As you can imagine, I have taken many a photography trip in my life. I have seen all the continents except Australia and Antartica and I have been to over twenty countries! I often travel with friends or family, and for no reason other than pleasure, but I have also taken trips solely focused on photography. This is how I planned those trips.
What defines a photography trip?
Every Person who does a photography trip has a different idea of what it means to them, this is what it means to me: Photography trips for me aren’t designed to be relaxing or slow paced, they are designed to get at least two to four solid entries to my portfolio. This may not sound like much, but on an average I get one portfolio pic for every seven hundred to a thousand pics I take. This means that I am usually taking an average of three thousands pics on these trips. This may seem like a lot, but landscape trips tend to be closer to seven hundred pics total with about fifty to a hundred per spot, and wildlife trips often have about five thousand a day when shooting at 14FPS burst mode.
Landscape trips:
These trips are usually done over two to four days on a long weekend. I will go to some corner of this country and take as many landscape photos as I can find. Some of the key subjects are waterfalls or large rock formations, and many if not most are taken well after the sun has set. These trips often have extremely packed driving days with four to six hours of driving a day, and usually end at around 2 am to maximize astrophotography time. I am not a sunrise photographer usually, so I often wake up just around noon and start my day in the early afternoon on these trips. My record was probably in New Mexico with nine full hours of driving time in a day.
Wildlife Trips:
These trips usually involve early mornings and end earlier in the day. Animals are active most at dawn and dusk so these are the times I will also be most active. They days often involve 5 am starts and end around 9pm or whenever it gets too dark to shoot. The exception was Costa Rica. I was taking pics of reptiles and amphibians that were far more active at night, and ended up taking the majority of my good pictures after dark with a flash. Wildlife photography is considerably more active. The driving itineraries tend to be shorter, but the hiking and photography takes a lot more time and effort. I also end up with closer to twenty or thirty portfolio entries on these trips.