Returning home with a good travel shot is almost as easy as “be there, point and shoot,” but as readers of PCPhoto, you want more—a dramatic image that can be proudly displayed on a wall back home, or a series of images that can be shown off as part of a slideshow or shared with friends and family via e-mail.

We’ve compiled a series of ideas to help inspire you to better travel photography. Some tips are strictly about dealing with gear, while others offer suggestions for technique. All are designed to help you create better photos in any travel setting from Boston Harbor to Bhutan.

Finding The Light
A key to great photography is finding your subject in the right light. Although we can’t all photograph like National Geographic pros who have the time to wait days for good light, there are some tips we can use on any trip to improve our travel images.

•Be ready when good light happens. In most locations, best light occurs when the sun is low, either early or late in the day. This is the time to have the camera ready, no matter what else is going on in your trip.
•Be patient when light is bad. If the skies are gray and everyone at the location says this never happens at this time of year, trust them and don’t leave the location because this is when the weather frequently will break. I have some Machu Picchu, Peru, photos with few people in them, even though this is a hugely popular tourist destination. Why? The weather was rainy and most tourists left. Since this was a time of year when “it never rains,” I suspected it wouldn’t last. I waited and got the shots.
•Use fill-flash. Most digital cameras make it easy to add a little light to a dull scene with flash, and with the LCD review, you instantly can see if your flash is balancing the conditions properly. The flash will clean up colors and add drama.
•Look for backlight. Backlight is dramatic at any time, gives you silhouette and glowing color possibilities, and adds dimension to a scene. Even on dull days, you often can find a direction to the light. By shooting toward that light, your photos usually will gain more power. When people are in the foreground, use a flash to balance the light.

Packing Efficiently
It’s tempting to take every piece of gear—you just might need it, right? Three problems arise: You have to carry it all, a weight that can get oppressive after a few days; all that gear can be distracting from the goal of getting the shot; and more gear means more bags, which can equal big trouble when moving from place to place.

There are some ways to deal efficiently with your gear. Backpack camera bags are a great way of carrying your gear between destinations. A number of bags feature wheels and handles, making them convenient for moving through the airport. Porter Case offers a rolling case that can be used as a cart to wheel all your baggage at once.

Rolling bags and cases aren’t the best for shooting in a foreign village or when climbing ancient stairs to a historic site, however. I like to carry my camera gear in a rolling backpack, but I add a smaller, packable camera bag in with my clothing and use it when I reach my location. In this way, I have the gear I might need in the big bag, but only take a limited amount of gear to a specific location.

I also prefer to travel with a digital SLR and a compact digital camera. I gain the power of the larger camera with an assortment of lenses and flash, plus D-SLRs always have excellent high-ISO capabilities, meaning you can shoot with them in low-light conditions. I have the advantage of size and portability with the smaller camera when I need to travel light or I want to shoot less conspicuously (such as during a celebration in some developing countries where a camera bag may make you a target for thieves). Quality, high-megapixel cameras offer superb results with big zoom ranges, yet take up little space.

Dealing With Power
With a digital camera, you must have battery power, and you can’t count on it lasting a long time (how long depends on the camera and how you shoot). The challenge is to always have power when you need it. There are several guidelines you can follow to ensure that happens.

•Put your charger on a special “to pack” list. There’s nothing more frustrating than arriving at a location and discovering your charger is still at home.
•Keep three sets of rechargeable batteries. This makes your travel photography less likely to run out of power. You go out for a day’s shoot with a fully charged battery or set in your camera, another fully charged battery or set in your bag, and the third is back at your base charging. When you return that evening, replace your camera’s battery with the one on the charger, put one of the other batteries on charge for the night (to go in your bag the next morning), and keep the last for charging the next day.
•If your camera uses AA batteries, look into the lithium AAs from Energizer. These lightweight, high-capacity batteries can sit for years without losing power, making them ideal for backup and travel.

Travel Compositions
We could write a whole series of articles on composition techniques for travel images. Here are some quick tips that will get you better shots in a hurry.

•Get close. Fill up your image area with the subject, whether that means zooming in or walking closer. Travel photos too often lack impact because the main subject is too small in the photo area.
•Look for interesting foregrounds. Usually, you can find something with good location detail that can be used in the foreground of a larger photo: signs, architec-tural details, flowers, even people can help give a stronger identity to your image.
•Avoid the middle. There’s nothing wrong with having a subject or horizon in the middle of a photo if it’s appropriate to the scene. The problem comes when every photo has the same composition because the subject or horizon is always in the middle (or close to it). Put your subject off to one side or corner and find ways to create relationships with the rest of the scene.
•Watch skies. Bland, washed-out skies should be avoided—keep them out of the photo if possible. If you have a dramatic sky, use it in the composition and look for ways to silhouette your subject against it. You also can use a grad neutral-density filter to balance the sky with the ground.
•Look for people to add to the scene. Many photographers are afraid of photographing strangers. You often can include people naturally going about their business in larger compositions, especially when you use a wide-angle lens, without being too obvious about pointing a camera at them. This can give life to a travel scene. See Rick Sammon’s article for more information, “Photographing Strangers In A Strange Land.”

Memory Cards & Storage
Memory cards have come down in price so that most photographers can buy enough memory to last at least through a short trip (this depends a lot on whether you prefer to shoot RAW or JPEG). Cards are small, so you easily can transport hundreds of photos, unlike film, which takes up space in a hurry.

I highly recommend memory card cases that hold multiple cards. Memory cards are easy to misplace, lose or even run through the wash if you don’t have a specific place for them. These cases also allow you to set up ways of noting if the card has been shot or not (if nothing else, you can insert the shot cards upside down).

I won’t travel without some sort of backup for my photos, however. We never could do any backup when we had to shoot film, but this has become easy with digital. Many photographers travel with a laptop for viewing and editing photos on the trip; having a built-in CD or DVD burner makes that laptop more useful.

In addition, there are excellent stand-alone CD and DVD burners that allow you to plug in a memory card and automatically record the images from the card onto a disc. You even can make multiple backups of particularly important days of shooting. CDs are especially useful because any computer can read them (assuming you use quality media and not the cheapest on the shelf), and little can hurt them while you’re traveling, short of being run over by a car.

Another option is a portable hard drive device with an LCD screen, a great way to view and edit images in the field. They’re even small enough to fit in a gadget bag. I still don’t feel completely secure without using a CD- or DVD-burning device of some sort to create backups of all my photos while traveling, however.

Get Out And Photograph!
One of the advantages to using digital cameras is that you can photograph under all conditions—low light, bright light; incandescent light, daylight; on the run, on a tripod—and get excellent results. You’ll know how each type of light will look because you can check your shots by reviewing them on the LCD. There’s no cost to experimenting or trying different shots. Not sure about using flash? Try it! Want to try an odd composition? Why not? You learn from it all and can erase anything you dislike.

That can be a huge help for travel photography. We often reach destinations that we might not visit again for a long time, if ever. We want to be certain we “get the shot,” so it’s easy to be conservative and not push for the better photo. That was encouraged by film because of the danger of running out or at least “wasting film.” You can’t do that with digital, so use that freedom to find your best shots. Go after images that might have seemed unattainable before. Experiment, play and enjoy! I guarantee that will give you better images from any trip, anywhere.