Tips for Taking Great Family Vacation Photos

Summer’s here - time for Family Vacation and Photos

Can you believe summer is half over! Have you already had your vacation or still looking forward to it?  I hope you enjoyed or will enjoy somewhere enjoyable and maybe even exciting!  Where ever you go, make the most of it and make it memorable! 

As I was thinking about this blog, I made a little trip down memory lane by looking through some photos in our family albums.  Wow, I forgot some of the things we did with our children when they were young, and how glad I was that we have pictures to remind us.  Now some of my pictures are better than others, some are not at all great technically.  When I took these, I definitely wasn’t thinking about all the things that I think about now when I take a picture - like lighting and composition.  But, you don’t need to be a professional photographer to do some minor things to help capture a great memory of your family and make it a pretty decent image as well.

Here are a few tips for taking great family vacation photos:

• Show the personalities of your family members. 

• Show them having fun.

• Capture them when they aren’t posing, but are just being themselves.

• Be sure to ask someone else to take a photo of all of you occasionally- so you can be in a few pictures too !!!

• If possible, try to compose your family with a fairly solid background so they don’t get lost in whatever is going on behind them.

• And along with that, put some distance between them and the background which will also help them stand out. 

• Avoid standing them up against a wall - so they don’t look like they are in a police line up!  Again, put some distance between them and the background.

• Be sure and download them and save them in whatever format works for you - but prints are good and they are a tangible way to remember!

Take a scroll through a few of our family vacation pics through the years.  Some are at the beach, at a friend’s lake house, from a trip to Disney World, and the last one is my son’s favorite of him riding horseback in Royal Gorge, Colorado.  I think he likes this one because although we were in a caravan of others on horseback,  he looks like a big boy all by himself  riding the horse up the mountain!  He has other fond memories of the horseback ride that day which further contribute to him liking this image!