Over the past 13 months, I have traveled the world, visiting and photographing many beautiful landscapes and cityscapes. But how do I find all those photogenic locations? A few months ago, I wrote an article about how upgrade your photography through scouting and discovering new locations. But to strike a good balance when traveling, you should also have a base of known photo spots ready. In this article, I show how I find and organize them.
It is nearly impossible to plan a photography tour that lasts several months from start to finish. If you travel often, you know that, even for short trips, you must stay flexible and react to conditions as they unfold. If you plan your travel itinerary too specific and limited in time, you will miss out on many photo opportunities.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t somehow map out the places you want to visit. Going into detail and planning the time doesn’t hurt either. But be prepared to change during your trip and allow yourself to react to weather and other unforeseen events.
I achieve this flexibility by separating my research of photo locations from planning my trip. Finding photo spots is a constant endeavor, while planning my trip takes place weeks and sometimes months before the start of my trip. I usually plan a preliminary photography tour before booking a flight, then tweak the plan until and throughout the journey.
Pixel database
One of the most important parts of online or on-site location scouting is data organization. There are several ways to do this, including creating personalized maps through My Google Maps. I used this method a few years ago. But the data is not accessible offline and the more maps I add, the more confusing it becomes.
That’s why I switched to Microsoft OneNote as my pixel database. It offers a great way to organize photo locations, link them to photo tours, and sync data between different devices. This data can then also be used offline. Adding OneNote to my planning process changed the game.
Inside OneNote, I keep a folder called “Locations” in which I create additional folders for different countries. I have at least one “Location Overview” page in each of them. That’s where I first gathered potential photography locations when I stumbled across them while browsing through various photo-sharing platforms, travel articles, and other sources of inspiration. The list I keep there can be a bit chaotic at first. But I regularly go through these pages and refine them.
For some locations, I add helpful links right inside the “Locations Overview”. For others, I create dedicated pages, as you can see in the screenshot below. Those dedicated pages contain the coordinates of the place as well as the Google Maps link. If I’m online, the link takes me to Google Maps. If I’m offline, this won’t work. I was then able to copy the coordinates to Google Maps. I keep maps offline for the places I go, so I always find photo spots, even when I don’t have internet.
In addition to those coordinates, I also marked the photo points on Google Maps. To do this, click the location inside Google Maps. In the details window that will pop up, press the “Save” button and choose the default “Starred Places” list or create a custom list. The marker for the location will appear on the map. Those will also show up inside the offline map.
It’s also helpful to add details about hikes, best times to visit, and links to additional information on such a detail page. Such a great source of information is Detective Location. There I can get photography tips for popular places and also some lesser known places, including exact coordinates. You can also add photos to your database. The OneNote Cutter is a browser plugin that will help you with that. I show how to install and use it in the feature video.
Plan a photography trip
The detailed and growing database of photo locations is a good foundation for planning a photography trip. For such plans, I created a “Trips” folder next to the “Locations” folder in OneNote. There I add pages for the trip I’m planning. I will have a list of things to do before the trip, such as booking hotels, flights, trains and other transportation. I also often create a photo itinerary for the tour. Depending on the length of the trip, I select places for the country I’m visiting from a list of places and combine them into one route.
The great thing about OneNote is that it allows you to create internal links between different sections. If you create an itinerary for the places you want to visit, you can link those places to the detail pages you already have in the places directory. Now is also the time to refine them if you find they lack the necessary information.
Initially, I talked about versatility on a photography tour. If your journey fails for some reason, you browse the list of photo locations inside the places directory to find alternatives. Ideally, this list should contain more photo spots than the ones that have included it in your travel plans.
With a powerful database, you may not even have to create an itinerary for your trip. When traveling across Asia for three months last year, I visited three countries. Besides choosing those countries, there’s not much to plan ahead other than booking flights and hotels first. Itinerary is a work in progress on the trip, with a review period of one or two weeks, allowing me to book transportation and accommodation. To do this, I relied heavily on a list of places I created over the months and years before my trip. Additional research was also involved because my database was not good enough. But it gave me a good start.
Conclusion
Even if you’ve already created a database of known shooting locations, don’t forget to search for new locations. The joy of photography, at least for me, is discovering scenes I’ve never photographed before. In another articleI share a way to find these.
And don’t forget to add those new locations to your database. Who knows, you might come back one day, and then you’ll be able to choose from a wealth of richer scenes to photograph.
I should also mention that OneNote isn’t the only note-taking app you can use to create such a database. My preferences are not necessarily yours, so do your research and find the solution that best suits your needs and workflow.
