticed. So start to hashtag things that are local to where you are. For example, the Catskills, where there are different areas like Sam’s Point, a really famous hike, you should hashtag #samspoint. You’ve got a greater chance of being featured if you are part of a smaller hashtag like that, rather than hashtagging #catskills or #newyork. Same thing applies when hashtagging local hubs. Within each community, there’s an Instagram community of local photographers. So, if you go up to the Catskills, there are going to be local pages that are driven towards the Catskills. If someone’s out on a road trip and they tag #beautifuldestinations, the chances of us seeing that is going to be much smaller than a local account geared towards Catskills photographers because they aren’t going to get that many tags.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BLVkArhje5d/?taken-by=beautifuldestinations&hl=en
Plan your shooting itinerary around sunrise and sunset. It’s pretty obvious but it’s really important to plan your itineraries or traveling around the best shooting hours. Sunrise and sunset, are the most beautiful times to capture light. When I travel, I always clear morning and evenings to be able to shoot. If there are tourist attractions I’d like to go to, I go during the day because I’m not going to shoot them anyway. If I went to Paris, for example, I wouldn’t go to the Eiffel Tower during the day. I would make sure that I was the first person there at 5 am because that’s when you get the shots. Even if it means you having to go to bed late and getting up early, you can sleep during the day when the light is really harsh.
Use bold colors and saturation. What we found is that on Beautiful Destinations, colors really work. That’s what attracts people attention. I use a really interesting plug-in on Lightroom that’s called Color FX, and it allows me to dig really deep into making much bolder or saturated colors. You can edit your picture in Lightroom, transfer it over to Color Fx , do a couple more color edits and put it back into Lightroom.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BKmeShfAC-Q/?taken-by=beautifuldestinations&hl=en
Put people in the shot. At @beautifuldestinations we’re posting 24 times a day some days, of which we’re getting anywhere from a 100 to 300,000 likes. When we look at the data analytics, we’re getting millions of these data sets of what works specifically on social media. Often times, it’s the shots with people in them are in the top performing percentage of shots. So, I would definitely put people in the shots. If you’ve got a massive view of Yosemite and you put someone on a little rock, and you see the scale of them in comparison to the monument or landscape, then you can really show scale. An additional tip: Invest in a red jacket! Red always pops. You’ll see, for example, in a lot of swimsuit shots, the models will often wear red suits. We actually did this in Yosemite about 2 weeks ago. We had one of our models stand just behind a big mountain with a lake in the middle, and we got a reflection, but he stood out because he was in red.
Finally, if you are really ready to take your travel photography to the next level and get your photos seen, consider joining our team at Beautiful Destinations. You can apply to join the #BDTeam by clicking here.
To see more Beautiful Destinations, go to www.beautifuldestinations.com or @beautifuldestinations. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of our amazing videos as well.
Cover image courtesy of: Shutterstock.com Josemaria Toscano
