Perfect Travel Selfies

I love traveling solo. There is something blissful about experiencing a new place and being guided only by my own impressions of it. Yet I often wonder existentially whether if I have no photographic evidence of my time there, did I really visit? I should take more photos with me in them – but sometimes I’m reluctant to hand my camera over to a stranger (whether it’s more that I don’t trust they won’t run off with it or I don’t trust they’ll capture me at an unflattering angle is debatable). It’s clear I need to master the art of taking perfect travel selfies.

For that reason, I was elated to run across this great piece on capturing perfect travel selfies as I often end up taking them when I want to remember a particular moment or place – and where I was within it.

I love some of her photos and her advice to “tell the visual story of a trip”.  Some of my favorite travel photos include photos of my ‘blackened feet’ after walking barefoot through the French Quarter post-Katrina due to a broken shoe, photos taken with shadows or pieces of larger architectural objects, and photos like the one above where I’ve tried to capture the lighting or sense of a place.

The author (Vivienne McMaster) used the same love of self-photography throughout her  overall website which invites readers to “Be Your Own Beloved”, something I focused on in my former scrapbooking business when I co-authored the book “Self Centered – The Art of Scrapbooking You and Your Life” way back in 2006 (now out of print).  The term “selfie” didn’t quite exist back then – but the belief that we should capture where we are in life at any moment certainly did!