Family travel has so many exciting and rewarding aspects. It allows you and your kids to expand your worldview, learn about new cultures, try different cuisines, and discover the beauty of a unique environment together. However, one of the most important and fulfilling things about traveling with people you love is the memories you make along the way.

Travel can be a powerful bonding experience that brings you closer together and teaches you new things about yourself and the rest of the world. Capturing those precious moments and memories is an impactful way to commemorate them, which is why taking plenty of photos and videos is such a good idea.

But while even the blurriest or awkward photos can still be precious, putting in a little bit of extra effort to the documentary process so that you can capture the essence of your travel experience is always worthwhile.

If you’re looking for some tips for getting more out of your travel photos, this list of ideas may just inspire you!

Deepen Your Travel Photography Experience: 6 Tips

If you’ve got kids, you know that the notion of getting picture-perfect family shots is not always a realistic one. Jet lag sucks, flights get delayed, and life gets crazy—sometimes, especially while traveling (at least, that’s what it feels like sometimes!).

But that doesn’t mean you can’t still find ways to capture the essence of your travel experience. In fact, sometimes, leaning into those crazy moments and finding the funny side of them can truly deepen your adventures abroad.

Here are a couple of ways you can return home laden with memorable, hilarious, and heart-melting moments captured in a variety of clever and creative ways:

Invest in a Polaroid camera

Polaroid or Fuji Instax cameras are one of the most fun and exciting ways to take photographs. They’re immediate, super tactile, and produce truly beautiful and nostalgic images. They’re very easy to operate, too, meaning that even young kids (from about five years old upwards) can operate them, which can lead to some, ahem, interesting photographic outcomes.

Polaroids also offer a unique style and aesthetic to casual travel photography that can allow you to see the world in a slightly different way, opening you up to a more spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment memory-capturing process.

Make a vlog

Vlogs are an incredibly immersive tool for capturing important memories. The video aspect of the day-by-day, moment-by-moment approach to documenting a journey allows you to capture every part of it beautifully.

Bring along a decent camera or even just use your smartphone to track your journey—from the first moment of embarkment to the day you arrive back home—and, of course, everything in between. As someone who grew up in a family where my eldest sister was constantly making “mini-movies'' with her camcorder, watching these moving memories as an adult gives me a more visceral sense of the good old days than any other form of personal content. It just captures everything!

If the editing process of making a vlog throws you off, remember that all sorts of easy-to-use video editing tools are available these days that can practically produce them for you.

Encourage everyone to take photos

If you really want to capture the essence of your travels, it’s important to view them from everyone’s perspective. While it can sometimes be easier to assign certain moment-capturing roles, allowing that role to shift between different people and ages gives a more dynamic result.

Let everyone get in on the travel-capturing process by making sure they all know how to operate the available cameras, and that turns are taken when it comes to operating them. The more kids you are traveling with, the more challenging this may be, but ultimately, it can help you capture the essential moments of travel from a wider range of perspectives.

When you get home, you can print out your photos and make an album, or you could take the professional approach and create an online photography portfolio to showcase your adventures to the world. This is a great way to let other friends and family see what you experienced, even if you’ve got several pics taken by a shaky-handed six-year-old!

Collect small, precious items along the way

Taking lots of pictures and videos of your time in a foreign place is one of the best ways to capture the memories you make there, but it isn’t the only one. Collecting meaningful tidbits such as train tickets, shells, leaves, and other randomly found objects can be a beautiful way to flesh out your trip in a more tangible, tactile way.

Sentimentality is a powerful emotion, and making an effort to find precious tokens can help capture the idiosyncrasies of your adventures more kinetically. Did someone say post-travel family scrapbook session?

Experiment with live drawing

Having digital photos and videos of your travel experience is wonderful, but honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a form of memory-capturing more emotive and poignant than live drawing.

Of course, not everyone enjoys observational sketching, and that’s completely okay, but challenging yourself and your loved ones to try can produce some interesting, if not amusing, artistic payoffs. Live drawings of cities, exotic dishes, people, and buildings all also make great scrapbook content!

Don’t overthink it

Don’t get so wrapped up in capturing the essence of your travels that you forget to actually enjoy them. Being present and in the moment with the various steps of your journey should always be the priority—you, your loved ones, and some lifelong memories.

While still remembering to capture essential moments as they arise, don’t allow that process to distract you from the real life that unfolds before you. Those are the best memories to look back on, anyway!

Cherish Every Memory

Exploring different cultures and cuisines with your loved ones is one of the best feelings in the world. But those feelings don’t have to end when you come home.

By broadening your photographic horizons and taking a more flexible approach to documenting your trip, you can capture the full spectrum of emotions and experiences that come with it. Years into the future, when you look back at the moments you captured, it will feel like you never left!