How to Prepare for Street Photography Overseas

Four things to consider before you pack your bags

Let’s say you’re ready to take your first, big photography trip overseas. You’ve been putting in the time, developing your skills, and now looking to challenge yourself in a new environment. How do you arm yourself with the right information to make the most of your adventure? There’s a lot that goes into my photography trips and this week, I wanna share the high-level steps I take get prepared.

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Define the Creative

The first thing I’ll do is figure out what I’m hoping to create. I’m spending days, if not weeks, ideating on the visuals that I’ll return home with. Sometimes it’s just a style or theme, where I wanna document a particular place. For example, I’ve been documenting markets across India as part of a long-term project and as a result, I’ll look to map out the markets I can visit. Here, I’m just putting myself in a place and letting the visuals come to me.

To take this further, I’ll research how best to travel in/around the markets, how the sun hits it in the morning, and scrub across Google Maps to plot out some potential entry/exit points. This type of work really pays off in the long-run and just gives me more of an edge when I’m on location.

There may even be instances in which I’m travelling to another part of the world for one specific shot. For example, the shot below was something that I planned years for and was able to execute in 2022. The entire trip revolved around capturing a portrait of this nature and through some crazy luck we dusted up, we ended up with a final image that was even better than I could’ve imagined.

If this concept appeals to you, I would encourage you to follow that intuition and just put in as much time fleshing out what the final shot feels like. When you can define that final image in extreme detail, you can work backwards to answer the key questions to execute your vision.

Alright, now that you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking to create, it’s time to move on to what I believe is the most important step in the process.