5 ways of finding interesting places to visit when traveling

1. Instagram

Instagram is my go to app to find interesting places I should visit when I'm traveling. There are a couple of ways that I find locations I should go to. The first is dependant on where I'm going, I'll go to a personal Instagram profile of someone who I know lives there or has traveled there before and go through their pictures. 

Another way is available now thanks to instagrams update where you can search for specific places in the search page. For instance I can type in Kraków in the search and flick through photos people have uploaded. I found an amazing church to visit in krakow that I otherwise wouldn't have known about if it wasn't for Instagram! I also found a lovely blog run by a traveller who was exploring Europe in 90 days who uploads a new post every day with pictures of where he went. 

Here are some photos from my personal instagram account @julia.trotti I have been posting images as I travel and writing where and what each place is in the hopes that someone else finds it helpful! 

2. Google

This seems like the most obvious option, but I need to mention it as I use this the most! One way you can use Google is to type in your destination and all the main attractions will pop up in your search with pictures and information of each one. This is a great way to familiarise yourself with all the main landmarks of a city you are visiting so you can keep an eye out for them while you are exploring. 

While I love visiting popular landmarks I also love to go to lesser known places. To find these I google more specific terms. Instead of googling a city name, I could search for "secluded beaches malibu" or "secret beaches sydney" or "flower fields poland" to find something a little different. These are the more secluded type of things I love seeing when I travel:

- forests

- waterfalls

- lakes

- secluded beaches 

- flower fields

- abandoned buildings

- lookouts

- country towns

- parks

The list could go on forever! 

Also under the same category, TripAdvisor is another great place to search for your destinations. On Trip Advisor you can look up the location you want to go to a see reviews and pictures taken by people who have travelled there. I would sometimes take the reviews made by travellers with a grain of salt though, as a place that was a drag to one person, could be the highlight of your trip for you!

3. Blogs

Blogs - travel blogs especially - are a great place to learn about some interesting places to visit while you're traveling. I have a few go-to blogs that I love visiting when I'm traveling such as Tuula Vintage, but you can find so many by heading over to Bloglovin and having a flick through their travel blog section. That's the easiest way I find them! 

Tumblr is another great tool, where you can search what city you are going to and browse through all the images and jot down anything that you would love to see yourself.

4. Ask a local + information centres

When traveling, I usually like to stay at accommodation via airbnb. Not only can it be really cheap, but you have so many beautiful home-like accommodation options rather than staying at a hotel. With airbnb accommodation usually being someone's home (which you can either rent their entire home or a private room in their home), it means that you get to meet and talk to the people who own the place and have usually lived there their whole life. We got to have a chat to the person who lived in our Venice Beach accommodation as well as San Francisco and got to learn about so many wonderful non-tourist things to do and places to eat that we would have otherwise no idea about. The lovely lady whose place we stayed at wrote out an amazing list of things to do in San Francisco that I kept pressed inside my journal:

Sourdough + clam chowder
[Boudin Bakery]

Brunch Places on Cortland Ave:
- Moonlight Cafe
- B Star

Places to eat:
- Piquenos Peruvian Tapas
- Namu Gaji [new style Korean]
- Right next door: Bi-Rite Creamery (where there is always a line)
Must try salted caramel with balsamic vinegar ice cream

Mission & Valencia are hipster hangouts +
anything on that street is worth trying

Craftsmen + Wolves on Valencia @ 18th
Try Rebel Within savoury muffin and half boiled egg

More on Valencia:
- Ritual coffee
- Blue Bottle
- Sightglass coffee
- Samovar tea lounge

With us only being there for two days we tried to cross off as much of it off as we could but didn't quite make it through the whole list. I guess it just means we have to go there again one day! 

While I was in Poland with Dan, we were very lucky to be able to stay with his family is Gdansk, where Dan's cousins Karol & Pawel and Dan's uncle would take us around to show us their city. In Krakow we were able to stay with Dan's family friends who also took us around to show us everything! It was really great being able to walk around with locals who knew what places to go to, what time is best to visit them and knew all the history about all the places! It was especially helpful for me in Gdansk where not many things are translated to English like in Krakow. So if I didn't have Karol or Dan around I would have no idea what it was I was looking at/visiting!! 

Information centres

When my friends and I headed to Joshua Tree for the weekend, we really didn't have anything in particular in mind to do aside from randomly exploring the National Park. On our first day there, we went to get lunch and had a lovely helpful lady let us know that she recommends us to go to the information centre to pick up a free map of the park. We did just that and on the map was a list of locations and hikes you can do in Joshua Tree National Park. 

Since we ended up going in the middle of summer, it was ridiculously hot during the day so we left all our hiking for the afternoon. In this case we didn't have time to do everything, so with the help of the information on the map we picked a few things we did have time for that sounded the best for us!

5. Get lost

Don't be afraid to throw the map away, don't have a plan for yourself for a day and just wander around. I mentioned in a previous blog post how the first thing I like to do when I arrive in a new city is to get out there and walk even if I don't know where I'm going. You can find the most interesting things by accident when you do this. Serendipity! 

Below we were driving in San Francisco in the mountains and there was fog in the distance but the road was clear. We park the car and start taking some photos of the view before we realise that the cold wind was pushing the fog towards us. Before we knew it everything around us was a white wonderland and you couldn't see more than a few metres in front of you. It was magical.

The picture underneath that, my friends and I hopped into an Uber to take us to the markets in Brooklyn. The Uber driver was so nice and really excited that the four of us from Australia wanted to go and explore in Brooklyn, where he grew up and still lives. He goes on to tell us about the history of Brooklyn and how it's an up and coming city developing so fast with a plethora of new places; restaurants, bars, places to hang out - popping up now because of the youth culture in the area. We started our ride in Manhattan and he took a detour to show us his favourite place to sit on his time off where he can watch the sun disappear and the lights of New York start to glimmer through the Brooklyn Bridge. This park is where he dropped us off after our ride and I had to snap a photo to remember what a lovely experience it was hearing how passionate he was about his hometown and showing us around.

I hope you found this helpful! I think next I'm going to blog a travel guide of sorts from my personal experiences from particular cities such as places to eat and things to see and do. j x

How do you find interesting places to visit when you are traveling? 

10 travel photography tips

1. Pack light

When you're traveling, you usually spend most of your days walking from morning to night to see as much as possible. The last thing you want is to bring a massive photography kit that will add more weight to yourself that you need lug around all day. I like to keep it simple when I'm traveling and try to bring the bare minimum with me.

My favourite camera kit to bring with me when I'm traveling is:

- Canon 5Dmkiii

- 35mm f1.4 lens

- Spare camera battery

- Spare memory card

I would very rarely bring a second lens with me as this minimal kit is already pretty heavy for me to carry around all day! But if I have a car with me, sometimes I like to bring my 50mm lens to get a few shots with a different focal length. 

I choose the 35mm lens as my favourite to travel with as it's such a good all-rounder lens. It's wide angle so it's great for getting beautiful shots of landscapes and cityscapes. It also a great portrait lens for photos of you and your friends as well as documentary street photography. It's also the lightest prime lens I own, so bonus points for that! 

2. Carry your camera with you everywhere

I like to walk around with my camera on my neck and turned on. Sometimes the most interesting things happen around you unexpectedly and disappear after a few moments. A flock of birds flying past, an interesting person walks by you, sights you see while on public transport or traveling by car.  I find it so important to constantly have my camera at the ready to shoot whatever I see as it happens. 

3. Bring a bag

Going back on my last point, sometimes you need to put your camera away. Maybe towards the end of the day or at night, when you're traveling back home on public transport and you don't want to put a target on yourself carrying around expensive equipment for everyone to see. Even when you're just eating lunch and you need both hands, its handy to be able to put away your gear. I always bring with me a backpack or a big enough handbag that I can quickly put away my camera when I feel the need to. 

Another little tip depending how mindful you are of your camera, is to pick a bag that doesn't look like a camera bag. This could be more useful if you are traveling to an unsafe country - look inconspicuous! 

4. Wake up early

When visiting popular locations, I find it's so much better to wake up as early as possible and get to your destination before the tourists start pouring in. This gives you a chance to see some beautiful landmarks in gorgeous morning light, capture photos without mass amounts of people in your shot and in general it just feels magical to be somewhere that's supposed to be packed full of people when it's empty.

There have been a few instances where heading off somewhere really early has come in handy. One morning my friends and I woke up at sunrise and headed straight to Central Park in New York City. We went picture crazy as it felt like we had the park to ourselves and light was soft and magical. Later in the day we were walking back through Central Park and there were people everywhere. It was safe to say that the photos I took that morning were some of my favourite of the park compared to the shots I took during the rest of visits to Central Park. Again, when we were visiting the Empire State Building, we arrived just as it opened so we were able to go up to the top without waiting in line at all and didn't have to wait to get a great view as there weren't many people at the top. When we finished and were heading back down, there was already over an hour of wait time to get to the top.

5. Camera settings

I've spoken about the importance of shooting in raw in the past, but I could apply it even more when you're traveling and shooting on the fly. When you're traveling, you often don't have the chance to take the same photo twice. Shooting raw could save a photo that was accidentally over or underexposed. If you find it too time consuming to shoot in manual mode, you can also shoot with shutter or aperture priority. 

6. Keep your files organised

As tired as I am when I get back from a day of adventuring and exploring, before I go to sleep I like to download all the photos I took that day in a folder named with the date and the location we went to and put my camera batteries on charge. It can be difficult to stay on top of this, the longer you travel, the more tired you are. But trust me you will be thanking yourself when you get home if you can roughly stick to this schedule! Instead of coming home to a giant pile of mixed up photos, you already have everything sorted by date and name which will make going through all your photos when you're home so much easier!

Another thing to keep in mind if you're downloading photos on the road and re-shooting on cards is backing up your files. I know they're not client photos, but your holiday photos are just as important in my opinion! If you can purchase a small, cheap hard drive somewhere at home to take with you, back up your photos whenever you have some extra downtime at your hotel or apartment. 

7. Take candid photos

While it's great to have posed photos in front of landmarks, don't forget to get candid photos too! I love candid photos as they remind me more of the atmosphere of the day rather than just showing me where I was. So snap away at your friends walking around, take pictures of interesting characters you see on the streets and keep it natural! 

8. Get photos of yourself!

Being a photographer taking all the pictures, you usually miss out on being in them! If you're traveling by yourself it could be a good idea to bring a lightweight tripod that you can set up and shoot on self timer if there aren't many people around (you wouldn't want to set up a tripod in a busy area in case someone knocks into it and drops your camera to the ground). If you are daring enough, you could ask someone who looks trustworthy to take some photos of you too!

If you are traveling with friends or a partner or family, I like to set up my camera settings (usually by getting a photo of said friend or family member in the spot I want a photo - then you both have a nice photo there yay!) then handing the camera to them with all the settings set and ask them to take a few photos of me. When I do this I get a few posed photos then walk around a little to get some more candid looking photos. This can feel a little strange sometimes but if you can just act silly in front of your friends and laugh it off it's worth it to get some nice photos of yourself. 

Sometimes this system doesn't work out amazingly. With a lens that shoots with a shallow depth of field and handing a foreign camera to someone who hasn't really used it before sometimes you can end up with blurry photos of yourself, but in the end run those photos can be cool too!

9. Wander 

The first thing that I love to do when I get to a new city is get out there and walk. You ground yourself, start understanding where everything is a little more and it really sinks in that you are somewhere new, very very far away from home or anything you know. Some of my best photos happen when I wander around a city without a destination in mind. I find when I wander, I spend more time taking in the details and taking my time when shooting pictures. On the other hand, when I'm on my way to a particular destination, I can often forget to stop and walk down a random street or notice the little things. It's important to take your time! Something I need to remind myself sometimes too.

10. Share your story

We've all seen countless photos of the Eiffel Tower and the view of the Empire State Building from up high. When you're traveling it's important to get these photos, but also remember to shoot the things in between - the moments that made your trip your own. Take pictures of your friends, the food you ate, a door your found interesting, encounters with strangers. Take pictures of the things that speak to you and that mean something to you.

I wanted to leave you all with one last thing. This isn't a tip, more something I'd like to mention. Don't forget to leave your camera at home sometimes. While I want to absorb everything I can with my camera, sometimes it's important to let it go, leave it at home. Explore and see everything you can with your eyes instead of through the viewfinder. Get out there and create stories!

I also have some exciting news because I've started sharing more fashion shoot behind the scenes videos + Lightroom & Photoshop Tutorials on my YouTube Channel! Be sure to subscribe as I upload 2 new videos every week.

j x