Picture Perfect
Let’s talk about travel photos…
Travel is nothing like what you see in social media.
You can read about our behind the scenes experience to learn a bit more about what our life of travel has really been like (Hint: not every day is a glamorous excursion). But in short, most of the social media “travel” content that has blown up in recent years can be misleading at best, and downright dangerous at worst.
The influencer travel content you see on social media is a carefully planned, curated, and orchestrated version of a location that has been edited to create the most buzz and views. We won’t delve into the monetization of this content but its important to recognize this:
You can make any place look stunning in a series of 1-2 second heavily edited clips
You should question EVERYTHING you see travel influencers post (with few exceptions).
How do we know this?
Because we have been to many of the “instagrammable” places and places featured in social media content. (To be clear we haven’t traveled to these places because of what we saw on social media.)
Because we have been to many more beautiful places not featured on instagram and watched the people flock to the insta famous spots.
Because we have researched and learned what is real and worth it and what is not. We do have a few travel people that we respect and follow, but most everything else is garbage.
Are these places pretty, sure. But often those instagram vs. reality videos are true. The “behind the scenes” to get those perfect shots is often a parade of people in ridiculous outfits spending hours taking hundreds of photos, staging and editing to create the allure and beauty so they can post one shot that often unfairly characterizes a place. Or its AI….
One of the worst offenders we saw was a person who went to a speakeasy bar in Laos that we happened to be at (if you have read anything of ours, you know we love speakeasies). They proceeded to sit next to us at the bar, order a drink, take 9000 pictures of themselves at the bar, and leave without ever taking a sip. Don’t get me wrong, the bar was cool, the atmosphere was cool, the drinks were better.
Why is this important to call out?
What social media travel content has done is lead normal non-influencers to trek towards these spots for their own “perfect” shot, creating a cyclical pattern of visiting places you saw on social media and everyone going to the same places for the same shots.. Stop it.
This takes away from what it actually means to travel and experience places. What we see more than anything is most of the people trying to capture these perfect shots don’t even stop to actually enjoy the place they are at. It’s just all about the photo. We have lost count of how many times we are sitting at an amazing beach or vista enjoying the view and people walk up, take 10 dumb selfies in a minute and leave…
This whole instagram phenomenon has led us to gut check many “popular” attractions based on the social media effect. Are we interested in going to this place because we genuinely want to see or participate in the activity, or is it “popular” because instagram has made it so. If it’s the latter, we pass.
Our photo philosophy.
We share photos sparingly on social media because we don’t want to contribute to the travel culture where people seek out places based on the photos they have seen on social media. That creates overtourism and a host of other issues we do not want to be a part of. Every photo we share (of the few we share on social) is curated to show our experience in an authentic and real way. What you see is what we saw. We sometimes edit slightly for color or clarity because honestly sometimes the richness of color is lost in the photo but no magic erase or AI effects here.
We don’t spend hours trying to take the perfect shot and forget to actually live, experience and marvel at what we are looking at. 90% of our time lapses are taken while we sit in the background chatting and enjoying the sunset (unless of course we forget the tripod). On occasion we have done some weird shit to take a good photo. But that is all in fun. We don’t traipse around Paris in a ball gown to take these instagram shots that drastically misconstrue what it is like to travel. So what does reality vs. instagram look like for us…. Here are some comparison photos of our unedited vs. edited photos so you can see what we saw.
Sidenote to say that we do take some of our shots in RAW format, which makes them look particularly bleak before being edited. That means some of the RAW photos HAVE to be edited before we can share because they don’t look accurate because of the format.
And here are some of our favorite authentic travel content creators:
We follow and respect these people not as travel “influencers“ but as full fledged travelers, who are sharing their experience and what they have learned on the road, with people like us.