Travel Photography while on a Cruise?

 

If you're interest in selling travel photographs from your travels and you like to cruise, you may be wondering how easy or hard it is to be a travel photographer while traveling via cruise ship.  

So, if you are interested in this topic, keep reading. I am going to discuss my views on travel photography while enjoying a cruise vacation, pros and cons, basically can you do it successfully.

Normally, I don't travel by cruise ship.  But after Covid we traveled on several cruises, including cruises to Alaska, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. 

Part of the attraction of doing travel photography on a cruise is that you get the opportunity to visit numerous stops all from one "base". So on first blush, cruising seems like a great way to get multiple photography locations with minimal work, no changing of hotels, not transiting.  No travel headaches. 

And there is a pool to keep the kids happy after a day of exploring!

But is possible to do travel photography that is publication quality from a cruise ship?  Are their constraints that will make it too difficult to get great shots? Or is a cruise vacation the promised land of travel photography. 

Let’s talk about travel photography from a cruise ship and some of the benefits and constraints of travel photography while cruising.

Problems

First, the problems associated with travel photography on cruises.

Daytime Port Visit

Professional photographers often make their most successful photos during the early morning or late evening, or during golden or blue hours.

With cruising, ships are often scheduled to be a sea during those prime photography times and so you tend to get pushed into the main daylight hours when the light is least beneficial, and locations are fairly crowded.

Of course, at some locations there are multi-night stops and later departures.  But these are often the bigger stops, like Lisbon or Barcelona or St. Petersburg and its often the smaller, less visited locations that are most interesting from a travel photography perspective.

Hurry up and wait

Often when you get to a port, it can take longer than expected to get off a cruise ship.  And depending on the location, the port can be quite far from the actual city you want to visit.  So once the Captain gives clearance to leave the ship, and you form up in lines for the shuttles and then make it into town through the traffic, and then get back to the meeting spot for pickup, the amount of time you have to actually to make photograph can be limited. 

And if you’re like me and your travelling with family, I need to make sure that we have good excursions that meet everyone’s goals and take care of lunch, and all of that stuff.

The result? Even more compressed times for shooting, less control over light, less control over getting to a spot at an optimal time. 

This can result in missing photographic opportunities in locations you're visiting.  

Ultimately, there are many logistical challenges that make travel photography really difficult.  You will typically face the harsh, mid-day light, and be stuck in some big crowds.  If the weather is bad that day, you typically don’t get any do overs.

So yah, travel photography from a cruise ship is not easy.

However, there are some great things about cruising that allows for unique travel photography.

Benefits 

Visiting Curated Site

The places you visit are often curated by travel industry experts. This is a double-edged sword, and can be a problem if you are into out of the way locations. But for a travel photographer looking for locations that will have solid market potential this is a great aspect of cruising.

And the opportunity to visit curated places works on multiple levels.  For example, cruises often take people to the nicest cities within range of coastal ports.  Places like Cartagena, Colombia, Ketchikan, Alaska, and Paris, France.

But also, within a port location, you are going to get a high degree of selection of some of the best excursions. Having prescreened excursions means you will have the opportunity to photograph the most interesting areas or activities that a location has to offer.

For example, we were able to visit the much less popular but fanstastic Mayan ruins at Chacchoben. The ruins are generally hard to access other than by cruise ship and are a fantastic location.

Some of the excursions are even photography oriented. So keep that in mind.

One of the interesting things that many people don’t think about, and this can vary by location, is that cruising provides a certain amount of safety.  In fact, the trip-based excursions are generally well enough run that I am comfortable having my family go on a different excursion while I go for something more photographically oriented that they don’t have an interest in visiting.

For example, I visited this fantastic castle in Palma de Mallorca that they were avoiding at all cost! I love castles!

Location variety

One of the best aspects of travel photography from a cruise ship is the diversity of locations that one trip can take you on. On a past cruise of the western Caribbean, we visited Mexico, Honduras, Panama and Columbia.  On a land trip, it would have been much more challenging to visit these locations, but more importantly, it would have cost way more than it did via cruise.

Location variety can even be about locations where you don’t leave the boat but only visit, these can be wild and hard to access locations like the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska.  Its almost impossible to get to a location like this other than via a cruise ship.

So in fact you can get photographs while on a cruise that you might never get access to in any other manner.

 

Incorporating Cruise ships into Photographs

The cruise market is huge, massive money is being spent on the industry.  And this fact creates opportunities for travel photographers incorporating cruise images into their photographs.

It's pretty hard to capture these potentially unique photos unless you’re actually a cruise passenger.   So, take advantage of the uniqueness of the cruise passenger role to make as much travel orient photography that incorporates the ship itself or views from the cruise ship. 

Not necessarily taking photos of the ship but from the cruise ship, can also be really unique option.  Sometimes this is obvious.  For those cruise trips to visit Alaskan glaciers, for example, obviously you are going to be taking pictures from the ship.

Another option is to take photographs from the docked ship while in port. Some places like Lisbon, the ship can be docked right outside the Old City.  Taking photos from the cruise ship allows you to photograph the location from angles and viewpoints that isn’t accessible to anyone else.

 

Cost of trip

Depending on the itinerary, it can cost way more to visit a series of locations than it will via cruise. In fact, a cruise can make things way more inexpensive that any other travel option. 

And for a person that takes travel photographs and sells them to fund travel or equipment or even make a living at it, cutting the cost of your trip is essential.

Conclusion

So generally, travel photography can be done from a cruise ship.  You will have to make compromises, but you always have to make compromises in photography and in life and this is what often makes photography fantastic.

The other thing that you need to do is adjust your expectations.  Understand that a cruise ship isn’t set up only for you, that times of day when you are out making photographs may not be ideal, but enjoy the amazing locations, the experiences, and the curated and relative safety of it all.  

Looking to sell your travel photos? Check out Shutterstock for more information! 

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