Over the years, I've developed a really streamlined step-by-step process to plan out my travel photography trips so that I get the best photos. Hi, my name's James Wheeler and I love travel and landscape photography. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through my step-by-step process of how I plan my trips using a recent trip I took to Hawaii as an example. I was really happy with the photos I got on this trip. Here's some examples like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. I'm just going to have to take a look at how I planned out the trip where I brought back these great photos. So I've developed a five-step process which I go through when I'm planning every trip. I'm going to walk you through each of the steps of this process and then show you an example from a recent trip I did to Hawaii. Step one is to define the goals in the output. When I go to a new location, I always know what I plan to do with the photos and videos when I get home. You don't want to get home from a trip and realize that you wanted to do a print for a certain spot on your wall and it needs to be a landscape format instead of in portrait. For example, on a recent trip that I took to Hawaii, I had four primary outputs. The first was social media. So like most people, I upload my photos to Instagram, Facebook and other social media sites. The next was the stock photography sites. So because of this, I know I need to get some photos that don't have people on them because you need to have model releases if you have people in your photos for the stock photo sites. The next is for a family photo book. So every year, I print out a photo book for the family. It's like 80 to 100 pages. And I want six to eight pages of that to come from this Hawaii trip. So I want to make sure that I get some good photos of me and my wife together. The last is my wife wanted to vlog the vacation so that she could share it with her friends. So I wanted to make sure that I got some video of B-roll that she could use in her vlog. What you define your goals, the next step is to create your shot list. Now I always create two shot lists. One is must shoot things or places. And the second is nice to shoot things or places. Now when you're creating your shot list, you don't just want to put down places there. You also want to put down experiences that you want to have, people that you want to meet, as well as things you want to eat. All of those should be in your shot list. So I'll typically start putting together my shot list by talking to somebody who's already gone to the location and getting some recommendations from them. After that, I'll turn to the internet to do some research. So I'll typically start off with TripAdvisor because they've got some really good lists of places to see for most places that you want to visit. After that, I'll go to the search engines and I'll look for things like top 20 places to photograph in Maui. Next I'll go to the YouTube search engines and see what other people are creating videos on. After that, I'll typically go to the photography, social media sites by those I mean flicker and 500 PX and see what other shots I've seen or maybe find some other places on those sites. And lastly, I'll go and take a look at Shutterstock. Now by now, I've got a pretty good list of locations. But with reason I go to Shutterstock is just to see what other people are already selling because if I can't create photos that are significantly better than those that have already been uploaded. It's very difficult to get into the top results against the established photos. So as I'm doing this research, I put all of the places onto a Google map. And as I'm doing it, I'll also note down when's the best time of day to shoot the particular location as well as maybe what the best weather might be. So some places are better at sunrise or sunset or other places might be better when it's cloudy. So for my trip to Maui, I had the following places on my must shoot list. Number one was Hallyacca Park. Now this is a volcano in Maui. It's probably the top tourist location in Maui. So I knew that I wanted to go and shoot it both at sunrise and sunset because the photos I saw were really different scenery at both of those times. The next thing that I wanted to shoot was sea turtles. Now I have never seen big sea turtles before and I saw some really cool videos on YouTube and I really wanted to go and see them and shoot them. So I did some research and I found some beaches where sea turtles like to hang out and I put them on my must see list. Now the next was the road to Hannah. So many of the lists that I looked at, people said that the road to Hannah was the highlight of their trip to Maui. So I knew it had to be on my must see list. The next was Black Sand Beach. I saw some photos of it. Look really cool. So I really wanted to go there and take a look. And the last one was just some beach shots. I couldn't go to Maui and not come back with some photos of the sun rising or setting next to a beach. So that was on my must see list as well. Alright, so that's five places on my must see list and I think that's a pretty good number for a five day trip. As you can see from this map, there's a lot of nice to see places, a lot more than I'm ever going to be able to see while I'm there. But that's okay. I really just need this map to help me in the next step, which is step three, planning my route. Now for our Hawaii trip, we really had four nights to plan out. So I wanted to choose three different locations to sleep. Now I wanted to do the road to Hannah. I didn't want to go back and forth in a day because I felt that would be too rush. So Hannah was going to be one of those places. Also wanted to do sunrise and sunset at Halionac La National Park. So I was going to stay there one night. So I had to choose one more place to stay. Now I wanted to photograph a lot of beaches and sunset. So I figured looking at the map that there's two primary places that I would choose from. Kihei or Lehanna. Now I decided to go with Kihei and I'm really happy with the photos I got. But I think I would have been just as happy if I had chosen to go to Lehanna. However, if I had tried to fit both of them in, I think the trip would have felt a lot more rushed and I probably wouldn't have been happy with that result. So now what I'll do is I'll take a look at the driving distances and figure out what my route should be. And then I'll put that route onto the Google map. Now I can clearly see all the other places that I can visit along the way. My next step is to create a daily plan. Now this isn't a plan that I'm going to stick to hour by hour. It's just things that I could do each day. So typically what I'll do is I'll fire up a Google sheet as well as a Google Doc. I'll put some notes in there. The Google sheet will basically just have a list of the days where I'm going to sleep that night as well as the activities that I could do that day. And in the Google Doc, I'll have a lot more details. What I'll put in the Google Doc is any information that I need to shoot, any of the locations that I've marked along my route. So this will include where to park, you know, the time of day that I may want to shoot it, where the sun's going to rise or it's going to set. If I'm shooting near the ocean, where what the tide tables are, anything that's going to help me get a good shot. And I want to take that with me. Now one thing to note is this isn't an activity list that I'm going to do all of them. There's no way that I can do all these things, but I want to be prepared to do any of them. So depending on the weather, how I feel, I can go to any of these spots. When I'm out on the road, I'm focused on traveling and the experiences and meeting new people and then documenting what I see with photos and videos. At this point, I'm also going to start booking transportation and hotels. Now for transportation, I'll book my flights first. For this trip to Hawaii, the only real way we're going to do this route is to drive. So renting a car was fairly easy. When I'm booking my hotels, I'll always try to book them as close to where I want to shoot sunrise and sunset. For this or why I trip, I book them all up front because it's a pretty short trip, only five days. If I'm going on a longer trip, I typically will always book my first day in the hotel. So I don't want to travel all day and then not be able to find a hotel. I spend a lot of time looking for it. But sometimes I won't book every hotel for the trip because I'll play it by your once I get there, depending on the circumstances. What I'll do is I'll put a link to some of the templates that I use in the description below. So you can go and use that link and take a look at some of these examples. All right, now step five, deciding what to bring. Now I don't want this to become a gear video, but I will put a list to all of my gear in the description down below. But what you really want to think about is what is the minimum amount of things that I need to bring to get the shops that I want, stay safe and stay comfortable? To give you an idea for the trip that I took to Hawaii, I took one 30 liter backpack, this one right here. And in there I had my camera body, my lenses, as well as a tripod and my clothes. And to be honest, I think I took more clothes than I needed. If you'd like to see my packing list or my planning templates, I'll put a link down below. Also, if you'd like to see how I upload my photos to social media, after I've finished my trip, I've got a video on that and I'll put it up here. Now, let's see if you want to see how much money I've made selling my travel photos online. I've got a video on that and I'll put a link down here. Happy travels!