Travel Photography | Don’t Forget Self Portraits

© 2012 Wazari Wazir | Once Upon a Time in Istanbul

I’m not a travel photographer but I’m a photographer who like to travel a lot. Normally as photographers, we often forget to put ourselves in front of the camera. Most of times I travel with my friends and most of them  are also like to take pictures, so even though we travel together, our interest is not the same, I mean I maybe like certain places or angle and my friends like to go to some other places and we end up walking alone when we reach a certain location.

For an example while traveling to Istanbul recently, when we arrived at Galata Bridge, most of us will walking at different directions because what attract my eyes might no be attractive to my other friends, so my point is, even if you travel with friends, it is better to take a photograph among yourself first before you split around.

As a photographer, I’m very particular about my self portraits, I mean I’m very particular about the composition, the background and every little details in the photograph and not many of my friends know my taste and most of the times, I’ve to satisfied with what I get but one thing for sure my friends who share the same interest in photography take better photograph of me than a total strangers who have little knowledge about photography other than pressing the shutter button.

It is also a good habit to start your photographic journey with a self portrait once you arrived at certain place of interest, trust me, if you forget this one, you will end up having no photograph of yourself. It happens to myself also, I don’t have a photograph of me inside the Grand Bazaar because it was so huge and once we get inside it, we can get lost and not seeing your friends. I did have photograph the Grand Bazaar but what I don’t have is a photograph of myself inside the Grand Bazaar.

As a photographer, I took thousands of pictures but the sad thing is that, I’ve very little photograph of myself and I think when I get old, my family especially my children’s like to see a photograph of me (myself inside the picture), traveling here and there and not very interested to look at the photographs that I took, they wanted to see his father inside the photographs. I will always keep that on my mind when traveling.